He tried to see with his ears, like Hank, but he couldn’t. He just got paranoid, thinking he heard sounds everywhere. Was that a slither? A soft movement of cloth from clothes that weren’t theirs? A creak, a groan, a tick, a knock; were these in his head? He had the imagination to produce such phantom sounds, but there were also real dangers, real horrors that could produce them as well. Zombies were not something Orson could intimidate with a knife and an evil grin. He couldn’t use his gift of persuasion to convince them that killing him was a bad idea. If they were coming, destroying the brain was the only way to stop them, and Orson had nothing he could use to do that. He had stupidly left the weapons he had confiscated back in the truck, instinctively assuming that they would be safe indoors.
In the end, Orson focused on the sounds he knew were real. His and Hank’s hands sliding along the metal railing, the legs of his pants brushing together, his shoes scraping on the steps. His own breathing in particular, that was a good sound to focus on. In, out, in, out. The rhythmic expansion and compression of his lungs was soothing. It let him know he was alive and well.
After several more flights of stairs, Hank came to a stop. “We’re here.”
The sound of Hank depressing the latch above the handle sounded explosive, followed by a loud clack and a creak as the door was pulled inward. Orson groped around until he grabbed the edge of the door. When they entered the hallway, Orson could see. Not a lot, but there was a little bit of light seeping under a few doors. Orson kept his hand on Hank’s back while the blind man led him confidently through the halls. He walked up to one of the light cracks and pulled his keys out. He found the lock in this door even quicker than he had the one downstairs. When he turned the key, however, it sounded like the door was already unlocked. As the apartment door swung open, Orson was blinded by harsh light. Sunlight was streaming brilliantly through the windows, and after such complete darkness, it stung and brought on tears. From complete black to all-consuming white in a matter of moments: from one blindness to another.
As his eyes adjusted, Orson began to get a sense of the apartment around him. It was immaculately clean. Everything was placed just so. Pictures hung on the wall in a line that was straighter than a ruler, decorative objects on tables were completely centred, the tables themselves perfectly butted up against walls and in corners. Orson blinked away the tears brought on by the brightness as he watched Hank move about his home. He held one hand slightly out in front of him, probably thinking his wife or kid might have moved stuff while he was gone, while the other trailed lightly over various objects. On one small table near the door, his hand swept over a sheet of paper. Hank snatched it up and drew his fingers over its surface.
He sniffed the paper quickly, and then held it out to Orson. “Someone has written on this in pen. Tell me what it says.”
Orson took the sheet and read from it, “’Dear Mrs. Paige, I came by to check on you and noticed your door was open. I hope you’re okay. Please call me.’ It’s signed by a Mrs. Egret.”
“That woman lives elsewhere in the building. She and my wife have tea once a week. Mr. Egret is an officer I worked with from time to time,” Hank quickly explained, and then walked off toward another section of the apartment.
Orson put the sheet back on the table and hurried after him. They entered a bedroom clearly belonging to his daughter. Orson had spent enough of his own teenage years in teenaged girls’ rooms to know the look: brightly coloured chaos.
“Do you see a backpack anywhere?” Hank asked as he swept his hands over objects. He walked very carefully in this room, as if it were booby trapped with pressure sensitive mines. Orson guessed the room never stuck to one layout for very long. He walked through the room, which was unnaturally clean for the age group, looking for a backpack. He checked under the desk, under the bed, and in the closet, but couldn’t find a backpack anywhere.
“She’s gone,” Hank said before Orson could tell him his findings, or lack thereof.
“How do you know?”
“Her pillow is gone. Either she was at a friend’s overnight, or ran off.” Hank swept his feet across the carpeted floor. “Likely the latter. And not because of the zombies either. She must have left before then or else her room wouldn’t be so tidy.”
That explained the lack of mess. A room like this would normally have a pile of clothes on the floor. “Where would she go?”
“To her brother, most likely.” Hank left the bedroom.
Next, they went into Hank and his wife’s bedroom. The same plain-yet-creepily-organized style was here as well. The only thing that stood out as different was the open bottle of whiskey on the nightstand.
Hank wrinkled his nose from the smell. “She was always a bit of a drinker. She must have dived right in once I was out the door.”
They didn’t look through this room as thoroughly. When Hank opened the closet, they found all his clothes and even his cane in there. Hank decided to change into something more appropriate than the suit and told Orson to find some food in the kitchen. He warned him that the fridge was likely to be rancid by now, but if his wife wasn’t completely useless, then there should be something in the cupboards. After some amount of searching, Orson was able to find two cans of tomato soup. They had no way of heating it up, but that was fine. Orson opened both cans, poured them into bowls, poured some water from a water bottle into them, and set them on the table with one spoon each. He then located a box of crackers and set those out as well. Hank came in wearing dressed-down duds, but still looking hipper than Orson could ever hope to be. He also had his white cane in his hands, which he was currently collapsing and folding up into a nice leather pouch attached to his belt. He sat down at the table, and his hand searched out the spoon and the bowl.
“Tomato soup, my favourite.” He ate a spoonful carefully over the bowl so as not to spill a drop.
“I’m impressed,” Orson said as he began to eat his own soup. “Your wife regularly spoke to, and hung out with, the wife of a cop, and it wasn’t until your daughter spoke up that you went to jail.”
Hank just shrugged a shoulder in response. Orson would love to have that kind of command over someone. He did once, long ago, with a girl named Saria. He loved that kind of control and missed it, although now he had two women and a child. He would get that power back with them. In fact, he just had a marvellous idea; when he was through with the Asian bitch, he would get the mother to kill her. If that wasn’t power, Orson didn’t know what was.
“I noticed you only have two bedrooms in this apartment,” Orson changed topics. He would save his glorious idea until later, closer to when he could put it into action. “Where did your son sleep?”
“The children shared a room,” Hank explained bluntly.
Orson thought that was strange. It made sense in a place so small, but it was still strange. He once knew a brother and sister who shared a room, and they were creepy. Even by Orson’s standards, they were creepy. Of course, that may have had nothing to do with the room sharing, but people told stories.
“When we’re done, we’ll gather up what food we can salvage and get back to the truck,” Hank decided. “And we should probably feed the women something and let them empty their bladders. I don’t want the back of that thing stinking.”
Orson nodded his agreement. Then he remembered that Hank was blind and told him that it sounded like a good idea to him.
***
The journey back downstairs wasn’t nearly as terrifying as going up was. This time Orson knew it was safe, and he had a flashlight. Not having run into anything on the way up, they were unlikely to run into anything on the way down. Yet, when they had been walking toward the stairwell, there had been a loud scratching coming from behind Hank’s neighbour’s door.
Each of them dragged a suitcase with wheels down the steps behind him. They each contained a pillow, some sheets, a few clothes, and all the food and drink they could find. There wasn’t much in the way of consumables, but Orson was confi
dant that they would find more elsewhere.
As they exited the apartment building doors, Orson’s ears picked up a rhythmic banging. No doubt, Hank had picked it up sooner. It was coming from the truck, and his first thought was that the women inside had been turned into zombies. A moment later he realized the repetitive beat was actually the pattern for SOS in Morse code. Orson had learned it when he was young, from a kid who went to boy scouts. It was probably the bitch, Nicole, trying to signal for help. All it was doing was drawing some slow moving corpses toward them.
Orson went up to the back doors and slammed a fist against them three times. “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in.”
The banging from the inside stopped.
Orson collected the rifle from the front of the truck and walked back to the rear doors. “I’m going to open the door, let you stretch your legs a bit, take a piss, maybe eat some food. If you try anything, I won’t hesitate to put a bullet in your brain. I also wouldn’t recommend stalling, as zombies are moving in every second. Do we have a deal?”
There was a pause as the women thought it over.
“We have a deal,” the voice of the mother came through the metal. What was her name again? Right, Isabelle, and the little one was Jasmine. More names to be added to his mental list.
Hank opened the doors while Orson stood back with the rifle. When they were opened, Nicole stood there, ready for anything. When nothing happened, she stepped down off the back.
“That’s for you,” Orson gestured with the muzzle of his gun to a bundle on the ground. It was a pair of bed sheets wrapped around three cans of pop and a large bag of dry pasta. They could decide how to divvy it up amongst themselves.
“You need to uncuff them to use the bathroom,” Nicole said as she placed the sack into the back of the truck.
“No way. You’re not all being uncuffed at once. You take a quick piss, and then we let them go and cuff you up.” That was a plan Orson had come up with and Hank had agreed to. If one of them were always cuffed, the men would have leverage.
Nicole began to walk toward some bushes near the front of the building.
“No way, sister,” Orson verbally stopped her. “Where we can see you. Right there on the grass is fine.”
Nicole scowled fiercely at him, but she also took note of the zombies closing in. There wouldn’t be much more time for the other girls to go if she hesitated or argued. She turned her back on Orson, quickly stripping off her pants, squatting, and urinating on the grass. Orson kicked a roll of toilet tissue toward her. She should be grateful he thought to bring some.
Nicole finished fast, yanked her pants back up, and headed for the rear of the truck. Hank waited inside, swiftly taking the cuffs off Jasmine and Isabelle, and slapping them on Nicole. The mother and child hurried out to the grassy patch, spurred on by the deads’ proximity. Orson was glad they were hurrying; the zombies were starting to make him feel a little uncomfortable as well. Even though he had a rifle, he wasn’t confident of his aim with it. He had never fired a gun before, but he knew how they worked. With the women, aim didn’t matter. Hitting them anywhere was likely to take them down, to cripple them with pain if it didn’t kill them. The zombies were another matter entirely. The melon-sized skulls on their shoulders were the only targets. Hit their limbs or torso and nothing would happen. Even if you severed tendons, they’d keep coming by whatever means possible. There were also child zombies, who were even smaller targets.
The mother placed herself between Orson and her child, and made sure that the hem of Jasmine’s dress flared out all around her to hide her lower body. Orson had no interest in the little girl. He did, however, make sure to check out Isabelle’s smooth thighs, as they were uncovered.
Just before Orson’s patience was up, the mother and child finished and got back into the truck. It was quicker just to leave Nicole locked up and let the two of them sit freely, so that’s what they did. Before hopping out of the back, Hank smiled at the little girl.
“I brought you this. It belonged to my son.” He held out a white, stuffed rabbit. “I insist you take it.”
Jasmine looked to her mom who nodded, trying to hold back tears. The girl took the stuffed bunny and sat it upon her lap. Hank left the back of the truck and slammed the doors shut. The men hurried to the front and climbed in. Several zombies were very close, and more kept showing up in the distance. Orson started up the engine and deliberately ran over as many as he could.
***
The second stop on the tour was Orson’s home. When he went to prison, his mom and Mr. Norton continued to make payments on his apartment for him. They thought that when he got out, he should have a familiar home to go to. Of course, they offered up their own home as well, but Orson insisted that he didn’t want to impose. In reality, it was because he wanted his privacy in order to plot.
Orson’s apartment building was much shorter than Hank’s, only six storeys tall, while Hank’s was around twenty-six. There were four identical buildings sitting in a row, which had housed mostly university students. There were surprisingly few zombies on the streets near Orson’s apartment. After they had gone inside and begun climbing the steps, Orson found out why. Unlike Hank’s building, Orson’s had its staircase in the corner of the building with two sides made of glass. Looking out through the glass, he could see into the stairwell of the apartment building one over. The top of that staircase had been crammed and barricaded with what looked like everything not bolted down: tables, chairs, mattresses, desks, lamps, everything. Below this pile of debris, was a massive horde of zombies. They completely clogged the stairwell, pushing and clawing at the mass higher up. There were survivors up there, somewhere, and the zombies were determined to get at them. Orson decided not to tell Hank what he saw, but it made him realize something: they couldn’t live in the truck forever. They needed to find a place somewhere eventually, a place where the zombies couldn’t find them and amass like that. Somewhere better than the prison. Orson didn’t have any idea where such a place might be.
In his apartment, they found fewer useful things than they had found in Hank’s. Although she kept up with the rent for years, Mrs. Norton, formally Mrs. King, didn’t come by that often. The place was dusty and had an unused smell. All the food had been cleared out but there were a few more useful articles of clothing, spare batteries for the flashlight, and Orson’s hunting knife. It was bigger than the one he had taken off Nicole. Either his mom had never found the knife, or she had left it in its hiding place between the mattress and the box spring. Other than the knife, there was nothing really here for Orson. It didn’t feel like his home any more than the prison did. It was his old life, his delusional life, where he pretended to be happy and normal. Now he embraced the animal within him.
“Is this one of your paintings?” Hank asked from the hallway.
Orson walked out of his room to find Hank running his delicate fingers across a canvas. It was one of Orson’s paintings, and he told him so.
“It’s beautiful.”
People had said that about his work before, but coming from Hank, a blind man as well as someone he looked up to, it meant so much more. Orson was deeply touched.
“You have wonderful brush work,” Hank continued. “It can be so smooth and so emotional at the same time. Very lovely.” He lowered his hands from the painting. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Yeah.” Orson looped the knife’s sheath through his belt and slung the rifle over his shoulder. He had remembered to bring it this time.
“We should depart then.”
The two of them left the apartment with small bags of loot. Orson was leading the way back to the stairwell they had come up, when Hank suddenly grabbed his arm with a grip like a bear trap.
“What is it?” Orson asked, trying not to wince from the pain.
Hank held a finger to his lips and cocked his head to the side. He could hear something. Orson tried to do the same. He closed his eyes and focused all of
his attention on his ears, but he couldn’t hear anything unusual. Even holding his breath, he didn’t hear anything. The silence was almost painful.
“Is there another stairwell?” Hank asked.
“Yeah, on the other side of the building.” Without needing to be asked further, Orson began to lead Hank to the other stairwell. He was going to trust Hank’s ears just as Hank needed to trust Orson’s eyes.
They got back down to the first floor without being attacked by anything. Still, to be cautious, they left by a rear exit and worked their way around the outside of the building. Back in the truck, they were safe.
“Where are we going next?” Orson asked as he started up the vehicle.
“I don’t know. Is there anywhere you would like to go?”
“Nowhere specific. I would, however, like to go somewhere where I can teach that Nicole who’s boss.”
Hank grinned. “I hear you. Any place would do really, but you want somewhere small, without windows, and a door we can park near. That way, you can get in and out with ease and don’t have to search the place much.”
“Do you know of such a place?” Orson couldn’t think of one off the top of his head.
“Actually, I do.” Hank’s grin got larger.
***
The place was perfect and fitting in a disgusting sort of way. Hank had given Orson the directions to a crematorium. After a quick scope-out with the flashlight, Orson declared the furnace room to be more than adequate. There was a large door to the outside to admit the coffins of the dead, while inside, there was a door to the rest of the crematorium, but it had a heavy lock that Orson engaged. He took one of the bed sheets they had brought and spread it out on the floor. The clean white square seemed to glow. Orson returned to the back of the truck where Hank was waiting inside to unlock Nicole from the truck’s side. Once he did, and the handcuffs were again secured, Orson grabbed Nicole’s wrist and reached for Isabelle. Why not have a two for one while there was time? Hank smacked his wrist as it neared Isabelle.
Survival Instinct (Book 2): Adaptive Instinct Page 27