“No, no, no!”
I pulled her away from the door and held her back against my chest. The chances of another door, even one that was locked, seemed slim.
“Guys, we have no choice. We gotta break in.”
I dropped the saw and waved my bat in Neal’s face to make my point.
“I’m telling you---” Neal started
“What else can we do ? We’ll board ‘em up or something once we’re inside.”
Gabby groaned. Morgan had wrapped the bandage more tightly around the place I’d cut. Gabby’s blood had turned both shirts from gray and blue to a horrible red.
She was fading fast. And it wasn’t because of the zombies. It was because of me. Her only chance was to get inside. It was a house, so there had to be a bathroom and a medicine cabinet and like gauze and iodine or whatever that might help her.
I lifted the bat, ready to swing.
“Kid, don’t !”
I didn’t listen to Neal and smashed one of the windows. Glass went everywhere. I hit the window again and pulled my sleeve down over my hand so I could clear the rest of the glass away. We didn’t need two bleeding hands to deal with. When the hole looked big enough, I handed my bat to Neal and started to climb through. My knees hit the faucets of the kitchen sink. I was trying to keep my balance as I saw the edge of the counter. I kept pushing myself forward, and my bad knee gave out. I tried to reach for something, but there was only air, and I tumbled over the sink to the kitchen floor. My head knocked into the cabinet.
“Oww!”
“Dude? You okay?”
I rubbed the back of my head and looked up to see Tom standing at the broken window.
“Yeah. Hold up.”
I stumbled to my feet and went to the door. I unlocked it quickly and saw the rest of them waiting. I was dizzy as I waved them all inside.
Morgan helped Gabby walk through the kitchen. Neal locked the door behind us. I moved back to the window. I couldn’t see the zombies. But I still heard them coming. Neal had had a point. We were only so safe after what I had done to the window.
Tom took the saw to the kitchen table.
“That’s good,” Neal said. “Smart.”
Subtle. The compliment for Tom was also meant as an insult for me.
But at least we were inside, right?
“We need to find nails. And a hammer,” Neal said. He started looking through the drawers. Forks and knives and measuring cups spilled onto the floor.
“Here,” he said when he found two packs of nails. He was still searching for a hammer when Morgan rushed back into the room and grabbed Lana’s arm.
“You’re pre-med, right?”
Lana nodded.
“Then help me. Please. I don’t know what---”
“What’s happening to her?” I asked.
Morgan glared at me with enraged eyes.
“She’s bleeding to death!”
“That’s what happens when a hand is severed from a body,” Neal said as he continued to look for a hammer. I was too concerned to glare down at him and started from the kitchen to see for myself just what I had done. Lana pressed her palm to my chest. She seemed to have softened some since we left the porch, but she obviously didn’t want me in the way.
“I got this,” she said, and she left with Morgan.
“Eureka!”
Neal had finally found a hammer.
“Dude, a little help?”
I snapped out it and helped Tom hoist the severed table to the broken window frame. We almost had it steady when a something flew into the room. We all jumped back.
It was Gabby’s hand.
“What the---?”
Before I could answer Tom’s question, another hand, lifeless but still moving, appeared just above the sink. It was followed by a gray face with milky blue eyes. I wasn’t sure if it was a guy or a girl, young or old. I just knew it wasn’t human and that its skin had melted and still dripped like candlewax. The zombie’s yellow nails dripped with pus and something green that I guessed used to be blood. The leaking fingers grabbed my wrist.
“Get it off me! Get it off---“
Neal swung the hammer and brought it crashing down on the zombie’s hand. It exploded in my face. I was covered in green slime, and I tried to wipe it away. The zombie let out a shrill scream and fell back at the blow.
“Sam! You okay?”
I was shaking, but I nodded at Tom.
“Then help !” Neal ordered.
I pressed the board into the wall again, and Neal furiously hammered. He only had a few nails in place when the force of something from the outside began to push against the board.
“Keep it balanced!” Neal said. He stuffed several nails between his lips and started sliding them out one by one. He didn’t seem so concerned about pounding them completely into place. He just wanted them pressed to the point where they wouldn’t fall into the sink. He repeated this same thing with another and another and another. The board continued to rock, but Neal had made progress. And now he needed help.
“Tom? Can you hold all of it?” I asked.
He nodded and stretched his arm across the entire board. I swiped a bunch of nails from Neal’s mouth. It surprised him, and he almost swallowed one whole before coughing it into the sink. Then all of the nails fell in a faint scream of metal on stainless steel. Neal kept choking as I recovered my bat and used it like a hammer to bang more and more of the nails through the board. Neal got the hammer and went back to work. Every time we thought we had it, another part of the board gave and everything outside slipped into the kitchen.
“How many of them are there?” Tom asked.
“Too many,” I said.
I saw a hand even greener and slimier than the one Neal had crushed enter the room. It got hold of Tom’s shirt and started to tug. I forgot the nails and started to hit it with my bat. The hand drew back before I could destroy it, but I bought enough time to nail the place where it had tried to enter. Finally, after what seemed like days, we had the board secure enough. The zombies continued to hit and scratch at our little bit of impromptu carpentry. But they weren’t getting in.
Not that way at least.
The three of us breathed hard as the board pulsed. Neal dropped the hammer in the sink and clapped his arms around both of our shoulders.
“Nice… job… boys.”
We were only relieved for only a second when we heard a squeaking against a window in another room. Neal looked from me to Tom and back, and he swallowed as he retrieved the hammer and another bunch of nails. He ran from the kitchen to what had to be the living room. There was a great bay window. On any other day there’d be a view of the trees and a front lawn. If there had been kids in the house, they’d be playing there, riding bikes or something. But today there was only a horde of disfigured faces pawing at the glass. Some of their hands tried to lift the window open. Others just banged away, but it was like no one had the power or the understanding to break through the glass.
Yet.
Neal rushed back into the kitchen. He returned with the two scary looking knives. He handed one to me and one to Tom.
“Get cutting!”
We destroyed every piece of furniture that we could find. The coffee table, the backs of chairs, legs of the couch. If this ever ended and the homeowners returned, we’d have a lot to answer for. Eventually Neal stopped cutting and went to work hammering more and more nails into place. The noise never stopped mixing with the zombies’ moans. I thought I’d go crazy from the sound, so I left the room in search of more furniture. I found a home office and went to work on a desk.
When I had it in several pieces, I carried the wood back into the living room. I had been gone long enough for Morgan to reappear. She was still wearing just her bra and jeans and a ton of Gabby’s blood. I started to approach her to ask about Gabby when I noticed that the window just behind her was slightly open. I saw it start to rise and as it did, another zombie moved with the glass. This zombie was
bigger than any of the others I’d previously seen, and when it opened its mouth, pus and slime dribbled onto the hardwood floor. Morgan didn’t see what was right behind her.
But I did.
“Morgan !”
She shot her eyes in my direction. She was either too terrified or too confused to speak. I dropped the wood and started to lunge for her. The zombie beat me to the punch and grabbed her bare arms.
“No ! Let me go !”
The zombie had Morgan in midair as she desperately kicked. I was trying to pull her out of the monster’s grasp when my bad leg gave out. I was on the floor trying to grab her ankle. I nearly had it when Morgan seemed to fly away from my reach. I turned my head to see Neal pulling her to the fireplace. Morgan was hysterical as Neal tore off his jacket and wrapped it around her quivering shoulders.
“It’s okay. I got you. It’s okay.”
Morgan didn’t seem to hear him. But I heard the zombie slithering into the room. I grabbed one of the busted boards from the desk and started to bat him off. It took so many tries that I lost count, but one of my blows him the back of his head. He grabbed it with his dirty hand and hissed through what used to be his teeth, which were now completely brown. Neal collected the other pieces of desk that I’d shattered and began boarding up the window.
“Hold it!” he said.
I place the desk’s surface and what used to be the drawers in what was no kind of a pattern. A few times the zombie’s fat hand poked back into the house. I hit it with the board again, and it fell away. When it got too close to Neal, he drove one of the nails through its meaty palm. It let out a cry that shook the entire house. Over my shoulder, I saw Morgan shaking just as much. We finally had the barrier in place.
“You okay, Kid?” Neal asked me.
I nodded and he went back to Morgan. The composure she’d suddenly shown when I’d maimed Gabby was replaced by the blubbering terror that, at least since I had known her, seemed more her speed.
“Morgan. Morgan, calm down.”
“We shouldn’t have left. We shouldn’t---”
“Listen to me.”
“They’re gonna eat us. I don’t… I just wanna go home.”
“Morgan !”
He roughly grabbed her by the shoulders. I was totally prepared for him to hit her again, but he pulled her close and ran his hands across her back.
“I know. Can I… can I tell you a secret?”
Morgan nodded through her tears. Neal pressed his forehead to hers.
“Me, too,” he whispered.
He patted her cheek and gave her a quick hug. Morgan cried against his shoulder. He held her for a few seconds then helped her to her feet. When he saw me standing, he handed Morgan over to me.
“Get her out of here. See what’s going on with the others. Tom and I will get to work upstairs.”
I started to lead Morgan from the room, but she clung to Neal’s hand.
“It’s okay,” Neal said. “Go on.”
He looked me in the eye.
“And don’t cut anything off of her,” he said with a smile and a sniff.
I was past the point of getting mad.
Neal and Tom made their way upstairs. Morgan felt limp against my side, but she was able to lead me to a closed door that she opened on a steep staircase. We descended down to a dimly lit basement.
Gabby was on a pull out couch, sweating and groaning under a patchwork quilt. Lana knelt at her side, and I saw that she had made a bandage so big that it was almost as big as Gabby’s head. She was in bad shape.
But she was still human.
Lana heard our footsteps moving forward and got up. She had ditched the pink hoodie. It was also part of the bandage, and she was wearing only a green tank. Her hair was pulled back, and I was glad when she smiled at me.
“You guys are making a lot of noise up there,” she said.
“Couldn’t be helped. Gabby? How is she?”
Lana sighed.
“She’s alive. I think the bleeding’s stopped. But she’s lost a lot. And there’s every chance that she’ll get an infection. And then…”
Lana didn’t finish her thought, but I already knew where her mind was headed. She could still die. And there was every chance that her eyes would pop open a few seconds later and we’d all be on her menu. Gabby had said that she was super hungry.
I approached the bed and stared down at her. I really hadn’t wanted to hurt her. I was just trying to help. If she woke up… when she woke up, I’d find a way to make her understand that.
We sat in silence until there was the sound of the door opening again. I was on edge until I saw Tom appear followed by Neal. They were sweating and filthy. Morgan leapt up and took Neal’s hand.
“Are you… oww!”
She flinched as she inspected his hand more closely.
“Splinters,” Neal said. “Work-related hazard.”
“But you guys okay?” Lana asked. “I mean other than that.
Tom and Neal looked at each other and slowly nodded.
“Yeah. Other than that everything’s perfect.”
Neal’s attempt at a joke fell flatter than a pancake.
I noticed that they were each dragging a garbage bag behind them. Neal dumped his contents out first. Dish soap, laundry detergent, enough hairspray and shampoo to tell me that any kids who had lived in this house had to be girls. If they were still alive that was.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
Neal sank to the bottom step in total exhaustion.
“I thought… I grabbed anything that we might be able to use as a weapon.”
There was no evidence that Mr. Clean would be able to defeat the zombies. But I had to give Neal credit for thinking outside of the box.
“Good call, Prof.”
Gabby had called him that. I wanted her back with us, really back with us, somehow.
Neal rubbed his face with his hand. He forgot the splinters and winced when his hand touched his cheek.
“Here,” Morgan said.
She helped him up and settled him in one of the chairs. She and Lana had found a sewing kit while we redecorated the upstairs, and she pulled out a needle and started to pick the bits of wood from his hand.
“I’ll try not to hurt you,” she said.
“I’d appreciate that,” he said with a smile.
Was it weird that I thought they were kind of cute together? She obviously had some kind of mood swinging thing going, and he could be her father. But it was like every horror/action/disaster movie I’d ever seen. The last people who should get together always hooked up in a crisis.
I looked at Lana. Way out of my league. Sawing Gabby’s hand off had probably hurt my chances as much as I’d hurt Gabby.
I wanted to get her back on my side.
“What about you?” Lana asked Tom. “Let’s see your sack of presents, Santa.”
Tom revealed most of the cutlery from the kitchen along with my bat and the hammer and the saw. I almost wished that he hadn’t brought it. We’d probably need it, but it was a reminder of what I’d done.
But no worse than Gabby’s hand.
I nearly threw up when I saw it.
“Why would you bring that down here ?” I asked as I choked on bile.
Tom dangled Gabby’s hand by the pinky finger in Lana’s face. It was stiff and already starting to stink.
“I… I don’t know. Like maybe you can reattach it or something.”
Even I knew that it would have had to have been on ice from almost like the second I chopped it off to make that possible.
Lana burst out laughing.
“Oh sure. Hey, Morgan! When you’re finished over there, just thread me a needle and I’ll sew it right back on.”
Tom’s face went red, and he dropped the hand at Lana’s feet.
“I was just trying to help.”
Lana cracked her knuckles.
“I know. You tried. But I have something better.”
She s
kipped past the bed and quickly reappeared with a shotgun in her hand. Tom and I ducked as she aimed it in our direction.
“Chill, guys. My dad taught me everything about firearms.”
She swung it over her shoulder. Lana obviously knew what she was doing. I smiled as I thought that the zombies had better watch out.
“Got any food?” she asked Tom.
He sadly shook his head.
“What there was is spoiled.”
That made sense. It had been days since the zombies hit, and stuff like milk and meat only stayed good for so long and…
“Wait!” I said. “Like no cereal or soup?”
“Negative,” Neal said as Morgan continued to work on his hand.
“But how can that be?”
What kind of a family had lived here? Did they buy everything fresh each and every day to avoid preservatives? Or had they basically starved their kids to keep them in line?
“What can I say?” Neal said. “Someone probably beat us to the punch?”
I kicked a can hairspray.
“Door was locked, genius. How did they get in?”
Neal wasn’t so quick to answer.
“Well played, Kid. Then I guess I have absolutely no idea.”
I hated myself more and more. I was the one who’d suggested out field trip. I’d probably killed Gabby. And now we were going to waste away with hunger to death in a stranger’s house.
Gabby moaned again, and all of our eyes were on her. I walked to the bed and took her cartoon-sized bandage in my hands.
“This… this is all my fault,” I finally said. “I’m really sorry.”
I waited for one of them, any of them, to reassure me that I wasn’t to blame. At least Tom would have my back, and I thought it was his hand that finally fell on my shoulder.
When I turned my head, I saw Lana, and I smiled.
“It kind of is, Sam,” she stated plainly.
So much for a full pardon.
“But I guess we had to try.”
I’d take that.
Morgan finished with Neal’s hand and clumsily wrapped it in gauze. She helped him to the foot of the bed where Tom already stood. Gabby’s breathing didn’t seem as shallow as it had been before. But she still wasn’t awake.
Zombie University (The Complete Series): How I Survived the Zombie Apocalypse Page 5