She nodded, trusting Tom to do the right thing.
Ben looked up to see the truck pulling away, the back-right tire burning and throwing the flames further onto the underside of the vehicle.
"Tom!" he cried. "Tom, you’re crazy— Get out of the truck!"
Tom heard Ben shouting, but he couldn’t make out what he was saying, nor would it have made any difference if he could. All he could think was to get the burning truck away from the gas pumps, away from the pumps, away from the pumps!
Cooper couldn’t fathom what was happening out there. The truck was driving away, but it was clearly on fire and could not have had time to fill up on fuel. And it was so dark and it looked like more of those things were appearing in the field now and ...
There were more dead walking in the field — some of them were advancing on the truck, others were wandering toward the house, but a number of them were headed straight for Ben. He was still trying to put out the ground fire before it could reach the pump, but while he had it somewhat contained, he also had more than a few minor burns to show for it. He kept the gun close, knowing that he would need to provide cover for Tom and Judy when they finally got it through their heads to abandon the lost truck.
A fair distance away, Tom at last reached that very conclusion. He jammed the truck into Park and threw his door open.
"Let’s get outta here!" he yelled over his shoulder.
But when he turned around, Judy wasn’t following him. She sat on the passenger side of the seat, her hair in disarray and her eyes wild, gaping at him.
"Come on," he cried, "come on!"
She struggled, but still wasn’t moving. Before he could ask, she panted, "My jacket’s caught!"
Tom leaped back into the truck, threw himself across the seat. Her denim jacket had indeed gotten caught in the passenger door, but when he tried to open it he learned why she had not done that simple act — the fire had spread to the door, and the handle was searing hot.
No time! He grabbed the door handle again, clenching his teeth against the pain, he had to do it, there was no time, no time!
No time.
Boom!
At the house, Cooper cried out and shielded his eyes. The window rattled so hard, he thought it might burst inward and shower him with glass.
Even though Ben was outside and much closer to the explosion, he found himself unable to look away. So little gas had remained in the tank, he couldn’t believe it could erupt into such a fierce conflagration, but it had. Black smoke billowed into the sky and flames engulfed the truck cabin ...
... with Tom and Judy still inside.
With everything he had seen since Beekman’s, Ben didn’t think he could be shocked anymore tonight, if ever again. But as he gazed upon the fiery deaths of those two sweet kids, he felt numb all over.
Cooper panted, near hyperventilating as the truck burned. Their one chance, their one fucking chance! Seething in anger and frustration and close to tears, he closed the drapes and backed away from the kitchen window.
Ben took a step forward, thinking that maybe — maybe — Tom or Judy might still be alive and needed help ... but no, it was the gas station explosion all over again, and in more ways than one.
When he looked around, the dead were already losing interest in the truck and were fixating on him.
Where in the hell were they all coming from? It was as though they were spawning right out here in the field. At Beekman’s, from the gowns and uniforms, he had concluded that most of them had spread out from the county hospital. But now they appeared to come from all walks of life.
Walks of "life," huh? Good one, Ben.
He bit his tongue hard to kill the laughter that threatened to bubble up from the back of his throat. Too treacherous — if he gave in to that whim, he could easily end up as lost and helpless as Barbra, if not downright deranged.
Ben lifted the rifle, took aim, and fired at the closest one. It was again a heart-shot, and would have dropped any living man in his tracks. But the dead man just stopped, tipped over backward almost to the point of falling on his ass, then rocked forward and continued moving toward Ben.
Ben considered going for the head-shot, but the same inner debate zipped through his mind in about two seconds — he just wasn’t a sharpshooter, and didn’t want to waste ammo.
So once more, he scooped up his torch.
But though they still cringed and flinched, the dead weren’t as intimidated by his portable little flame — not after the brilliance of the burning truck. He waved the torch in a wide arc and the dead recoiled, but they wouldn’t give any ground.
Ben swallowed, his dry tongue making a clicking sound against the sandpaper that was the roof of his mouth, and stepped closer to them.
His gamble paid off. When he started actually touching them with the flames, when sparks sizzled from their clothing and singed their skin, they finally backed off just enough to let him squeeze through the front ranks.
But he was far from home-free. Everywhere he looked, from every direction, the living dead were closing in.
Holding his torch before him, Ben zigged and zagged back toward the house, relying on their timidity of the fire and his own superior dexterity to get him through. They couldn’t see in the dark any better than he could, so as he slipped deeper into the night, his torch paled in contrast and some of them lost their focus, started wandering aimlessly once more.
But there were still plenty more that were willing to make the extra effort to devour him.
Ben ran faster.
Finally, he gained enough lead and clearance to make a dash straight for the house. For the moment, none of them were near the front door, but he knew that wouldn’t last long. He needed to get his ass inside, right now!
Harry Cooper was about to step through the cellar door when he was startled — stunned, really — to hear Ben call from outside, "Let me in!" There had been so many of those things out there, how could the man have possibly made it back to the house?
Ben slammed into the front door, expecting Cooper to have opened it already. All it did was jar his shoulder as he bounced off the unyielding barrier.
"Let me in!" he yelled again. Looking behind him, he saw another wave of the dead advancing upon the house, and his torch seemed a pitiful shield. This time he hit the door with his fist. "Cooper!"
Cooper lingered in the cellar doorway, torn. He stepped further into the stairwell, then froze again. He knew the best thing to do, the right thing to do, would be to shut the door and join his family and Barbra below. Ben had been nothing but trouble, and now that Tom and Judy were gone, the food they had collected would last that much longer.
But ...
Outside, Ben shouted, "Cooper!" once more. Then the gasps and wheezing pulled his attention back to the front yard. The torch was now in danger of burning out altogether — Ben thrust forward, throwing it at the dead. They would be on him in seconds!
Cooper had found it much easier to dehumanize Barbra and Ben when they had been nothing but noisemakers from overhead, screams and shouts that meant very little to him with no face to associate with them. Now, regardless of how he felt about the arrogant prick, he knew Ben, had argued with him and worked with him, to a point.
This time, Cooper took a step out of the cellar, toward the front door. But once again, he froze with indecision. What should he do?!
Ben made the decision for him.
Hauling back, Ben kicked the door with everything he had. The door jam gave way, and as wood splintered inward ahead of the swinging door, he stumbled forward with so much momentum, he almost took a face dive right onto the rug.
The sudden noise startled Cooper into retreating back into the cellar stairwell. When he realized who it was and what had happened, he stopped short of closing the door.
But the look Ben gave him made him almost wish he had. Ben’s fierce gaze bore straight into his soul, and Cooper knew that there would be hell to pay if he didn’t retreat right now. But h
e was afraid to budge an inch — from the heat in Ben’s eyes, he considered himself lucky that Ben didn’t shoot him on the spot!
Ben indulged himself in that one-second glare at Cooper, then turned and slammed the front door shut. But the problem was, he had just broken through the door to get inside — the doorknob would no longer catch, let alone lock. Setting the rifle aside, Ben grabbed the nearby loose door they had removed for lumber and shoved it crossways against the front door.
Once he was out of Ben’s sights, Cooper found he could move again. This was his chance — while Ben was wasting time, he could close and barricade the cellar. He had warned them all along, he had warned them, but no, they wouldn’t listen to him!
All that was well and good, but if he had felt conflicted upon hearing Ben’s voice calling to him, he discovered he simply could not turn away now that Ben was inside and struggling to keep those things at bay.
He wanted to, he wanted to turn away and leave the bastard to his just punishment, but when he imagined the look in Helen’s eyes — or, God forbid, Karen’s once she got better — he ... he just couldn’t do it.
So, much to his own surprise, Harry Cooper found himself running across the room and throwing his weight against the barrier alongside Ben, bracing it with everything he had as the dead pushed from the other side.
Together, they pressed the barricade flat enough for Ben to start hammering it into place. Ben hustled back and forth, pounding the barricade on one side then the other, shoving Cooper aside as he worked, sending the smaller man rushing to and fro, holding and pushing and bracing wherever he was needed. It probably took no more than a couple of minutes, but for the two sweating, panting men, it felt more like an hour.
When they had nearly finished the job, when the door was no longer shuddering from the dead’s assault, Ben looked over at Cooper. The man was fidgeting and licking his dry lips, reluctant to meet Ben’s gaze. His eyes pleaded with Ben for understanding, for mercy. See? those beady eyes seemed to say. I helped you re-blockade the front door! We’re even now, right?
An anger — no, a rage — built within Ben like nothing he had ever before experienced. This glib, belligerent little man had caused trouble from the moment Ben had laid eyes on him, countermining and subverting at every turn. He had been willing to let Barbra fend for herself, had let Ben and then Tom do all the work on securing the house ... and then, when Ben and Tom and Judy had risked their lives to save his daughter as much as themselves, the motherfucker had been willing to leave Ben outside as one more feast for the living dead.
A small, still-rational part of Ben’s mind knew that this was pointless, that it would accomplish nothing and it certainly would not bring Tom or Judy back. But for now, that part was in recession; for now, the rage was in charge, and Ben meant to indulge it.
Dropping the hammer lest he be tempted to use it, Ben clenched his teeth and his fist — his left fist, where he wore his bulky class ring. He lashed out, catching Cooper square in the mouth. Cooper crumpled away and Ben seized him by the front of his shirt, refusing to let him fall until he had delivered an equally powerful right cross.
Cooper went down onto his hands and knees, crawling away from Ben toward the study. When he reached the doorframe, he had just managed to climb up to his feet, like a drunk getting his second wind, when Ben delivered another punch to the face. Cooper dropped again, catching and then trying to climb up onto an armchair — a nonsensical move, but then, Cooper’s thinking wasn’t very clear at the moment.
Ben decided to stop there, that the man had had enough ... so he was surprised to find himself grabbing the man by the back of his disheveled shirt, pulling him onto his feet once again, and delivering the most devastating blow yet — a roundhouse punch to Cooper’s bobbing chin.
Cooper went down hard this time, sprawling against another chair and showing no intention of getting back to his feet. Ben descended upon him once more, and wondered if his hands would continue to act on their own and rain more blows upon the helpless prick.
But no, he settled for grabbing Cooper in a harsh grip and hauling him up into the chair. Which was a good thing, because if the beating had continued, he might have killed the man.
Bending over Cooper, looming over him, he spat, "I outta drag you out there and feed you to those things!"
Ben shoved away from Cooper in disgust.
Cooper said nothing in return, offered no defense; he remained collapsed where he was, blood running from his nose and mouth, his eyes wide and unfocused and woeful. He lay there whimpering under his breath as Ben stormed out of the room, his mind a whirlwind of hateful thoughts (and self-loathing guilt) ...
Out in the field, the dead drew closer to the truck as the flames ran their course. Their moaning swelled in pitch alongside their excitement, until the night slithered and crept with a cacophony of their hellish delight.
Ben and Cooper had both seen the truck explode. Ben and Cooper both believed that Tom and Judy had died in the flames.
Ignorance, as they say, was bliss.
The truck’s gas tank had indeed been nearly empty, and in the dark night, the flames created more light than heat. The concussive force behind the eruption had knocked the young lovers into a daze, the flames stealing all the oxygen and leaving them unable to voice their screams, their agony.
Now they lay together in a stupor, third-degree burns covering their bodies, conscious thought blessedly elusive through their fog of anguish. They clung to life by the thinnest of threads ... but however frail, that thread was still intact.
Tom and Judy were still alive.
Which is what drew the dead to them.
They crawled over the truck like maggots over putrid meat, scrambling through the open driver’s door and the melted windshield. Their clawing hands sank and ripped into tender flesh, rending and ripping it to shreds while the victims trembled, incapable of reacting in any useful way.
It was an appalling way to die, but it ended Tom and Judy’s suffering.
When little remained of the young couple, the dead spread out with their ghastly bounty, many of them sinking to their knees beneath the bright moon as it broke through the clouds. Those with solid chunks of meat — a thigh, a pectoral, a heart — sat quietly and feasted. Others who had ended up with intestines and other loose matter thrashed and fought over their pith; one might have called it "playing with their food," had they not been so mindless. Arms and legs, hands and feet were treated like legs of chicken, the soft gristle torn and plucked from bones and tendons in familiar fashion.
For the time being, the dead were satisfied.
Ben turned away from the window where he had watched the dead consuming the remains of Tom and Judy. At first it had been too dark, the shadows a vague orgy of furtive movement ... but when the moon came out, he saw what was happening all too clearly.
He gagged, his guts clenching, his throat tightening. A cold, acrid sweat broke out on his forehead, across the back of his neck. He was going to lose it, he knew he was ...
Then the urge passed, though the memory of what he had just seen remained painfully fresh and threatened to lift his gorge again at a moment’s notice.
Ben lowered himself into a wooden dining chair. He sat, just sat and focused on breathing, slow and even. He gripped the rifle in both hands, using it not as a weapon but to help himself feel more grounded.
Across the room, Cooper sat nursing the wounds Ben had delivered upon him, a wet cloth held against his sore, swollen left cheek. Behind him, his wife Helen appeared at the top of the cellar stairs, her stride shaky and tenuous. Ben barely glanced at her, but he could see that she was exhausted.
She stopped in the doorway, rubbing both temples against a headache. Her gaze flickered to Harry on the chair and Barbra back on the sofa, and asked, "Isn’t it three o’clock yet ...?" She glanced back down the stairs, toward where her little girl rested, then registered that no one had answered her. She parked herself just outside the doorway and said
with more force, "There’s supposed to be another broadcast at three o’clock."
"Ten minutes ..." was Cooper’s muttered reply.
"Oh?" Barbra perked up. "Only ten more minutes? We don’t have very long to wait. We can leave." When no one commented, she continued, "Well, we better leave soon. It’s ten minutes to three."
Ben had no idea what was going on in her head at this point, but he didn’t like that all of them — himself included — seemed to be catching her lost, disjointed neurosis. They had lost Tom and Judy; they would not lose anyone else. Not if he had anything to say about it, goddamn it!
Shaking himself into motion, Ben checked the rifle’s ammunition, then dragged the box of bullets closer and began reloading. As he worked, he asked the Coopers, "Do you know anything about this area at all? I mean, is Willard the nearest town?"
Night of the Living Dead Page 15