Dead in L.A. (A Gathering Dead Novel)

by Stephen Knight

  Wallace got to his feet, grabbed the baseball bat and ensured his pistol was still in its holster. He darted into the kitchen. The backpacks were still on the breakfast bar, where they’d left them, packed and ready to go. The back door was closed, but it was rattling in its frame as something pushed against it.

  Then, suddenly, the racket stopped.

  Wallace held his breath as he tightened his grip on the baseball bat. He stood a good ten feet from the door, trying to decide if he should put down the bat and take up the pistol. The bat would be more covert, should something find its way inside… but the gun would be more immediate.

  From upstairs, he heard Darien’s voice. “Wallace?”

  Before he could respond, the back door burst open, sagging on its hinges. A tall, stiff, black zombie staggered boldly into the room. Caught standing in the middle of the kitchen with nowhere to go, Wallace angled his body, bringing up the baseball bat. The zombie saw him in the darkness and, with a dry hiss, it lurched toward him.

  “Well, fuck me,” Wallace said, then stepped forward to meet the monster. He pulled the bat over his shoulder, wound up, and swung away with all his might. The bat landed square and true right on the zombie’s head with a hollow crack! that sent it reeling. It made a half turn, then collapsed to the floor on its face. Wallace raised the bat again and stepped closer to the ghoul, ready to strike it again when it pushed itself back to its feet.

  The zombie didn’t move.

  Wallace relaxed slowly, like a serpent gradually uncoiling from around its prey. Well, that wasn’t so tough—

  But then another zombie stumbled in through the open door, assassinating his relief before it had a chance to mature into full-on jubilation.

  It was clear right away how much faster this one was—more agile—and yet it was the figure of an older woman with a wretchedly stooped posture. It scurried right in before Wallace had time to even raise the bat, and set upon him with outstretched claws.

  He lashed out with his right foot. He’d fallen asleep still wearing his thick hiking boots, and the big boot’s rugged tread centered right at the creature’s solar plexus as it rushed forward. The creature doubled over onto his leg, practically folding in half. Its hands still clawed mechanically at his pants while its jaws chomped dumbly, biting against the floor. He staggered back, regained his footing, and without hesitation he finished the job with a formidable crush of the bat onto the zombie’s head, which splintered open. The ghastly wound leaked a stinking blackish ichor that seeped across the floor.

  “Wallace!” Darien yelled, rushing into the kitchen behind him as another zombie entered. Behind it loomed yet another ghoul, reaching out to steady itself against the doorjamb.

  “God damn it!” Wallace steadied his stance and swung again, catching the first zombie on the side of the head. The blow left a deep divot in its cranium, and the creature staggered backward, blocking the other zombie from pushing into the house. As it was falling backward into the next zombie, Wallace charged them both. With a brutal thrust, he shoved the first zombie back into the other, so both collapsed back onto the cement walkway outside. But as he slammed the door shut, he saw others approaching, doubtless drawn by the commotion and Darien’s shout.

  “Get your shit together!” he snapped. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Darien wordlessly slipped on her backpack, then grabbed Wallace’s. He handed off the bat to her, then swung into his pack, pulling the straps tight around his shoulders.

  From outside, the zombies made it back to the door. They started hammering on it, moaning in the quiet predawn gloom. That got Wallace’s attention. The moaning was certain to draw even more of the walking corpses.

  “We should go out the front,” Darien called.

  “I have to secure this door! We need time,” Wallace said.

  “No! Let’s just go out the front while they’re back here!” She pulled at his arm. “Come on!”

  Wallace dragged the kitchen table across the ceramic tile floor and jammed it across the broken door. In response, the gray and purple fist of a zombie busted through one of the small panes of glass in the door. Its gnarled, leather-like fingers clutched at nothing, oblivious to the chunks of glass that wedged its flesh. The grunts and moans of the creatures grew louder. More had already assembled—five or six—and they were clustered around the kitchen door, shoving and heaving against it. The table inched backward.

  “We’ve gotta get out of here!” Darien cried.

  Another hand shot through the glass, and wood splintered. The window of the door was now crowded with zombies—dire, impersonal killing machines clawing to get in the house.

  “Let’s go!” Darien shouted.

  They dashed to the front. Wallace stopped long enough to look past the drawn curtains in the living room. The street outside was clear. As he turned to join Darien at the front door, something caught his eye. He hurried over to the fireplace and took hold of a fireplace poker. Anything that could be used as a weapon was definitely high on his Christmas list this year.

  Wallace slowly opened the door. All clear. They stepped out quickly and crossed the lawn, moving up the street as stealthily as they could. Their luck didn’t hold for long. It was only a moment before the first of many zombies staggered around another house and followed in pursuit.

  There had been no cars at the house they’d camped out in. The plan had been to systematically check each neighboring home until they happened upon a vehicle, but that wasn’t happening now.

  Instead, as the first light of day grew over their right shoulders in the east, they hurried down the street. Most of the zombies didn’t move very fast, which Wallace thought was a plus. But they also didn’t have to stop for rest or bathroom breaks, and that was a big minus. Without wheels, he and Darien were on the high side of becoming the zombies’ next food item.

  “We’ve got to get a car,” Darien said.

  Wallace never noticed what street the house had been on, but it led them out to Harkness Lane, which he knew ran north and south. Artesia was to their north, and he turned right at the corner of Harkness.

  “We can just follow this up. We’re about a mile south of Artesia,” he said, reasonably sure that the Hermosa Beach auto dealership they’d pinpointed was pretty close to the coast.

  “We should head toward the water,” Darien said. “They can’t possibly swim,” she said.

  “Okay, probably not. But how long can we?”

  “We won’t need to,” she said, and there was a sudden definitive tone in her voice. “We need a boat, and I just happen to have access to one.”

  Wallace was going to ask why she hadn’t mentioned that before, but it wasn’t important. What was important is that with a boat, they could move up the coast to Malibu. It would be immeasurably easier than fighting their way overland.

  “What kind of boat?” he asked.

  Darien smiled in the diminishing gloom. “An absolutely beautiful boat, at Marina del Rey.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s get up to Marina del Rey,” he said.

  CHAPTER 6

  MATTHEW

  Matthew could run. If there was a skill he had, it was his ability to run and run. So it wasn’t really that hard for him—at least at first—to keep a good distance ahead of the zombie horde.

  The problem was he didn’t know where to run to. The creatures had followed him along his street and he knew it would be stupid to show them where he was living. His father was helpless in bed, and as desperate as he was to see him, the last thing Matthew wanted to do was lead the dead right to him. In his current condition, his father wouldn’t be able to fight, so Matthew would have to be very careful about every move he made.

  So he had run off in the other direction from where his mother had met her end, surrounded by a growing circle of ghouls that savagely tore at her. He didn’t have a destination that he thought could offer safety at the moment—and he had no idea how long he would need to stay out drawing the zombies away
before he could double back and return. For the moment, it was a question of just getting the hell out of Dodge.

  His mind was on fire following the gruesome death of his mother. But even though he was just a boy, his survival instincts had kicked in and kept him running. His silent neighborhood unrolled before and behind him as he sprinted down his street. The grim images of his mother’s end played on an endless loop in his mind, and tears poured down his face, but he kept moving. The pervasive silence of the middle class neighborhood stretched across the afternoon, but the throbbing pulse of his frightened heart filled his ears like an underwater symphony.

  Without consciously planning it, Matthew headed toward his school.

  Silver Spur Elementary School was the kind of “retro” design that popped up in the early 1960s—a series of loosely collected blocks of brick and mortar under unnecessarily angular roofs. A vague feeling of relief stirred in his chest as Matthew spotted the school down the block. He crossed the remarkably empty Montemalaga Drive and trotted up the slow rise of Basswood. His breath was coming from him in ragged gasps now, and the final five hundred yards seemed close to impossible to complete.

  The school, of course, was closed. Classes had been cancelled almost two weeks ago, the same day his father had pulled him out of class and gotten ill. He literally banged himself against the full-length heavy glass door with a thud. The sweat from his forehead rubbed upon the glass as, staggering to stay standing up, he worked his weak hands to try the doors. They were locked.

  Matthew ran around the entire school, trying each door. All were locked. He peered in through the windows, trying to see if anyone might be inside—a janitor, a teacher, even that dick of an assistant principal, Mister Melfi. The school was dark and vacant.

  In the not-so-far distance, the light, dry breeze carried a moan.

  Matthew charged into the bushes outside one of the science classrooms and pressed his back against the building’s rough surface. Defeat finally caught up with him. He hadn’t outrun it.

  Images of his mother’s death and his friend’s death and all the chaos that had ensued in the last several hours crashed upon him, assaulting his psyche with such a violence that tears welled anew in his eyes and misery swelled inside his narrow chest, making him feel that he might explode.

  The moaning continued. Matthew squeezed his eyes shut and hot tears left trails down his cheeks. He heard a footfall in the near distance. Then another… and another… The zombies were making their way across the parking lot. Had they seen him make it to the school, and if so, had they seen where he ducked down to hide?

  I really don’t want to die at school, a small voice inside him said, and that made him giggle quietly. Yeah, dying at school was pretty lame.

  He wiped his eyes and looked through the sculpted bushes that surrounded the school. Sure enough, a gaggle of zombies were crossing the empty parking lot, ambling toward the school in a ragged line. To make matters worse, they seemed to be heading directly for Matthew’s position. While that horrified him, he also knew he had to act. Some message of survival pushed its way into his mind—some tiny fire burned in him and urged that he not give up.

  He was rested now. He could run again. To stay only invited death. To flee meant there was at least a chance to live, even if for only a few minutes longer.

  As he gathered his feet beneath him to launch himself out of the shrubbery, he suddenly remembered one time last year when he and his friend—poor Greg—had come here on a Sunday afternoon with his friend’s new remote control drone, a device with four little rotors that could take off like a helicopter and zip around the sky. The athletic field around the school was deep and wide and clear of any meaningful obstructions, so they’d decided to give the little drone a proper shakedown flight. But Greg had crashed the device on the school roof, and they’d been forced to find a way to climb up the side of the building to fetch it.

  The roof…

  Buoyed by the energy of the abrupt light bulb idea, Matthew vaulted to his feet and ran again. The zombies saw him, of course, and with a collective moan they gave chase, but their leaden, dead legs were no match for his. Matthew continued around the side of the school, keeping an eye on the zombies as they slowly adjusted their paths to try and intercept him.

  Around the far corner of the school, he reached the spot he and Greg had used. There was a wide window ledge around chest height. The window itself was composed of three rectangular panes of glass, which were separated by thin, sharp metal frames that formed a short ladder up to the overhang of the roof. Matthew reached the window in a flurry and tried to hoist himself up in one motion, but in his panic, he slipped and cut his arm along the white concrete of the sill. He lost his grip and fell back to the ground, knocking the wind from his body and cracking the back of his head on the sidewalk. For a moment, all Matthew could do was lie there, frantically trying to breathe while staring up into the deep blue sky overhead.

  The gurgling snarl of a zombie forced him to regain control over his senses. Finally taking a deep breath of air, he rolled onto his side. The closest zombie was only about thirty yards away now, and even though it moved with a ragged, uneven gait, it wouldn’t be long before it was standing right over him.

  Matthew climbed back to his feet, turning back to the window. He hoisted himself up so that he managed to get his left knee onto the sill. The zombie growled again, as if sensing its quarry might escape. Matthew moaned with terror, but he forced himself not to look. He moved carefully and brought his feet under him until he was standing on the sill. The zombie howled, and Matthew looked over reflexively. It was only twenty yards away now and leaning forward, like a slow-motion sprinter leaning into his run, trying to burn up the remaining distance to the finish line in one final burst of speed. For an instant, Matthew wondered if it would be wiser to make a run for it while he still could. He saw his opening and knew he would easily outrun this creature. At the same time, the roof beckoned, and he knew that he would be safer up there. The horizontal bars between window panes were much narrower than he remembered, which made it more of a challenge to find good footing. Still, he worked his way up to the first bar, and then the second, at which point he was able to get his hands on the edge of the roof. The sharp plastic liner edging the flat roof was a perimeter around the gravelly asphalt up top. Matthew gripped it tightly with his fingers and readied to hoist himself up.

  Right as he pushed up with his feet from the sill, something clamped onto his right ankle, stopping his ascent as surely as a gunshot might. Matthew cried out and kicked, slamming his foot right into the zombie’s face as it pulled itself closer to him. Its jaw snapped shut, and Matthew had no doubt that he had just broken several of its teeth. He kicked again and this time his foot hit the zombie’s wrist, tearing its hand away from his ankle. The ghoul hissed in response and pawed at Matthew as he hung there, hanging off the edge of the roof. It was shouldered aside by another corpse which also reached for him, and the pair collapsed in an awkward heap.

  Matthew screamed as he placed his feet back on the bar and kicked upward with all of his might. He got first one elbow, and then the other, across the edge’s lip. Still kicking, he pulled himself upward. He felt the momentary contact of dead fingers against the bottoms of his sneakers, and for an instant, Matthew was fearful he was about to void the contents of his bladder right into his pants.

  In a second’s time, he yanked the rest of himself up onto the hot, gritty roof and rolled into a sitting position away from the edge. He found he now had a moderate view of the surrounding terrain. The zombies gathered themselves below, coming together in a pulsating mass of necrotic flesh, bumping and jostling. The ghouls ignored each other, but they were united in their desire for warm flesh and hot blood.

  Matthew edged closer to the end of the roof and looked down at them. He watched them for several seconds as their dumb hands reached toward him, clutching stupidly at nothing more than empty space. Their moans filled the air, and in the distan
ce, Matthew saw more shambling monstrosities heading toward the school, drawn by the noise of the group below. He shrank away from the edge and did a quick survey of the roof.

  It was a very intricate rooftop. In fact, it was more like a series of roofs, with angles moving up and down to different levels to suit the unique design of the various rooms inside the large school. It didn’t take him long to find some skylights, and then several windows that were placed high up on the walls of several classrooms that were accessible from one of the many angled rooftops. The first window he tried was open and he rejoiced. This was going to work out well, he thought, at least for a little while. Once he got inside the school, it seemed perfectly logical that he would be safe. He knew intuitively it was far-fetched to ever expect this legion of the dead to do any organized damage to the building.

  The only problem was that the window he’d opened was about twelve feet above the floor of the classroom, with no discernible way to climb down.

  Having just thwarted capture, however, it seemed a minor problem to Matthew, and he simply began searching the roof for some tools that might prove useful.

  He discovered a long strip of some kind of coated coaxial cable running along the bottom of one short wall on the roof. It took some doing to rip a long section loose, but before long he managed to yank a large enough section up and tied it around a piece of the window frame. He threw the rest into the classroom, and was gratified to discover it was so long that the end actually hit the floor.

  After testing the strength of the cable and his knots by yanking on it with great force several times, he quickly climbed down, virtually rappelling off the wall like he was a soldier or a member of the LAPD’s famed SWAT team. It was difficult on his hands, but he managed to drop to the floor without injuring himself.

  He looked around the classroom, which he knew belonged to Missus Tankersly, one of the English teachers. The room smelled familiar, leaving him feeling strangely nostalgic, even though he had hated Missus Tankersly’s class and the weird way she pronounced words like “predicate.” The nostalgia was tempered by the classroom’s silence, along with the fact that he felt like some sort of burglar.