Guess I have some neighbors after all. Of the dead variety.
Wallace wondered if the dead required shelter too? It didn’t make any sense that they would, but then again, legions of animated dead hunting down the living in Southern California didn’t exactly spike a ten-point-oh on the Reasonable Meter, either. He pulled back from the window a bit, not wanting to be seen. The movement came again, fast, almost furtive.
They’re everywhere. Literally everywhere.
The curtains moved once more and a woman’s face appeared behind the window. She peered into the yard for a moment, then ever-so-slowly pulled back. Wallace watched, not moving a muscle as the face receded back behind the curtain.
He waited.
Finally she returned. Like a startled deer, her intense face poked past the curtain. Her expression of grim foreboding seemed fixed and frozen. She looked right across the gap separating the garage apartment from the house, and her gaze was crystal clear, not a turgid, milky white like that of the dead. Wallace found himself moving closer to the window.
The woman was alive.
CHAPTER 4
DARIEN
Her name was Darien Geller—a New Jersey girl who’d eschewed the more traditional career path leading toward Manhattan and opting for Los Angeles, instead. She was twenty-seven and, as a trained and true attorney specializing in intellectual property, was known as an up-and-comer at her Wilshire Boulevard law firm. She was also regarded by some of the senior partners and hotshot new guys as an HPA—hot piece of ass. She’d discovered this through one of her female coworkers, who had rewarded her with that nugget of information after one especially late night at the firm. That had been a virtual slap in the face, and one that had motivated her to simply put in her time, get out, and start her own practice.
Just the same, she’d continued being a good trooper, if only to further her goals. She had access to a tidy revenue stream outside of her work as an incubating legal eagle, so she wasn’t worried about losing her job if she stopped smiling as much and began refusing to attend staff functions that would only devolve into surreptitious leering sessions. But the work kept coming in, and while she’d heard reports about the burgeoning zombie epidemic, she hadn’t really believed it. She was fixated on one thing, and one thing only: succeeding in gaining enough experience and credibility in legal circles to separate from her current firm and start a new one.
As such, a bit of tunnel vision was the result.
It was an odd day the morning she drove to work and found the freeways were even more congested than normal. Radio news had been spotty, but Darien had never thought much of it to begin with. There was talk of an epidemic, and the potential of the governor activating the National Guard. She checked her phone, and found no messages from work indicating that today was an off day. As she ground through the bumper-to-bumper traffic in her leased BMW, she took in the sights around her. Next to her was a Cadillac Escalade carrying what appeared to be a family. The back of the towering SUV was full of earthly possessions—suitcases, bags, interestingly, brown boxes with DEL MONTE stamped on them. She figured the people were either moving, or had a thing for canned vegetables. To her right, a pickup truck was similarly laden with all sorts of interesting items, including an ATV in the back. The truck was jacked up on a huge lift kit, and had gigantic knobbed tires. The man behind the wheel sported a huge beard and wore a camouflage baseball cap, and the truck’s rear window was festooned with NRA stickers. Darien didn’t want to get any closer to the truck than she had to, but the traffic was so thick there was no escape. Ahead of her, a Honda Civic labored beneath a heavy load. Sooty exhaust emerged from its loose tailpipe, in contradiction to all of California’s strict emissions laws. She couldn’t see the occupants, due to the bags that apparently took up every inch of space afforded by the vehicle’s back seat.
Her commute took her northbound up the 110, the major freeway that ran relatively parallel to the Pacific coastline. Even on a normal day, the trip was never an easy one, though today seemed like a blockbuster for delays. Traffic helicopters thudded past overhead, and she heard the wail of intermittent sirens. There were several accidents lining the shoulder of the freeway, but there were emergency vehicles present. No CHP, no ambulances, not even tow trucks. It was a bit disquieting... almost as much as the bearded guy in the pickup next to her, who was now looking out his window to try and get a good look at Darien’s legs.
Things really got weird as she approached the 405 interchange and nearly drove directly into a wall of stopped traffic. The cars were willy-nilly, and as she came upon them with the rest of the traffic lining up behind her, horns began to blare. Helicopters orbited overhead below the marine layer. For minutes, she sat there in her idling BMW before tuning in one of the local news stations. While there was no mention of the traffic jam on the 110 at the 405, there was apparently much more going on elsewhere. Hospitals were overflowing, people were attacking each other, and public schools were now officially closed.
The man in the truck put his ride in park and opened his door. As he climbed down, Darien saw he sported a belly that was even more impressive than his beard. She also caught a glimpse of something metallic beneath his long flannel shirt as he ponderously alighted from the big vehicle.
A gun? she asked herself.
The man ignored her for a moment as he adjusted his cap, still standing behind the open driver’s door. He then slowly turned and scanned the entire freeway with his eyes. Overhead, helicopters continued racing over the road. The man walked to the front of his truck and, after a moment, mounted its tall bumper. It was quite the feat of athleticism, given his ponderous belly, and he had to pause several times to hitch up his sagging jeans. He finally made it, and balancing there with one meaty hand splayed against the hood of his idling truck, he looked northerly. Darien kept her eyes on him, since he likely had a much better view of what lay ahead than she did sitting in a low-slung BMW coupe. She watched as he fidgeted about, and she leaned forward in her seat. She couldn’t quite see his face.
A few cars ahead, a man bailed out of his car as horns blared. He tore past Darien’s BMW at a fast run, not even looking back as his car slowly rolled into the vehicle in front of it. More horns sounded, and one of the helicopters appeared, hovering almost right overhead a thousand feet up. The man with the truck suddenly hopped down from the bumper and ran back to his vehicle, a look of abject terror on his face. He opened the rear door on the driver’s side and pulled out a big backpack and slung it on. To Darien’s shocked surprise, he then pulled out a black, military-style rifle. More people streamed past the BMW, and those who passed on the right side of the vehicle didn’t seem to be fazed by the fact that a heavyset armed man was in their path. They just squeezed past him, running for all they were worth.
My God, what’s going on?
“Hey, lady!” the big man shouted down at her. “You know what’s good for you, you’d better run!”
With that, the guy took off, leaving his truck still running.
Ahead, she heard panicked screams. And a few gunshots, that rattled off in a rapid fashion. Darien brushed her long hair out of her eyes and looked around, still strapped into her seat. People were practically streaming past the car now, pushing and shoving, all with expressions of terror etched into their faces. Real fear touched Darien then. Something was very, very wrong.
And she didn’t really want to know what it was by the time it reached her. She shut off her car and tried to open the door, but couldn’t due to the stream of humanity darting past. Every time she tried to get out, someone would run up and slam into the door, closing it on her. Darien shouted in frustration and slammed her palm on the horn. It had no effect.
Finally, a woman slipped and fell right by the front left fender. A man tried to vault over her, but he went down as well. It was her only opportunity, so Darien threw open the door, whacking the man in the head in the process. As another runner tried to pick his way across the tangled bodies, Da
rien lurched out of her car. She half fell against the Escalade beside her, startling the family still sitting inside. As she gathered her feet beneath her, she turned and looked in the direction people were running from.
At first, she couldn’t understand what she saw. It looked like some sort of large fight, with mobs of people attacking motorists as they tried to flee. Metal crunched as cars and trucks tried to pull out of the melee, but there was nowhere to go other than into other motor vehicles. People climbed over stalled cars, or attacked them physically. As she watched, Darien believed she caught a glance of a young man being hauled through a shattered window. She didn’t know what to make of it—what was the cause for all of this?
The driver in the Escalade leaned on the horn and revved the SUV’s big engine. Darien pushed away from it just as a bloodied, battered man in torn clothing slithered across the Cadillac’s dark hood. His skin was pale, and there was matted blood and dust in his fair hair. As the man turned toward Darien and gazed at her, she had a momentary recollection of one of her mother’s dolls which had cold, marble eyes mounted in its plastic skull. The man’s eyes looked exactly like that: remote, emotionless, boundlessly vacant.
The man turned to the tangle of people below him as the motorists who had fallen finally got their feet beneath them. The man—if it was a man—on the Escalade’s hood reached out and grabbed the woman, yanking her toward him. As Darien watched, he sank his teeth into her face. The woman shrieked, and blood flowed down her cheek and chin. She struggled and fought, but her attacker held fast, ignoring her fists, not deviating away from her for one second even as she tore away clumps of his filthy hair. Then another filthy, disheveled figure—this one a woman—crept around the front of the Escalade, hissing. She too reached for the embattled woman with claw like hands, her eyes devoid of any hint of reason, mouth open wide, black tongue lolling. The man who had tripped over the unfortunate female motorist yelped and pushed past the flailing limbs and drove straight toward Darien, his face a pale mask of fear. Darien turned and fled before him, lest he run her down. Not for the first time, she was glad she wore running shoes to work, though this was the first time she’d ever needed them.
Behind her, she heard absolute pandemonium erupt. There were a few more gunshots in the distance, and sirens wailed even further out, barely audible over the helicopters overhead. Darien heard the cries of those running with her over a multitude of footsteps, and the shattering of glass. To her left, she saw other people heading toward the freeway, and that puzzled her. When she saw those people attacking the motorists who had crossed the guardrail, she understood that they were more of the demented savages, closing in on the highway from the city streets to the east. Most of them moved on stiff legs; some loped; a few actually ran. Darien realized that the runners would be the most formidable ones, and that meant she needed to get off the highway. She and the rest of the fleeing motorists were stuck to narrow channels, and she was smart enough to know that she needed greater mobility.
So she cut around the front of the next car and elbowed her way across three lanes of motionless traffic, cutting across the paths of fleeing men, women, and children. Mixed in with the escapees were more of the killers, and she saw one take out an elderly man just a few feet away from her. She ignored the man’s cries, moaning to herself in fear as she bolted across the concrete thoroughfare. She practically vaulted across the median barrier, but the traffic there was moving slowly toward her, as other motorists had already started running across. There was a screech as a car skidded to a halt, horn blaring. An instant later, a hollow cracking sound as a delivery van drove into the car which had just stopped.
And above it all, more screams.
Darien glanced over her shoulder to ensure she wasn’t in immediate danger of being attacked from behind, then slowed and picked her way across the highway, dodging around slowly moving traffic. Passing drivers looked at her in a mix of shock, dismay, and anger. For a moment, she was brought to a standstill as a semi truck slowly trundled past, its driver obviously operating under an abundance of caution in order to avoid running over the sudden influx of pedestrians. Darien bounced on her toes for an instant, then padded toward the rear of the truck and crossed behind it. She climbed over the far guardrail, then skidded down the grass and dirt embankment on the other side of the highway. She stumbled and almost fell, but managed to stay on her feet. At the bottom of the embankment, she reached the cold, hard cement of a street that she had never before set foot on. She paused there, breathing hard in her business wear and running shoes, heart pounding and mouth dry. Houses sat nearby, shoulder to shoulder, facing the street she stood on. In the near distance, she heard the commotion from the highway continuing to increase in sound and fury. She turned and looked up the embankment as a woman wearing a torn, blood-stained blouse staggered over its top.
“Help me,” she said, her voice pale and distant even though she was only forty feet away.
Clambering over the guardrail after her were a dozen shambling monstrosities.
Zombies, Darien thought. Zombies. They’re actual zombies...
They descended upon the injured woman like wolves. She didn’t cry out when they grabbed her. Darien could see the woman had already given up and accepted her fate, and she went down without a sound. Darien turned and resumed running, past one corner, then turned onto another. She didn’t really know where she was, though she must have driven past this neighborhood a hundred times. Was it Torrance? Carson? She didn’t know. Her only thought was, Get to the water. She didn’t know why, but she heeded the directive, even though the cold, steel blue Pacific was at least three miles to the west. Casting a glance over her shoulder, she saw some of the zombies still pursued her. None were runners, and that gave her a bit of hope, but she still poured it on. She’d ran track in high school and college, and her body still remembered the rhythm of movement all those years had conditioned her for. It wasn’t long until the number of zombies diminished, breaking off to search for easier prey.
Darien continued on, slowing to a jog as she trotted through neighborhoods she didn’t know, neighborhoods that were far too quiet for her liking. She considered stopping and trying to enlist some help from some of the residents, but there was something tickling the back of her mind, something that bade her to continue pressing on. But she was dangerously close to reaching the limits of her endurance, so she slowed to a fast walk, clasped her hands behind her head, and kept going. From the highway, she could still hear the faint concert of carnage, rocking on beneath the beat of helicopter blades.
When she heard faint screaming from inside one of the houses she walked past, she lowered her arms and picked up the pace.
Get to the water.
CHAPTER 5
WALLACE AND DARIEN
“I don’t know,” Darien said with a gasp as she rubbed her forehead in concentration. “I don’t know when it started.”
“Well, it’s Friday now, I think. Or… it may be Saturday.” Wallace stood with her in the bungalow’s kitchen, his hand on the butt of his pistol. looked around the house he and the girl stood in, his hand on the butt of his pistol.
“I don’t know. Tuesday. I don’t remember. I mean, why don’t you know?”
He could see Darien was growing frustrated with his questions, though it hadn’t been Wallace’s intention to upset her.
“I was out of it,” he told her. “I was sicker than I’d ever been. Totally floored. Couldn’t get out of bed at all.”
“You were sick?”
Wallace nodded. “Yeah. Like the worst flu ever. I was literally out for more than a week.”
“That’s how it started,” she said. “Some sort of super-flu. A lot of people died from it, I mean a lot. Not just in LA. Everywhere. I heard that’s where the dead came from—al lot of those people who died, they suddenly got up again and started eating people.”
Wallace didn’t know what to make of that. But she was right, there certainly were a lot of corpse-l
ike creatures stalking the City of Angels, and they were pretty damn hungry.
“You try the TV?” he asked, then waved the question aside. “Sorry. No electricity.”
“I never really watched a ton of TV,” Darien said. “Now? I really miss it.”
The silence of the house was made more acute by their urge to whisper. It was as if each were almost too scared to breathe.
It hadn’t taken Wallace long to find the nerve to make the run over from the apartment over the garage. As methodically as he could, he’d removed the barrier he’d built and—securing an intelligently gathered plastic bag full of supplies, along with his bat and his pistol—finally walked the forty or so feet to the back door. He went slowly and silently, listening for any sounds that could even suggest something living—or at least moving—was nearby.
Once inside Darien bolted and chained the door, but at Wallace’s suggestion, they also moved some furniture against it.
He followed her back into the kitchen as if she were the host of her own home. She shrugged and told him that there was juice and soft drinks in the lifeless refrigerator, but he declined.
“Well, if nothing else, I’m happy to see you,” Wallace said. “I’m happy to see anyone, at this point.”
Darien seemed initially glad to see him too, but his sudden close proximity now had her looking a bit nervous.
“Yeah, well, don’t be too happy,” she said with a guarded tone that almost made Wallace smile.
“Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “I’m not a rapist or anything like that. Just a guy trying to find his kid.”
“Really. So what’s your story?” she asked.
“My story?”
“Yeah. How did you get…” She waved a finger around the kitchen of a stranger’s house.
Dead in L.A. (A Gathering Dead Novel) Page 5