by Tim Curran
15
“We ain’t getting out,” Joe said with sobering finality. “None of us are. Not by road, anyway.”
He tooled slowly up the streets, driving nowhere in particular. Just driving and driving and driving. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to go. Not until something occurred to them, some escape route.
Nancy and Ben had both been quiet since Joe plowed through that army of psychos. But inside Nancy’s mind, it was not quiet at all. She didn’t know much about these people, about Joe and Ruby Sue, but what she did know, she did not like.
They had an agenda.
It was illegal and they freely admitted as much. They’d lied about when they arrived in town and for some reason this really ate at Nancy. And what for God’s sake were their last names? Maybe that was a small thing, but it mattered.
Just Joe and Ruby Sue.
She supposed bikers were like that. Christian names. Nicknames. Nothing more. But she was not part of that world and did not want to be part of that world. What it came down to was that she did not trust these people. And the more she didn’t trust them, the more she didn’t like them.
“This is so weird,” Ruby Sue was saying. “Totally wild. I saw this movie once, you know, where this city was, like, taken over by vampires. This guy—he was the last human being left—he lived in this house and hung garlic and crosses and shit on the door. At night they’d come banging on the doors, the vampires would, and he’d sit there and get drunk.”
“I don’t think they’re vampires,” Ben said.
“Yeah, I know. But wouldn’t it be wild if they were?”
Ben and Nancy looked at each other, shook their heads.
Joe kept on driving. “What we need to do people, I think, is find some place to hole up in. What do you think?”
Ben nodded. “Sounds good. It’s obvious they won’t let us leave.”
“Right. So we hole up somewhere for the night, see what day brings. This town can’t just fall off the edge of the planet without somebody noticing. My guess is by morning, people are starting to ask questions. Maybe then the cops or the army or somebody will come in and clean this place out.”
Ruby Sue said, “Right. And, hey, maybe they only come at night. Maybe they’ll hide in the daytime.”
“Oh, would you get off the vampire-thing already?” Nancy said, sterner than she’d meant to.
“It’s just an idea.”
Yeah, right, Nancy thought, like you’ve ever really had one of those.
Any other time, she would have been all over someone like Ruby Sue.
Nancy had a real low tolerance for airheads and dizzy blonde bitches of any variety. Usually by now she would have been tearing into Miss Ruby Sue, jumping on every vacuous remark, every twirl of her hair, but tonight she just didn’t have the strength.
She kept thinking about Sam.
Wondering if it was even remotely possible he was still alive. She decided it probably wasn’t…but she still clung to the possibility. They weren’t that close, really, for a brother and sister. Seldom saw each other, seldom had time to take interest in each others’ lives…but Sam was still her brother. She still felt his loss, kept seeing them playing together as children, saw the good times and the golden moments. She had everything she could do not to start crying.
But that would be for later.
For now, there was this mess…and Ruby Sue.
Joe pulled the Jeep to a stop on Chestnut right before a grocery store, Northland A & P.
“It looks quiet here,” he said. “This is as good a place as any.”
“A grocery store?” Nancy said with amazement.
“Yeah, why not?”
“No, it’s a good idea,” Ben said, warming to it. “Food. Drinks. Everything we need. What could be better?”
“An armory, a police station.”
Ruby Sue laughed. “You guys ever see that movie where this gang attacks the police station? That was wild. There was this one part where—”
“Let’s go,” Joe said.
He popped all their door locks and they got out. He went around back of the Jeep and opened the hatch. He took out a black duffel bag and went to the door of the A & P.
“It’s locked,” Nancy said.
Ruby Sue laughed. “So what?”
Joe took a small leather bag out of his duffel. Using a penlight, he sprayed some lubricant into the lock and began manipulating the tumblers with a little L-wrench. Within five minutes, the lock clicked open. “After you,” he said, holding the door open.
“What if this trips some sort of alarm…” Nancy began to say and then realized how stupid that sounded. “Ignore me. Just ignore me.”
They’d all been looking at her, but now they went in.
Joe locked the door behind them.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Ruby Sue said. “What if we trip some silent alarm, you know? But then I thought, so what? Send in the fucking marines, man. Good to go.”
Nancy squeezed her eyes shut tightly, was truly frightened because she was starting to think like Ruby Sue. And that was a very scary thing. She decided she’d probably rather become like one of those zombies out there than a total airhead. It would be less painful to everyone concerned.
The display cases at the front of the store were lit up and there were occasional fluorescent ceiling panels illuminated throughout. It was dim in spots, but not dark. And the food—snacks, drinks, the deli, bakery. Nancy hadn’t realized how hungry she was until this moment. Now her stomach was growling.
She followed Ruby Sue to the donut case and started chewing on a long john, while Ruby Sue found a Bavarian.
Ben and Joe were eating slabs of ham from the deli case, slugging back beers.
It was a fine, peaceful moment.
Nancy sat there on the counter, eating and thinking this was the most relaxed she’d been since they stumbled into this hellhole. It was funny, she’d only lived an hour or so away from Cut River most of her life, but she’d never once visited before this day. It was all very ironic, she supposed.
Fucked-up, ugly, sadly ironic.
She wondered how the kids were doing. Just fine, no doubt. Watching TV. Playing games. Maybe raising hell. Never for a moment guessing that their Uncle Sam had been murdered or the nightmare their mother and stepfather were wading through.
Better it’s us, she decided. I couldn’t handle this if they were here.
Joe and Ben were eating silently. They hadn’t really warmed to each other beyond small talk. Nancy was wondering exactly what sort of man Joe was. He went through the door like a professional. What did that say exactly? She decided they were damn lucky to have him with them, a guy who knew shit like that. He would probably know other stuff, too.
“We’re going exploring,” Ben announced.
Which left Nancy with Ruby Sue.
Whereupon, Ruby Sue began to ply her with questions about where she was from, how long her and Ben had been married, if they had children, what they did for a living. It went on and on. By the time Ruby Sue took a breath, Nancy’s head was spinning madly.
“There’s an apartment upstairs,” Ben said when he returned maybe five minutes later. “Nobody home. Only way in is up a stairway in the back. Joe says it will be a good place to hide out later on. If…if they try to come after us, we can go up there. They’d have to come up the stairwell to get us, so we could hold ‘em off.”
“With what?” Nancy wanted to know. “Loafs of rye bread? Cans of Mini Ravioli?”
“Guns,” Ruby Sue piped up. “We’ll stop ‘em with guns.”
Nancy looked at her. “And where, pray tell, will we get those?”
Ruby Sue grinned. “You gotta be prepared, girl. It’s what the Boy Scouts say.” She opened her coat and pulled out a shiny black automatic about the size of a paperback book. “Course, they don’t pack this kind of firepower.”
“Jesus,” Ben said, running a hand through his beard, “is it real?”
Nancy shook her head. “No, it’s a fucking squirt gun, Ben.”
“Yes, it’s real,” Ruby Sue said.
It seemed a reasonable question to her.
She hefted it in the air, taking up a firing stance and mouthing Bang! Bang! soundlessly. She went up to Ben, rubbed against him, pressed the gun into his hand like she was offering her tit—which, Nancy decided, probably would be next—and wrapped his fingers around it. “Take it, Ben. It’s yours. You know how to work it?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
She showed him the safety catch. How to work the slide to jack a round into the chamber. “See? Easy. Easy as pie, honey.”
Nancy sat there, thinking: I can’t believe her. Right in front of me yet.
Nancy was looking her up and down now.
Yeah, she was a slutty little airhead, all right. And that would have been fine except that she had a nice body on her, too. Face wasn’t the best, but cute in a girl-next-door sort of way. Nancy’s skin felt hot. She hadn’t had curves like that since she was nineteen.
“Is this legal? Full auto?” Ben asked.
“Fuck no!” Ruby Sue said, still maintaining body contact with him via hip and arm. “But I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Ben smiled. “You should keep it. In case there’s trouble.”
“Don’t want anything happening to me?” Ruby Sue seethed. “That’s cool. Don’t worry, Joe has others.”
“Others?” Nancy said incredulously.
“What do you think’s in his bag, Nanc? Cookies? We came here to do something. We came prepared,” she said and said no more on the subject. “You keep this one, Ben. I want you to have it.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“Just point it and shoot. Bam! Dick through a donut.”
“You’re definitely handy,” he said and Nancy did not like his tone at all.
“Oh, you’d be surprised how handy I can be.” Ruby Sue’s words dripped with sex.
Nancy hopped off the counter. “Excuse me,” she said. “But I’m right here and I happen to be his wife.”
“Lighten up,” Ruby Sue said. “I won’t break him.”
Nancy stared, eyes gone liquid green.
“Way I’m thinking,” Ruby Sue said, oblivious to it all, “is that these people here are, like, infected with something. But they’re still human…or almost. What we gotta do is shoot ‘em in the heads. You know, like zombies? Blow their brains out. Bet that stops ‘em.”
“Shut up!” Nancy cried.
“What—”
“Listen,” she said in a haunted voice. “Listen.”
They did.
They had company.
A group of people had assembled out on the sidewalk. They stood stock-still as if waiting for some sign, some command to begin the inevitable. And then apparently, they received it. They pressed in, a tight knot of white faces and leering eyes.
They pushed up against the glass.
Ruby Sue said, “Oh shit.”
Ben started walking towards the front of the store, the automatic in his fist.
Nancy called to him to come back, but he didn’t. Maybe the gun had given him courage, had turned his balls to drop-forged steel. But maybe he just wanted to see, needed to see what the hell this was all about. Get a good look at these savages, prove to himself that, yes, it was okay to kill them because they weren’t men and women (and children) anymore, just berserkers wearing the skins of the same.
They started beating on the plate glass windows.
A tall man, his chest infibulated with numerous gashes and lesions, pressed his hands flat against the glass door. He seemed to be weighing the possibility of gaining entrance. He tried the door, rattled it violently in its frame, then decided to do things the hard way. He let out a maniacal, blood-curdling scream like someone being roasted over a bed of coals.
It went right up Nancy’s spine like fingernails.
Grinning and foaming at the mouth, he began slamming his face into the glass. Not his fists. Not his feet. His face. He pounded it savagely against the glass, leaving a sticky smear of blood and slime with each impact. With each passing second, he put more and more force behind it until the glass began to bulge with each collision and the pounding reverberation of it rang out like the dirge of a funeral bell.
Then a series of tiny cracks fanned-out, met, and the glass shattered, exploded inward in a rain of jagged spikes.
The tall man stumbled in, his face a bloody ruin, his eyes bright and yellow like a stalking wolf’s. Bathed in blood, he seemed no worse for wear.
A dozen others followed him in.
One, a teenage girl wearing a stained pair of cranberry sweatpants and nothing more, stooped down and scooped up a blade of glass. She held it in her hands, seemed fascinated by it. Then she drew it in a straight line between her breasts down to her navel, slitting open the flesh. Then repeating the process with a transverse cut across her sternum, fashioning a crude, bleeding crucifix.
The blood ran.
She dipped her fingers into it and licked them clean.
Ben stood there, rooted to the spot like an old elm, just watching.
Nancy screamed to him and it seemed to break his trance.
He brought the automatic up and started shooting. He put four slugs into the tall man before it slowed him down. He shot an elderly woman in the head and she fell back, fountaining blood. Next came a set of twin boys, no more than ten or eleven. Only remotely human by this point, they scrambled forward on all fours.
Ben put more bullets in them.
He kept shooting until he used up his ammunition, then he turned and ran, shouting to Nancy to get upstairs, get upstairs.
Nancy turned and saw that Ruby Sue was gone.
No, not gone.
At the deli.
A cadaverous man in a Carhartt jacket had her by the hair and was dragging her back. She stomped on the instep of his work booted-foot, pivoted and kneed him in the groin. He released her, more out of surprise than anything else.
In that brief respite, she snatched up a plastic knife from a tray of them and sank it into his left eye. Then she ducked away and Nancy saw no more of her. Just her retreating form and a naked man with an eagle tattooed on his chest who brandished a severed arm, his penis obscenely erect like a missile.
None of the savages had taken notice of Nancy yet.
Five or six of them were in hot pursuit of Ben.
In the center of a cereal aisle, they boxed him in and lunged forward for the kill. Ben climbed right up the shelves, an avalanche of Cheerios and Frosted Flakes in his wake. He made it to the top of the shelves and stayed there.
A few followed him.
The smarter ones ran to catch him in the next aisle.
But he didn’t jump down, he ran straight down the flat top of the shelves kicking displays and signs out of his way, ducking the ceiling. At the end he dove off, straight at the man in the Carhart jacket, the guy who carried the plastic knife in his gored eye without concern. Ben slammed him flat and rolled off him, making for the rear of the store.
The savages were all loping in that direction now, howling and screeching and making horrible congested sounds.
Nancy flipped herself over the bakery counter, knowing there was no way she could join her husband or the others. She heard gunfire and peered over the lip of the counter and heard Ben shouting her name madly, saw him disappear in a clutching profusion of white hands. Then more gunfire.
She was thinking about those zombies from Night of the Living Dead…but they were nothing like these animals. Cinematic deadheads, crafty as rusty coat hangers, all the cunning of petrified rabbit shit, but these…these things, they were smart…and fast. Whatever contagion had consumed the population of Cut River, it had only amplified their cunning.
She pressed herself under the counter, her body rigid and jumping with terror.
A weapon. She needed a weapon. Something.
She looked around. Deep fryers. Cake pans. Pi
e tins. Bins of flour, sugar. A rolling pin. Her hand snaked out and grabbed it. Better than nothing. She could still hear them, gibbering and hissing, so very inhuman.
There was more gunfire. Moanings. Wet sounds. Thuds. Then…silence. She waited under the counter, her heart too large for her chest, banging like drum.
Were they all dead?
Everyone?
Even Ben? Joe? Ruby Sue? Lying dead with their attackers? Is that what happened?
Nancy needed badly to cry, to scream, to do anything but lay there, trembling like some frightened animal. The sense of loss—Sam and now possibly Ben—was huge and overwhelming, a feeling of violation. As if all the rules of normalcy had been set on their heads by some lunatic, giggling god. She couldn’t take it, couldn’t take anymore.
She pulled herself up gradually.
Slow, shuffling footsteps.
She froze, fear clinging to her like a sheet of ice. She lay under its weight, shivering, her brain desperately seeking the peace of blackness, of oblivion.
But she wouldn’t allow it.
She bit down on her lower lip, bringing pain bright and real.
The silence was heavy, filled with ominous potential or the lack of it. Someone was near. She knew that much. She could hear them breathing. Drawing in low, rattling breaths. Louder now.
And then a smell…Christ, like rotting meat.
Although herbrain demanded she hide, that she be still and silent, she could not be. She raised herself up careful inches, brought her face up over the lip of the counter to look, to see what form her death would take
And something struck her square in the face.
She fell back, black dots before her eyes.
She never passed out, but it was close. Blood ran from her nose. She could taste it on her lips. Reality swam back in completely.
Whatever had struck her brought pain, but she was unaware of it, her mind locked now in battle mode, ready to fight to the death. She still had the rolling pin. Her fist was wrapped stiffly around it. As she moved, something rolled off her lap.
A softball.
Softball?
Yes, of course. That’s what had hit her. That’s what—
There was a little boy standing before her dressed in a muddy, rumpled blue suit. Looked like maybe he’d just come from choir practice. Seven, eight years old. No more. Nancy made to smile at him, but she saw his eyes, leering and yellow like full moons, filled with a total, unflinching hatred. A blind hate that was not human, not animal, but something feral and rabid.