With my posse in tow I moved through two more glass doors into the dark ticketing lobby by feel. To my left was a long hallway that I remembered led to a number of theater auditoriums. Straight ahead was the ticket and concession booth enclosed by a long L shaped bar. Further ahead to my right was another hallway leading to the larger auditoriums used for the movies slotted to earn the most ticket revenue.
There were already two zombies in the building; I could sense them standing listlessly in a film room above one of the smaller auditoriums. They were trapped in the tiny, secure room because they were zombies and therefore kind of stupid. They had both been employees of the movie theater and had thought it would be a good place to hide out. Their idea had been good for they had supplies and a fortified position. What ended up killing them was just bad luck. Ryan had been bitten on a supply run only a few weeks earlier. Shawn didn’t have the heart to leave him as he succumbed to the infection. He had died and reanimated in his sleep while she slept next to him and the rest was history. At least they died together.
In a moment I had them out of the room and en route to join my group in the lobby, each carrying a handful of snacks from their tiny hoard. Mandy and I took a break to devour some processed food.
Refueled and ready to rock, I hopped over the counter and searched with my hands for a flashlight. This was a long painstaking process which resulted in sticky fingers and no flashlight. I did find a lighter. The long kind usually used for lighting gas grills or ranges.
I had to flick it three times before it stayed lit. Next I found a metal trash bucket and filled it with paper I doused in popcorn grease. I touched the flame to the paper and soon I had a functional yet awkward torch. I couldn’t carry it because of the obvious burn risks so I had one of the zombies carry it and walk in front of me. His name was Chad and yes, I felt bad about it. I found two hot pads and made him wear those to alleviate my guilt. Plus I didn’t want the aroma of burning, rancid flesh to add any extra ambiance to the already depressing place.
With our bellies full and shelter from the storm, Mandy and I began exploring the place with the zombies as escorts from auditorium to auditorium. I tried pretending that I worked for the theater and was giving a tour to a group of executives from corporate who were in town for a surprise audit but it wasn’t all that enjoyable so I stopped. Aside from the theater rooms themselves there were a couple of supply closets, an employee lounge and an office for management. I found a bunch more food, mostly candy but I wasn’t complaining. I also commandeered a flashlight and some keys from a corpse in the office who had shot himself in the head. That was a happy find.
At the end of the hallway of smaller theaters was a door marked private and it was locked. It was a heavy steel number with no window. The kind that usually led to a basement furnace room. It was the only room I hadn’t looked in. I fumbled around with the keys until I found the one that fit and the door opened with a stubborn groan. The smell of old basement greeted me as I shined the flashlight down a long staircase of ancient wood.
Although a heavy steel railing had been added in the years since she had used it, I recognized Eva’s cellar instantly. Could this really be the old bakery? I didn’t know all that much about the history of Northeast, Minneapolis let alone this particular theater but it did appear my eyes weren’t lying, this was the place.
Spurred on by the sudden excitement of discovery, Mandy and I dashed down the rickety steps like a couple of reckless gymnasts. We made it safely to the bottom and were getting ready to start searching for the tunnel entrance when the zombies coming down behind us caved in the entire staircase in a glorious roar of snapping wood and bone.
“Fuck!” I called out as both the dog and I dove away from the small avalanche of wood splinters and bodies. I scrambled to my feet to assess the damage while Mandy jumped around barking and sniffing at the undead lying in a big pile. A cloud of nasty air floated into my face and I started coughing and gagging.
The burning bucket miraculously remained upright near the base of the pile casting a somber glow across the room. It looked like a Halloween orgy gone wrong. My bodyguards were mostly toast. Three near the top were moving slightly but were clearly too busted up to stand. The rest of the pile was unmoving. They were actually fully dead. Only Shawn remained at the top of the landing looking down at me. She had been the only smart one not to follow the crowd of lemmings that had overwhelmed the old staircase.
“Well good for you, Shawn, well done. Perhaps there is hope for you yet,” I called up to her. I smiled to show her I was proud just as she stepped off the landing and smacked face down on the cement floor. It was so sudden, so final and yes, I cried.
She would have been my ace in hole. If the tunnel didn’t exist I now had no chance of climbing out of the cellar which was easily twenty feet from the landing to the floor.
Wiping the tears and dust from my eyes, I snatched up Mandy’s leash and the flashlight as I surveyed the room. A lot had changed since Eva’s day. The hard packed dirt floor had been replaced by cement many years ago. I could tell because it was dirty and starting to crumble in places. There were still shelves but they were sturdy metal now and filled with supplies one would expect to keep a movie theater stocked. Why they decided not to replace the staircase was a mystery. Unfortunately, management was no longer around for me to ask.
The room was as large as I remembered and as I neared the back wall where the door should be, a growing knot of dread filled my belly. As I shined the light around the last shelf I closed my eyes and willed the door to be there. Of all the things that had gone wrong over the last few hours I deserved something to go my way. I was owed this. It was my right and my destiny for that door to be there waiting for me to open it.
I opened my eyes to a solid brick wall. “Fuck!” I screamed for the second time in five minutes. Mandy looked up at me with her tail wagging. I sighed and patted her gently on the head. “It’s okay, girl, we’ll figure something out,” I told her.
Truth was I didn’t know what we would do. We were effectively trapped inside the cellar. Then I remembered I had left two zombie guards out by the front door. I closed my eyes to take control of them but I couldn’t find them, they were gone. If they had simply wandered off, I could’ve located them which meant they were no longer undead but for real dead.
Images of the Creep flashed through my mind. I could see him skulking through the long dark hallway stealing glances at his reflection in the windows as he glided past. Or even worse, he was already standing at the doorway to the basement staring down in bemused silence at my predicament. I looped the end of Mandy’s leash around a hook protruding from one of the shelves and leaned around the edge to get a look at the fallen staircase. The trash bucket was emanating a soft glow indicating the papers and other materials were now only embers. I couldn’t see the doorway so I moved out of my hiding place on my belly and army crawled for a closer look. I tried not to make any noise but the sound of my clothing scraping along the cement sounded to my ears like the percussion section of an orchestra.
The doorway was a tapestry of shadows through which I could see nothing. I laid there staring up at it until my neck started to go stiff. I could hear Mandy whining behind me. A bead of sweat slipped from my stocking cap into my eye. I batted it away with a gloved hand and got to my feet, convinced I was alone. Mandy whined again.
“What’s the matter with your friend?” the sing-song voice spoke into the darkness.
I think I shit my pants as I screamed. The sound hadn’t come from up in the doorway. The Creep was in the cellar with me. I swung the flashlight through the air as I did a full spin. Of course I didn’t hit him, he wasn’t that close. I did a second spin but much slower, shining the light around the room, the shadows dancing around my beam. I didn’t see him and I couldn’t hear him because Mandy was barking up a storm. I edged back around the shelf toward where the dog was leashed. She stopped barking as I drew nearer but I could hear her panting. I didn�
�t dare turn around for fear of the Creep rushing me as I looked away. Memories of that long butcher knife flittering in my head. I kept stepping backwards until I felt Mandy’s hot breath on the back of my leg. I could see the end of the leash on the hook near the side of my head, the leather taut as it led to the dog behind me.
In the darkness from the wall to my left came a rustling and my heart skipped into double time. I turned my flashlight toward the sound, illuminating Mandy crawling toward me on her belly like she had when I found her in the bar. She started whining again and I held my arms out to let her know everything was okay but she wouldn’t come any further. It was then I realized I could still feel hot breath on the back of my leg.
I froze.
The breathing stopped.
Mandy hid her face in her paws.
A hand, long and spider-like, encircled my left leg just below the calf, the grip tightening as he used me for leverage to stand. There was so much I wanted to say but I couldn’t speak, so much I wanted to do but I couldn’t move because of fear-induced paralysis. I felt his presence loom large behind me as he stood. He was taller than I thought. I could feel that same hot breath on top of my head. Under my chin I felt the chill of cold steel on my neck. It would seem I was about to meet the same fate as Marybeth in the cold damp basement so close to my goal. Part of me was terrified about the prospect of death. Part of me was disappointed I would never get to explore that tunnel. Would I be able to die? Would the super virus in my body even let me?
“Pass me the flashlight, shit-fer-brains,” he growled into my ear. The sing-song quality of his voice was gone, replaced by a twangy, guttural tone I knew I would hear in my nightmares if I lived through this experience. I slowly passed him the flashlight which he delicately plucked from my hands. He switched off the beam plunging us into darkness.
“That’s better,” he sighed. “Now we can just be ourselves.”
He was using his high voice again. My mind started racing through the possibilities his last statement presented. What in the holy hell could that mean? The blade of the knife stung my neck. I knew any type of movement might get me killed but I had to try and get him talking.
“Excuse me, sir,” I whispered through clenched teeth. “But what exact-“
…
I opened my eyes to darkness. There was no confusion. I knew exactly where I was. In the cellar of the theater that long ago use to be the cellar of the bakery that was a front for the speakeasy Eva Goldstein worked in. My head was pounding where the Creep had bashed me with the flashlight. I was lying on my belly facedown with my arms splayed out above my head. The only sound was my own heavy breathing. With a groan I sat up and gingerly felt the lump on my head. I was alone. I could tell, the room had a solitary feeling to it. I panicked briefly as I inspected my wardrobe but I was fully clothed and not sore in any questionable places which was a relief as I fully expected a different outcome from the way the Creep had been talking before he hit me. Then I remembered Mandy. I didn’t think I could stomach another loss at this point.
“Mandy?” I called. I heard nothing. “Here, girl,” I sang out and made those little kissy noises that all dogs understand to mean come hither. Still no sound. I was starting to fear the worst. I began searching for her in the room. Poking around on my hands and knees, my head throbbing as I softly called her name. After floundering around in the dark and banging my head on a shelf I located the flashlight. Relief flooded through me when it still worked. The light confirmed that Mandy and the Creep were gone. My only solace was thinking maybe she wasn’t dead. The Creep seemed like the kind of fellow that would want me to find her corpse when I woke up so it was possible the dog had escaped. Sadly, that seemed unlikely unless she had a phenomenal vertical leap.
How he was able to enter and leave the room was a mystery to me. Try as I might, I couldn’t come anywhere close to reaching the door and nothing had been stacked near it to climb on aside from the pile of stairs and bodies which weren’t nearly tall enough. I tried to move one of the tall, free standing shelves but I couldn’t even budge it. It turned out they were cemented in place. I closed my eyes and scanned for the undead. There were plenty around the immediate area which shouldn’t have been surprising, they always showed up whenever I had an adrenaline spike. I called them to my current position and soon had several queued up near the door. I couldn’t think of a way for them to help me out of the cellar though upon hindsight there were many options I could have tried. I blame that failing on nerves and a possible concussion.
From a toolbox I found on one of the shelves, I pulled a large ball-peen hammer which would have been nice to have before the Creep showed up. I marched to the back of the room and faced the wall. Since I was stuck in the cellar I figured I would take a few swings at that goddamned brick wall that shouldn’t have been there. After lining up the flashlight to brighten up my workspace I stepped into a herculean swing that vibrated up my arms and made me feel as though my head was going to explode. I cussed a minute, wound up and struck it again and again and again, losing myself in a snarling, screaming rage of brick and mortar destruction.
When I was spent I dropped the hammer and fell to me knees sweating in a haze of dust and grit. After a few minutes everything settled down and I was left looking at the brick wall, now damaged and cracked at the point I’d struck it repeatedly. The cracks branched out in all directions. I got back to my feet and started in on it again. A few whacks later my hammer punched through the wall and I jammed my hand on the bricks very hard.
“Oh fuck me,” I said, my hand throbbing in rhythm to my aching head. I had to use my leg as leverage to remove the hammer and as I did a blast of cool, fishy air hit me in the face. Leaning closer I could hear what sounded like running water. I had found it! Somewhere along the timeline between Eva and the present, someone had removed the door and bricked over the entire wall to hide the tunnel.
Bolstered by my discovery, I forgot all about my head, my hand, the Creep and Mandy and started making the hole bigger with the hammer. Soon I had the space opened large enough for me to crawl through. I stuck the hammer in my belt and grabbed the flashlight. The beam showed a cavernous space filled with crates to the left and a long tunnel disappearing into the darkness straight ahead of me. I crawled through the hole.
The crates were nailed shut but I had a hammer so I made quick work of opening one. It was full of dusty ceramic jugs and a few spider webs. I pulled one of the jugs out. It was heavy with some type of liquid. A faded label was unreadable so I pulled out a crumbling cork and took a big whiff. Whatever it was burned my sinuses and cleared my head instantly. I figured I didn’t have anything to lose so I took a big pull from the bottle and felt napalm scream down my throat and throw a mighty tantrum in my belly.
I decorated the hard packed dirt floor with whatever I had swallowed. After a few terrible heaves I took another pull from the bottle just to clean my pallet. This wasn’t the brightest move. I learned my lesson after the second time and put the bottle down, concluding that the liquor had been made during a time when men were a bit more rugged.
There was nothing other than old bootlegged liquor of various types in the other crates but I had to know if ‘he’ was still there. I moved to the back corner of the storage room which was really nothing more than a natural cave. There my light found the crumbling pile of burlap sacks. I kicked a few of them aside until my foot uncovered the stark white bone of Manny Tulio’s leg. The tuxedo he’d been wearing was mostly disintegrated leaving just the skeleton. It seemed bizarre he had never been found. He had to have been missed by his employers. Perhaps that was the reason the entrance to the tunnel had been bricked over. Maybe they’d panicked and thought Manny had been compromised by the feds so they closed off the room and shutdown the speakeasy. Maybe no one ever gave him a second thought. I would never know the end of that story but I knew one thing for sure. If Eva Goldstein had been in the cave with me I would have given her a great big kiss on her zombie lip
s. I had found my way into the city.
Chapter 21: Farewell to the Human Race
The Past
The helicopter flight from the clearing outside of Area 51 to a private airstrip in Henderson, Nevada was long and tense. Nobody spoke as they stared in frightened silence at Dick. He sat in his chair, head on a swivel, scanning the horizon as if he expected the helicopter to be shot out of the sky by a Syndicate drone at any moment.
When they finally touched down, Andrew’s body was vibrating like a giant tuning fork. He took his place in the assembly line as the group moved all of the stolen lab equipment from the helicopter to a small jet waiting on a runway so tiny it could have doubled as the driveway of the office Andrew could see several yards away.
“Fucking move, you dolts, we are on a very tight schedule,” Dick barked as he ran to and fro like a man possessed. He also hadn’t ceased his vigilant monitoring of the nighttime sky. He was afraid and his fear infected the group. Everybody picked up the pace.
Andrew didn’t think he could move any faster. He couldn’t remember ever being so tired. From what he could tell, everyone else was in the same condition or worse. Even Todd was hanging his head as he hauled an overstuffed bag to the plane.
The pilot was nervously wringing his hands and following Dick around whining about weight limits and his ability to get the plane off the ground with so many passengers and gear. Dick didn’t even look at the man let alone engage him in anyway so eventually the pilot gave up to sulk by the cockpit door.
Soon they were loaded and ushered into the plane. Dick disappeared for a few minutes while they waited in the stifling, cramped cabin. When he came back he had a small garbage sack full of snacks he had evidently plundered from a vending machine inside the office.
“Pass these out,” he said gruffly to Todd. “Better eat up, folks, I have no idea when our next meal is coming.” Todd dutifully went about his assigned task with all the enthusiasm of a zombie with no live prey in sight.
Running with the Horde (Book 2): Delusions of Monsters Page 18