Brian Keene

by Dead Sea (epub)

  "Okay," I said. "Stick close, but stay behind me. Breathe through your washcloths and duck down as much as possible. Smoke rises, and the air will be better lower to the ground. Try to keep quiet. You ready?"

  They nodded. Tasha crossed her arms over her chest and shivered.

  "You scared?" 1 asked her.

  "No. Well, yeah. 'Course I'm scared. But that's not why I'm shivering. I'm cold. My clothes are wet."

  "Sorry about that," I apologized. "We'll find you some dry clothes when we get to safety."

  "Where are we going?" Malik asked.

  I paused, not sure how to answer him.

  "I don't know. Somewhere else. Somewhere other than here."

  "Someplace where there's no zombies?"

  "Yeah," I lied. "Somewhere without zombies or fires. Someplace where we can chill for a little while. Rest up. I don't know about you guys, but I'm tired. I'd like to stop all this running and fighting. I've had enough for one night. Let's get to where we don't have to do that."

  Privately, I wondered where that place was- wondered if it even existed anymore, and if it did exist, how we'd get there.

  We left the apartment, and Tasha locked the door behind us. I thought about asking her why, but then thought better of it. This was their home. It wasn't much. None of the homes here ever were. But it was probably the only one they'd ever known, and all their memories were here, and now they were leaving it with a stranger, while a bunch of dead people pounded on the door. Deep down inside, Tasha must have known that she'd never see the apartment again. I don't cry easily, but the look on her face damn near broke my heart.

  The noise got worse as we reached the landing and started down the stairs. It kept growing louder as we neared the first floor, until finally it was almost overpowering. I wanted to scream at the dead, tell them to shut the fuck up. Glass broke somewhere, maybe in one of the first floor apartments. I couldn't tell for sure. It was hard to concentrate. The zombies stink filled the hallway and the smoke was getting stronger again, too. The front door shuddered with every blow, and long splinters of wood fell off the bottom of it. Cracks split open on its surface as the hammering continued.

  "Which way?"

  Tasha pointed toward the back of the hallway. We slipped down the passage, quick but quiet. I was in the lead, followed by Tasha and then Malik. Brother and sister were holding hands. I glanced back at them and smiled, trying to reassure them. I didn't feel very sure, but they smiled back.

  And that was when the door burst open. It slammed against the wall with a loud bang, spilling zombies into the foyer. The first wave toppled to the floor, and more of the creatures rushed inside, clambering over the fallen ones. Their stench burned my nostrils. It felt like a thin layer of film in my sinus and throat. Tasha and Malik both screamed, but not as loud as me. They froze, staring at the onrushing hordes.

  "Go!"

  I pushed them behind me and raised the shotgun. The first zombie made it through the crowd and stumbled down the hallway after us. She'd once been a female. One swollen, purple breast had fallen out of her blouse. She moved in a series of spasms and twitches. There was hunger in her dead eyes, and I wondered how she'd eat me. Her jaw was hanging by only a few tendrils from her skull. With each jerking step that she took, her jaw swung back and forth like a kid's swing blowing in the breeze.

  With one squeeze of the trigger, I solved that problem for her. The zombie's head just vanished. There was a spray of red and then nothing. The corpse dropped to the floor. My arm went numb from the shotgun's kick, but I managed to pump it again. I took down a second creature, which had once been a child about Malik's age. Despite the gruesomeness of it all, 1 got a thrill as I jacked a third shell. I was a much better shot with the shotgun than I'd been with the pistol.

  Keeping the gun aimed at them, I retreated down the hall. Tasha was holding the basement door open for me. Malik had already run to the bottom of the stairs. I backed into the stairwell and pulled the door shut behind me. There was no lock.

  "Shit."

  "This way." Tasha tugged on my sleeve. She led me down the stairs and into a dark, wet cellar packed high with boxes and junk. A ten-speed bike. A damp mattress with wires poking out. Roller skates. A deflated basketball. A television with a broken screen. Mildewed clothes. Stacks of newspaper and magazines bound up with twine. The cement floor was cracked and uneven. Moisture spread in gray patterns along the walls. At the far end was another set of doors. They led into a small laundry room with three coin-operated washers and dryers. Two laundry baskets sat against the far wall. Clean clothes that somebody would never wear again spilled out of them and onto the floor. Beyond those was a small set of stairs and a pair of closed storm doors.

  The doors were fastened with a bright, shiny padlock.

  Above us, the dead began pounding on the basement door. It was in much worse shape than the front door had been. They'd be through it in a minute- maybe less. I stared at the padlock, my mouth hanging open. Then I turned to Tasha in disbelief.

  "Why the hell didn't you tell me it was locked?"

  She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. "You think we're stupid? We're the ones that locked it. Mr. Lahav had us lock all the doors. We just didn't have a padlock for the front door, so we used the plank."

  The pounding grew louder, in time with my pulse rate. Over in the corner, behind a pile of boxes, something skittered in the shadows. I wondered if there were rats in the basement, and if so, if they were the dead kind.

  I turned back to the lock. "You have a key for this one? If not, stand back and let me shoot it off."

  Smiling, she pulled it out of her pants pocket and held it up. She started for the storm doors, but I stopped her.

  "Wait. There might be some of them in the alley by now. Let me go first."

  She stepped aside. My fingers were sweaty and it was hard to hold the key and the shotgun. Plus, my hands were shaking, which made turning the key even more difficult. When it clicked open, I breathed a sigh of relief. Slowly, I opened the storm doors and stuck my head out-shotgun barrel first. The coast was clear.

  "Come on."

  I helped them up into the alley, and then shut the doors behind us. The kids put their wet washcloths over their faces and waited for me. After hunting around for a moment, I found an old skid and managed to tear a board loose from it. I wedged the board between the door handles.

  "That should slow them down."

  Malik squeezed my hand. "What now?"

  I checked both sides of the alley. The front led out into the main street, where the zombies had surrounded me earlier. The rear intersected with another alley running along behind a bail bondsman's office. We went that way as carefully and quietly as possible. Behind us came a muffled thump. The zombies in the basement had discovered the storm doors.

  "This way," I whispered, hurrying the kids along.

  We turned left, and then right, and then left again, working our way toward the waterfront, more out of need than any sense of direction. I wasn't trying to reach the harbor. That was never my plan. We were just trying to stay ahead of both the fires and the zombies. Several times our progress was blocked by one or the other. I preferred the flames. Didn't have to waste ammo on them. Whenever possible, we stuck to side streets and back alleys.

  We'd made it a few more blocks before we were attacked again. We were behind a used sporting goods store and I was trying to get a bearing on the fires. The smoke was getting thicker again, making it hard to tell how close the flames actually were. Every time the wind shifted direction smoke billowed toward us.

  Without a sound, a corpse lurched out from behind a Dumpster. The only reason we noticed it was because it accidentally kicked an empty forty-ounce while stalking toward us. Its face was concealed by a hockey mask. The zombie clutched a hockey stick in its hand but never tried to use it as a weapon. I think it held the stick more out of instinct than anything else. With its free hand, it reached for my head, trying to pull me toward its
gaping mouth. I ducked, sidestepped, and swung with the shotgun. The stock crashed against its jaw. The corpse stumbled backward. Gripping the shotgun barrel in both fists, I clubbed the creature's legs, breaking both of its kneecaps. As it collapsed, I smashed its head in. The zombie's face imploded behind the hockey mask. Black sludge that must have been curdled blood squirted out of the mouth and eyeholes like wet clay. It lay on the pavement, twitching.

  "Hit it again," Malik cried. "Smack that son of a bitch."

  I did. I struck the zombie on the side of the head, and its mask flew off. Its face looked like a bowl of spoiled spaghetti. Black mold grew on its skin. I slammed the shotgun down again and the skull cracked. The zombie quit twitching and lay still. Bending over, 1 picked up the hockey stick and wiped the mud and gore off of the handle.

  "Here." I tossed the stick to Malik. "Think you can use this?"

  "Hell yeah, I can." He grinned like a kid who'd just unwrapped his Christmas presents. Then he swung the stick around in a circle, making a sound like a light saber.

  "Knock it off, Malik," Tasha said. "You're gonna get blood on me."

  "No I ain't. I know what I'm doing. Next zombie we see, I'm gonna crack it in the head just like Lamar did."

  "Now you're talking," I said. "Just don't hit me or your sister with it"

  "You should have given it to me," Tasha said. "He's too little to hit anything with it."

  Malik frowned. "Say's you."

  "It's not fair."

  "We'll find something for you," I promised Tasha. "Don't worry."

  After I'd cleaned the gore off the shotgun butt so that I wouldn't accidentally infect myself, we continued on. I wiped the sweat from my brow and wished for a cold beer or just some water. The hot summer temperatures combined with the heat from the fires had made it pretty much unbearable. Add to that the fact that we were running and then fighting and then running again-I was exhausted. Sweat dripped from the tip of my nose and soaked my already wet clothes.

  We came across some other survivors as we neared Fells Point, an area of the city where mostly rich, white college kids from the suburbs went to drink on weekends. It was full of bars and music stores and vintage clothing shops-stuff like that. (They called it vintage clothing, and paid top dollar for the shit. Meanwhile, you could buy the same pair of pants at the Goodwill store for a dollar). Every night, you'd see Eminem wannabes stumbling around drunk, shouting to each other, groping their girlfriends or even strangers passing by, pissing in alleys and puking all over the brick sidewalks.

  Now Fells Point was a battleground. We'd cut through a very narrow alley, the old kind with crumbling brick archways over it. We heard the gunshots and the screams but they were muffled by the buildings on each side of us. It wasn't until we'd reached the end of the alley that we really saw what was happening. There was a riot going on in the central market area-human versus zombie and even human versus human. It was hard to keep track of anyone. Hard to focus. I held out my hand, motioning for the kids to stay behind me. Then 1 stared in disbelief.

  The street was littered with body parts and un-moving corpses, and the gutters ran with blood. Gunfire echoed off the buildings and smoke filled the air. It was a nightmare. The stench, the screams, the chewing sounds. Even over the explosions, you could hear the zombies as they fed.

  I saw a car that was upside down, its tires sticking up in the air like the legs of a dead animal. It must have just wrecked right before our arrival because there were people still inside it. They screamed as the zombies pulled them out through the shattered windows and ripped into them, tearing their flesh with teeth and hands. Another corpse staggered by a burning antiques store. Its arms were missing. Someone shot it from inside the store. The store's display window shattered, and the zombie crumpled to the sidewalk. Then the store's roof collapsed with a roar, sending fiery embers soaring into the night sky. Someone, probably the shooter, screamed inside the burning building.

  In the street, a pack of undead dogs chased a woman and her baby. A zombie pit bull ripped the infant from the fleeing mother's arms and tore it apart, shaking the screaming baby like a rag doll. A wayward bullet took down the mother a second later. At least I hope it was wayward. Maybe the shooter had been aiming for the dogs and hit her instead. Or maybe they were aiming for her after all; a mercy shot. There were a lot of zombie animals among the chaos. Mostly rats and dogs, but I also saw a few dead cats and what I think was an iguana. The dog zombies moved faster than their human counterparts, and I wondered why that was. Maybe it was because they had four legs instead of two, or maybe they hadn't been dead long.

  A man stumbled by us, close enough for me to reach out and touch if I'd wanted to. He wasn't dead yet, but he was certainly dying. His hands were clasped around his bleeding stomach, trying to hold his guts in. Half-dollar sized drops of blood speckled the pavement behind him. A child zombie in bloodstained rags trailed after him, chewing what looked like a length of intestine. The man seemed oblivious to his pursuer and the zombie seemed in no rush. I shot it in the back of the head as it passed by us. The man never paused. Just kept walking. I ducked back into the shadows, worried that my Good Samaritan act may have given away our hiding place.

  But it didn't matter because a second later things got even worse.

  Civilians in a commandeered half-track barreled through the crowd, crushing both the living and the dead beneath the vehicle. A teenaged corpse in a Slipknot shirt tried to climb up onto the half-track, but one of the men kicked him back down with a boot to the face. Another of the men opened fire with a mounted machine gun. Bodies-both living and dead-jittered and danced as the rounds punched through them. I gasped. These guys didn't care who they shot. They were just as bad as the zombies-maybe even worse. The dead couldn't use guns. Clearing a path, the vehicle rolled on. The humans they'd just killed stayed dead. They were the lucky ones.

  Another man ran by us. He was carrying a rifle.

  "Hey," I shouted, trying to get his attention.

  "Get the fuck out of here," he gasped, and kept running.

  I started to tell him that we didn't know where to go. Figured he might know of a safe place. But he rounded the corner and disappeared.

  The median in the middle of the brick-lined street was carefully landscaped, full of trees, flowers and shrubs. As I watched, the treetops burst into flames, fed by the fire in the antiques store. More. stray bullets chewed up the pavement. Something shattered a car's windshield nearby us, and chunks of cement sprayed through the air. The stench grew stronger; decay, cordite, burning fuel and flesh. The screams got louder.

  "What are we going to do?" Malik asked. He didn't sound brave anymore. He sounded like a scared little boy on the verge of tears.

  That was when the idea of making it to the harbor actually occurred to me. I was pissed off at myself for not thinking of it earlier, when we'd been fleeing in that direction anyway. Fells Point bordered the Inner Harbor area. The Inner Harbor was Baltimore's main tourist attraction. It had the National Aquarium, the big Hard Rock Cafe, the three-story Barnes and Noble store, Port Discovery, the World Trade Center, Fort McHenry, the Maryland Science Center, the Pier Six Concert Pavilion (I'd seen Erik B and Rakim along with some other old-school hip-hop acts there last year), tons of shops and restaurants and bars, and quick access to hotels, the stadium, and the convention center. But Inner Harbor was also just what its name implied-a fucking harbor. It emptied out into Chesapeake Bay. The open water-someplace where the zombies couldn't reach us, just like I'd promised the kids.

  There were ships and boats all along the waterfront. The Pride of Baltimore II, which was a reproduction of an 1812-era clipper ship. The USS Constellation, the last Civil War vessel still afloat in America, built in 1854 and still seaworthy. Both of those were out of the question. 1 didn't know the first thing about sailing one, but I knew that you needed a whole crew just to get underway. There was a coast guard vessel, the USCGC Spratling, which they let tourists tromp around on. It had
permanently replaced the Cutter Taney, which had been sent out for repairs and restoration a year or so ago. Before that, both coast guard vessels had been open to the public. Again, the Spratling was out of the question, just like the other big ships. But there were smaller boats, too; ferries, water taxis, and tour boats. Hell, there were even paddleboats, and I certainly knew how to operate one of those. There were also several marinas nearby full of yachts and fishing vessels and pleasure cruisers.

  I didn't know shit about boating, but how hard could it be-especially given our alternatives? If we could reach the Inner Harbor or one of the marinas without getting killed or eaten, and manage to steal a small boat, we'd be well away from land before the entire city burned to the ground. Even if I could just cast off from the dock, we'd at least be able to drift far enough out into the bay to where the zombies couldn't touch us. Maybe even into the ocean. Drifting on the open sea was better than staying here.

  The Inner Harbor was only a few blocks away. No telling how many zombies and crazy fuckers with guns we'd encounter between here and there. It would be tough, but what choice was there? We had to try.

  I ushered the kids even farther into the shadows and then I knelt down. The smoke was really getting bad, and when I spoke, my throat felt raw and dry.

  "Listen," I croaked. "I have an idea, but you guys are going to have to stick close to me and do exactly as I say. We're going to try to get to a boat-"

  Tasha interrupted. "What boat?"

  "Any boat. There's hundreds of them at the harbor. All we have to do is get there."

  "How?"

  "Well, we're gonna have to make a run for it. That's why I'm-"

  "Run?" Tasha looked stunned. "Out there? Into that mess? Are you crazy?"

  "I know it's dangerous, but there's no other way. Everybody is fighting each other. If we're quick, the zombies might not even notice."