Assuming Room Temperature (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 3)

by S. P. Durnin

  “I got this.” Henry walked to the opposite side of the armored machine, knelt, and began speaking quietly to the girl. Her eyes moved from Kat’s to his as the grungy teen turned her head, proving that she wasn’t completely out of it.

  “Huh.” Kat stood, then moved to wipe her sword (somewhat) clean on the shirt of a creature the bulky man had smashed in the head with his mace. She’d give the blade a proper cleaning later, and hoped Sampson would be able to talk the teenager out quickly. While he kept murmuring to the traumatized girl, Cho took a moment to marvel at his handiwork. The cranium of the corpse on which she wiped her sword had been pushed halfway into its chest. Seeing the zombie’s motionless eyeballs ju-u-ust peeking out over its dead collarbones though, was a testament to Henry’s awesome strength.

  Pretty darned funny too. She giggled briefly at the sight, then turned back to help Leo and Elle quickly police the bodies.

  They made sure to do that, when they could. If not for their own sake, then simply for other survivors who might still be in hiding. It wasn’t always possible. Sometimes—most times if she were to be honest—the areas in which they had been forced to engage the creatures were really and truly infested. They’d crossed paths with dozens, if not hundreds of maggot-heads on their convoluted south-westerly route. It was—and probably always would be—necessary to avoid any major cities like the plague, so they kind of meandered their way along. Kat and her friends stuck to back roads, kept, well away from large population centers and hoped to avoid detection by scouting out ways through miles-long traffic jams with the Troll. Every day, Cho felt like kissing Rae upon their return each evening for having the foresight to modify the big, green machine into an honest to God, zombie-proof engine of destruction.

  “Twitcher on the left,” Elle called, and pointed at a corpse. Judging from its apron—and the Polo shirt emblazoned with the restaurant chain’s name—the zombie had once been a Steak and Shake employee. While unable to rise or even move much, the decayed thing still jerked awkwardly on the road at the blonde’s voice.

  “Got it,” Leo replied. Stepping forward, he acquired a sight picture through the Aimpoint red-dot sight on his rifle, then calmly put a 5.56mm round through the creature’s head. It slumped bonelessly to the earth, ceasing its convulsions, and young Salizar continued to move around the edge of the pack they’d turned into impressionistic art.

  “Ever wonder if these things remember who they used to be on some level? I mean yeah, they’re dumb as a sack of hammers, but do you think there’s anyone at home inside their heads? Aware, but not able to control themselves anymore?’

  “Does it matter?” Elle’s brow furrowed as she stood watch in the Humvee’s turret.

  Leo shrugged. “Not to me. They’d still have to be put down. Just curious, I guess.”

  Elle continued to observe as Kat quietly put a round through the brain of another corpse that had dragged itself forward over the pavement. The zombie was missing everything from mid-sternum down, thanks to the blonde-haired Sergeant’s deft work with their MG-34. “So what? You wanna ask one?”

  “Hey, don’t get me wrong,” Leo put a shot through another body’s forehead, “If they’re conscious in any way, it sucks. Knowing what they’ve been turned into and not having any control, constantly awake and on the move, eating people is a horrible thought. Don’t get me wrong, they’d still have to be destroyed. I didn’t fight most of my way through Columbus, armed only with a machete, to let one of them take a bite out of me over a maybe. Forget that.”

  “See? That’s why I like you. Even though you’re brainy enough to ask the tough questions, you don’t let it get in the way while snuffing maggot-heads.” She smiled and gave him an appreciative glance. “We’ll talk about that. Later.”

  His eyebrows went skyward as his cheeks reddened, so Kat thought she’d take pity on him at that point and change the subject.

  “Alright. While its really fun to watch Leo blush like an Anime schoolgirl, let’s see how the big guy’s coming along at getting our new friend out from under the Troll.” Kat nodded towards the vehicle and began walking back, careful to avoid the pools of blood and other nasty bits they’d scattered all over the street during the brief firefight.

  “Not bad, from what I can see,” Elle told her as they circled the Hummer’s front end.

  Sampson had actually convinced the grungy teen to leave her hiding place between the vehicle’s axles. As Kat approached, she took in the girl’s appearance and realized poor kid must’ve been on her own virtually since the outbreak began. Ratty hair, stained t-shirt, raggedy jeans, and a pair of impressively soiled cross-trainers, all contributed to her “wild child” look. Combine that with the kid’s involuntary nervous movements and furtive eyes that continued to dart in every direction checking for danger, and you had an extremely traumatized girl. She drew back behind Henry as Cho stepped closer, so Kat stopped just out of arms reach and gave her a friendly grin.

  “Hi. Looked like you needed a little help there. How you doing, kiddo?”

  The girl didn’t respond, but she didn’t run away or attempt to dive under the Humvee again either. Kat took that as a positive sign.

  “I see you’ve already met the big guy. The blonde up on top of our car is Elle, that young fellow there’s Leo, and my name’s Kat. What’s yours?”

  She waited for the girl to work herself up enough to say something, but she was obviously still frightened nearly out of her mind. Or in a state of shock, so Henry spoke up quietly.

  “Kat, this is Mel. She lived in Vanita before everything happened. She’s fourteen and-”

  “Almost fifteen,” The girl said in a hushed voice, and glanced around the area again. “I… My birthday’s in three months. Or, it would’ve been.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you Mel. Those guys,” the blue-haired woman motioned at the bodies on the street, “were a bunch of creeps. You seem a lot nicer. They didn’t hurt you did they?”

  The girl shook her head, which sent her tangled hair bobbing around. “No. They couldn’t catch me. When you get...bitten, I guess you get really dumb and slow.”

  “Did they manage to bite you, Mel?” Kat couldn’t see any blood or marks that would suggest the creatures had, but it was still necessary to ask.

  “No,” Mel replied. “They can’t run and they fall over stuff a lot, so normally they’re pretty easy to keep away from. I was on the track team too, and I can do six miles, so I thought I’d just loose them in the neighborhood. More kept coming from all around, though. I had to keep moving further and further away from my place.”

  Henry looked down at her from his imposing six foot seven height. “Do you have anybody else with you Mel? Anyone else that might need help?”

  “It’s just me,” she said, numbly. “Everyone-... They all got bitten. Or eaten. I haven’t seen anybody else normal since... In forever.”

  Elle and Leo shared a look at that. The slim teen moved to pull a bottled water from the Troll’s back seat, and brought it back to the girl. “Do you want something to drink?”

  She took it with a shy nod, twisted off the cap and downed half of it straight away.

  “Have you been all alone all this time? Ever since the outbreak?” Kat asked gently.

  Mel nodded and clutched the plastic bottle to her malnourished chest. “Uh-huh.”

  Elle whistled softly. “Wow, kid. You must be pretty damn sneaky to survive all this time by yourself! The maggot-heads are—”

  “The what?” Mel asked.

  “Maggot-heads. It’s the term we use for them,” the blonde replied, and leaned over on the Hummer’s roof. The muscles in her shoulders stood out as some of her weight transferred to her toned arms. “Silly, I know, but it’s better than actually using the word zombies. It doesn’t remind us that there are corpses shambling around eating people, and it’s kinda funny too. It was either that,
or the walking d—”

  “Let’s! Not go there. Please.” Kat interjected quickly, as she paused to run a hand through her short, indigo hair. “Look, Mel? We need to get moving because we’ve got friends waiting for us, okay?”

  The filthy young woman blinked a few times and nodded.

  “Oh. Okay. I should try to get back anyhow.” She glanced around at their party. “Thank you. For saving me.”

  She turned and began to walk off, causing the others to look at each other in surprise.

  “Um, Mel?” Kat called after her. “Did you actually want to stay in Vanita?”

  Coming to a halt ten yards away, the girl turned back to them with hollow eyes and shrugged.

  “I don’t have anywhere else to go. My mom and dad and my brother Kenny all got... They’re not around anymore. I don’t know what happened to my friend Kim and her mom, but I never saw them again after everything went bad. Besides, where would I go? The radio said everywhere is like this.”

  “Not everywhere, it turns out,” Henry said, and laid the shotgun in his large palm over one larger shoulder. “We’ve been told the west is still safe. California, Oregon, places like that.”

  “That’s where we’re going.” Leo was already up in the Humvee’s turret with the nodding Elle.

  “You can come too, if you want.” Kat leaned against the vehicle’s armored quarter panel and crossed her arms. “We’ll understand if you won’t. You did just meet us and all. We could really use another capable person in our group, though. Since you’ve been on your own all this time, you for sure fit the bill.”

  From the expression on her face, the grime-covered girl was more than a little shocked.

  “You want me to go with you?”

  Kat smiled again. “Why not? You said there was nobody left here except the maggot-heads. Not fun to hang with, at all. They’re hopeless when it comes to intelligent conversation.”

  Mel still stood in the middle of the road clutching her water bottle.

  “At least come and meet everyone. If you don’t wanna stay we’ll bring you back to town, or drop you off someplace, if you want.” Cho crinkled her nose. “At the very least, it’s a chance to get clean. We’ve got a working shower and some Paul Mitchel back at camp. Along with some deodorant. We can get you a couple good meals and a change of clothes, too.”

  The girl lowered her head and stood there looking down at her dirt-smeared and sweaty clothing for a minute. When her eyes came back up, they had a lot more life in them. And was that the beginning of a small grin?

  “Do-Do you promise not to leave me alone again?” She hiccuped, swallowing back tears

  Sampson clumped forward and took a knee in front of Mel. He was so large, his head still sat higher than the girl’s did as she stood erect.

  “Hey. We don’t leave people behind.” Henry assured her.

  “That’s right, we don’t.” Kat thought back to how Jake traded himself to the Purifiers while trying to free Karen Parker, the ninja-girl’s own hastily-planned rescue attempt, and then the others showing up in a last minute gambit to free their missing friends. “You can stay with us as long as you want to. I’ll even start teaching you some ninjitsu when you feel up to it, if you want. That way, you won’t always have to run from the maggot-heads. You can learn how to fight them.”

  The teen’s eyes widened. “You’re a real ninja? Isn’t that kind of stuff just in the movies?”

  The pretty Asian cocked her head. “Anyone?”

  Elle tossed an empty water bottle from the back seat of the hummer into the air, over Kat’s head.

  The leather clad woman’s sword blurred out in a nearly invisible arc, and whipped around to make contact with the bottle. Cho’s blade cleanly sliced away the plastic cap on top, and set the clear container spinning skyward. She leapt straight up—as if her legs were spring-loaded—twisted in midair, and sent the falling bottle out of sight over the Humvee with a spinning roundhouse kick. When Kat’s feet hit the ground again, her sword was already back in its sheath, she wasn’t the least little bit out of breath, and an enormous grin was plastered across her face.

  Mel’s eyes bugged visibly.

  “Show off,” Henry rumbled, but looked highly amused as he stood beside the stunned girl.

  “Oh my God! That was amazing! How did you do that?”

  Kat shrugged. “My mom made me walk around on my tip-toes, wearing those strap on ankle weights, and a backpack with a brick in it, for a whole year when I was twelve. My calves were sore for almost a month, until I got used to it. Then she started making me practice forms and kicking drills in them too. Let me tell you, doing that? It’ll work wonders when it comes to improving your vertical leap. Tones the tush up nicely, too”

  Mel continued to gape at her. “Can you really teach me how to do that?”

  “Sure! It’s not hard.” Kat nodded towards the Hummer and Sampson opened its passenger door, allowing the girl to scurry into the front seat. Kat slid behind the wheel again and fastened her seat belt as the big man crammed his bulk into the back.

  Due to Henry’s size, Leo and Elle had to share less than half of the rear seat, so the blonde-haired woman moved onto young Salizar’s lap. He blushed as she moved her posterior around to get comfortable, then threw an arm around his shoulders. “We could always stand in the hatch.”

  “I’m good here.” His face was a combination of pleasure and embarrassment.

  Elle wiggled her hips a bit. “I can tell.”

  Leo’s face went even more crimson.

  Kat started the Troll’s engine, revved it once, and set them rolling south at a steady thirty-five miles per hour. While heavy machine could move much, much faster if need be, driving at a high rate of speed in the middle of a zombie apocalypse was an overall bad idea. There were quite a few wrecked cars on the motorways (sometimes even the back roads they traveled), debris from long-since abandoned barricades where the authorities had tried (and failed) to keep the infected at bay, along with useless household and personal items people had discarded as they fled the creatures. Oh, and zombies.

  Can’t forget about them. Kat thought, when she noticed a creature someone had pinned to the corner of the town’s small, Frosty Freeze ice cream hut. With an Oldsmobile. The thing looked like it had been there for months, pounding away on the car’s hood as it continued its attempts to get free.

  Mel was rubber-necking at everything in the Troll’s interior. The pair of RPG’s held firmly to the back of its front seats with bungee straps, the Long-Arm sniper rifle resting in its quick-release brackets which Foster had mounted facing the rear window on the roof’s interior, the two-way radio secured to the console with lengths of duct tape, and—finally—the “Hello Kitty” bobble-head Kat had affixed dead center on the dashboard with bonding epoxy.

  “Wow.” The girl was a little taken back, not only by the amount of weaponry they had access to, but also the somewhat slap-dash modifications inside the cab.

  “She’s not pretty, but she’s got it where it counts, kid,” Henry told her, straight-faced.

  “Heresy, I tell you.” Kat said loftily, as she steered around an old Ford missing all of its window glass, smeared with zombie goop. “Stylish steel-plated corpse pusher in the front, appealingly armored body, lots of room for oversized-yet-smart-mouthed-minions and weapons of destruction. No air conditioning, but hey, we can have all the windows down without worrying about the infected reaching through the reinforced bars. The Troll is damn sexy.”

  Mel stifled a giggle as they continued north, away from her hiding place and the horror her last few months in Vanita had been.

  CHAPTER THREE

  After heading through the town to Route 69, motoring east, then circling south, then east again off the exit to Route 28, Kat brought their Hummer to a halt before a massive steel barrier that butted up on both sides against the
Neosho River.

  It had been a relatively uneventful trip. Which is to say, the little group of survivors had seen fewer than ten infected over the course of their drive. In a great show of restraint, the blue-haired Asian had only flattened one of them with the heavy vehicle. The one that reminded Kat of her previous boss at the pharmacy she’d worked in, prior to the outbreak.

  “Um. Where are we?” Mel asked quietly. The girl had been huddled up, her skinny arms wrapped around her knees in the passenger seat, ever since they started moving towards the town of Langley, Oklahoma.

  “We’re going to meet up with our friends, Mel.” Henry replied from the back seat. The big man reached up to pat her shoulder gently. “Don’t worry, it’s safe. We’ve been here for nearly three weeks and in all that time, we’ve only had a handful of those things show up at the barricade.”

  The grubby teen seemed to take heart at that, and gave Sampson a weak grin. She even relaxed a bit as Kat turned on the two-way, took hold of the mic, and spoke into it.

  “Prometheus, this is Bluebell, over.”

  Mel looked confused. “Bluebell?”

  Elle left off nibbling on Leo’s ear. “That’s Kat’s radio handle. Her hair, you know? We use code words when we’re transmitting. That way, anyone who’s listening in won’t be able to learn too much about us.”

  “There are others alive out there?” From her expression, Mel obviously found that hard to believe.

  “A few, we think,” Elle told her. “Not many. And some of them aren’t the kind of people you’d want to meet. We ran into one group of them a while back. Let’s just say we agreed to disagree.”

  A female voice came back over the cab’s speaker, causing Mel to jump.

  “Prometheus here, Bluebell.”

  “All good here, plus one.” Kat said, looking towards the top of the barrier. “How does the weather look?”