The longest and loudest wail came from him a couple hours later, when an even more fundamental deficiency tore at what was left of his mind and soul. He realized shortly before dawn that he could not name or understand his feelings for her. Seeing her with his mind’s eye was a pleasant experience: it was not fear or pain or anger, for example—feelings of which he seemed to have retained a better, fuller conception. It was not a need or hunger, exactly, even though he intensely wanted to see and hear the girl again. But his wanting her was not the same as the physical thirst and hunger that wrenched his insides from his throat to his abdomen and twisted them into a knot of burning pain and grasping desire. If anything, thinking of her made him forget about his broken, torn body. It made him forget himself entirely and think only of her, and what she might need or feel or want.
It seemed all the more imperative to know what such a self-annihilating feeling might be called, and what might be expected of one who felt such a thing so intensely. As any understanding of this feeling seemed completely beyond the grasp of his damaged mind, he loosed a cry to the uncaring stars as long and piercing as any sent forth from a living man as he died, forsaken and alone. The fact that he was already dead only seemed to increase his loneliness and separation from anyone or anything that might ease his pain.
As the orange orb of the sun pushed up above the tops of the cool forest around him, the light soothed him somewhat, and he could let the feelings and thoughts of the girl occupy him, rather than hurt him. He would simply have to go on with them as his mental landscape. Looking at the stiffened female body across his lap, the smears of his blood and hers on the pavement around him, he realized these did not frighten or hurt him; and if they did not, then he would ignore the pain of his thoughts, perhaps even let their beauty distract him from the ugliness and destruction all around.
He laid the woman gently on the ground and folded her hands across her chest. Smoothing her beautiful hair one last time, he pulled himself up to his full height and shuffled away from the body. He had no plan, but something in the words on the sign—WELCOME TO LOUISIANA—made him think of her, the girl in his mind.
His shoes crunched on broken glass. He didn’t like the sound.
Wayne watched from the darkness at the foot of the stairs. His flashlight hung from his belt. His right hand rested on his holstered gun.
The skylights were just useless blue rectangles now. All the lower-level windows were long-since boarded up. You couldn’t see the dead amassing outside, but you could hear them, shuffling and grunting in the primeval twilight. Occasionally they banged on the aluminum walls and it echoed through the building to sound like a stage storm, making it hard to hear the living as they scuttled in between points of artificial light. Wayne held his watch to his face and pressed the light button. The sun would be down in half an hour. Five minutes and they were out of here, ready or not. Where the hell was Ian?
“Keep your voices down,” Seth said, hissing, trying to rally the troops and failing miserably. Several men clustered around him, voices raised in the darkness, their wan faces washed in the cold light cast by various battery-powered fluorescent lanterns. Outside, the dead moaned.
“Listen, listen,” Seth said, and someone shouted him down. They needed to get out of here, and now.
“No,” someone else said. It may have been Hank, but Wayne wasn’t really sure.
“How did they find us? How did so many…”
“…gotta get to the trucks and…”
“…to shut up. They can hear…”
“…already know we’re in here…”
“…how many are there…”
Gunshots from above brought silence, then the hollow thump of the aluminum roof sheets shifting beneath the weight of the gunmen.
“If you’d just listen for a minute,” Seth said, no longer bothering to keep his voice down. “I was trying to—” Another shot interrupted him. He raised his voice: “Steve and Brian are on the roof. We’re safe here. That’s why we—”
Static, and then a voice: “Seth. It’s Brian. Over.”
Motioning for those around him to stay silent, Seth plucked the walkie-talkie from his hip and held it to his face. “Talk to me. Over.”
“There’s gotta be fifty or sixty out here right now. Over.”
“We can handle that.”
A few seconds of silence. Wayne looked at his watch again. He could hear one of the kids upstairs, crying. Somewhere, a walking corpse pounded on the side of the warehouse with what sounded like a pipe. More gunshots.
“Brian? Over.”
“Yeah, we can, but we’re making a hell of a lot of noise. They might just keep coming. You know how—”
The shouts from those around Seth drowned out the rest. The large group splintered into smaller groups, the familiar cliques coming together at last.
“…it’s Wayne’s fault…”
“…finish the job!”
“…followed his trail…”
“…that’s not how it works. They’re not that smart…”
“…led them right to us…”
“…where is he…”
Crouching in the darkness, Wayne pulled his gun, killed the safety. Almost. Almost.
Seth’s small group pulled together, shouted for everyone to listen, said that they had to work together, that they’d survive if they could just—
“The trucks,” one of Zach’s pals said, his own group advancing on Seth’s. Everywhere, people scurried, vanishing into the offices that served as their living quarters. Above, the gunfire continued. Outside, the dead howled and pressed in. “Give us the keys. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”
“I’m not giving you the keys, Tevin. Just take a minute and think about what you’re—”
Someone shot Seth, and then the air was buzzing with lead.
Wayne dropped low and let the whole thing play itself out. A second of silence, followed by the cries of the wounded. On the roof, the men continued to fire their guns. The dead hammered the building. Someone ran by, their flashlight beam bobbing.
Wayne leapt to his feet and took the stairs two at a time.
“Here they are,” someone said. Wayne heard keys jingling, and then he was in the classroom. He closed the door behind him.
Sue held the small black boy to her chest. He pressed his face to her neck, weeping. Some of the kids were standing, tears in their eyes. Others still sat amid their sheets and pillows, stuffed animals held to their chests. Patty sat at the back of the class, just out of the glow cast by Sue’s lantern. She held two children close to her.
“What’s happening?” Barely holding it together. “Who’s shooting?”
“Some guys are on the roof picking them—”
“No. Someone in the warehouse fired a gun.”
“Seth. Someone—”
“Seth shot somebody?”
“No. Somebody shot Seth. We have to—”
“Oh, God. Is he—”
“Are you ready? Wayne said.
“Now?” Sue asked, looking around, jittery. “Wait, where’s Morgan?”
“Bathroom,” Patty said.
“Jesus.” Sue bit her lip and stood. “Kids, get up, we’re going.”
“Not you, hearts,” Patty said to the kids in the back, and closed her eyes.
Leticia, Greg, and Shawn gathered by Wayne’s side. Sue looked around. “Where’s Sarah? Sarah?”
“She’s staying with me,” Patty said, pulling one of the shadows closer, her voice slurred.
Wayne said, “We can come back. You can fit. We all can fit. We can—”
“Goddamn it.” Sue made fists at Patty and screamed, “You idiot!”
“You’re going on foot?” Patty said.
“The Jeep is just four blocks away,” Wayne answered. “We can—”
“You told Seth that you left it behind,” Patty said. “You’re going to get them killed.”
“Do you have your gun?” Wayne asked, staring at P
atty’s shadowed form.
“I have three.”
“Okay. Let’s move.” More gunshots. Shouting from downstairs. The drone of the gathering dead. The kids wailed. They closed Patty in the back room and stopped in the hall to the stairs.
Wayne looked at Sue and whispered, “I didn’t know you wanted that one.”
“He won’t let go of me,” she sighed. “I don’t know where…he couldn’t tell me where his shoes were, I just have to fucking carry him.”
“We can make it.” Wayne said, fighting back the urge to yell and curse. “We just need to be fast. Just—wait…”
“What is it?” Sue asked.
“I think I heard the motor pool loading door rolling up.”
“Damn it. They’re gonna get in.”
An eruption of gunfire. Sue switched the small boy—Devon, Wayne remembered—to her left arm and pulled her gun. She nodded.
Wayne pulled Leticia, the smallest of the three standing around them, onto his right hip. She wrapped her arms around his neck. “Now hold on tight, okay?”
“Don’t let them get me.”
“Okay,” Wayne said, sucking in a deep breath. “Sue, behind me. You cover our right. I have the left. Get them between us.”
Sue nudged the two crying boys between them. Wayne winced. There were seven or eight in all, but damn it, they were so small.
“Hold onto my belt,” he told Shawn. “Now.” He looked at Sue. “Just like we planned. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He opened the door and led them out. The vast expanse of the warehouse was lost to darkness. Their flashlight beams seemed to die on black air.
A row of offices separated one warehouse from the other. The dead may have been packed shoulder to shoulder in the motor pool, but there were none to be seen on this side of the facility.
They took the stairs slowly. Somewhere, voices raised in anger. More popping gunshots from outside. Heavy footsteps on the roof.
At the bottom of the stairs, Wayne stopped. The kid’s head bumped into his back. Feet shuffled somewhere nearby. Ian stepped from the darkness and sank his teeth into the soft flesh of Leticia’s shoulder. She screamed.
Wayne’s gun thundered. Ian dropped. Sue and the kids screamed, retreating, falling over one another. She opened fire, shooting at nothing. Leticia’s hot blood doused Wayne’s hand. Her grip on his neck tightened. She screamed and screamed, and then there were more of them shambling through the darkness toward them.
Wayne screamed, “Go back!” and trailed Sue and the kids to the top of the stairs. “I’ll take care of these. I’ll get the Jeep. Wait in here.” He pried the screaming and wounded child from his neck and passed her to Sue.
“Take care of her,” he said, and with the click of the door shutting, was gone. At the bottom of the stairs, two more dead things bumped into one another. Trace and Mark, killed in the shootout over the keys. He took them down and moved toward the loading door, his flashlight beam passing over Seth’s body. In the direction of the motor pool, someone yelled. An engine revved.
There would only be a few of them milling around outside—most of them would have flocked toward the motor pool loading door, some forty feet to his right. He could get through with ease. Probably.
Holstering his gun and still gripping the flashlight, he grabbed the chain with both hands, hoisted the massive door some five feet from the ground, and dashed into the night. Cold hands groped for him, and he stumbled over a fallen corpse—they were everywhere, thanks to the snipers, now long since gone. The walking ones closed in, grunting and eager. He rolled, kicking and thrashing and fumbling for his gun.
“Fuck.” His holster was empty. One of them threw itself onto him. His chin hit the concrete. Blood flowed.
Rolling from beneath its thrashing dead weight, he scrambled to his feet and ran into Zach. The dead man gasped, its breath rank.
Wayne jerked back, pulled the Doctor from the holster on Zach’s right hip, and blew the thing’s head into pulp.
A pickup truck burst from within the motor pool, tires screeching and bouncing over the parking lot dividers. Screaming and flailing, several people flew from the truck-bed and slammed against the concrete.
Wayne ran. The further he got from the warehouse, the less activity he found. Within five minutes he found himself sliding behind the wheel of the Jeep, panting. Two minutes later, the headlights passed across the nightmare taking place outside of the warehouse.
Sue walked toward him, clutching Devon to her chest, her gun held high. There was no sign of Shawn or Greg, save the glistening red tangle over which the things fought just inside the loading door. Its ragged jaw twitching and useless, Ted’s corpse dragged its baseball bat through the blood pooled around the feast. On the roof, someone waved and yelled for help.
Wayne brought the Jeep to a halt.
“Are either of you bit?”
Sue shook her head.
“Good. Get in.”
She did.
They drove away.
He walked for days, thinking of the girl and of her hair, though not entirely sure which hair or which girl. Sometimes he wondered where she was, what had happened to her or if the signs around him had anything to do with her. NEW ORLEANS 65, one of them said, but that wasn’t quite right. Almost right, maybe, but not quite. It was and it wasn’t.
His wandering carried him from the highway and into a town. HAMMOND, the sign said, and that meant something to him, or had. The town was shattered and wrecked and broken, like the stumbling forms who were so like him and not at all like him.
One storefront was more thoroughly destroyed than the others he had seen. The front doors were lying on the ground, ripped from their frames. He looked past them and saw a small machine, about the size of a man, lying further from the store, as though it had somehow been yanked through the doors, tearing them out along with it. The small machine had three letters across the top—“ATM.” He didn’t recall what it was used for, but it looked sad lying there.
He looked back to the devastated store. To the left of the entrance, a dead woman stood raking her head back and forth across the wall. Little pieces of her face clung to the bricks. As he stepped into the store, she pulled her forehead away from the smeared rainbow of filth to watch with listless eyes as he passed. Because so much damage had been done to the front of the store, it wasn’t as dark inside as the others. Boxes and trash were everywhere. The floor was slick with dirty water. The broken doors let the rain in, and this reminded him of something else, something that came to him only in images: the interior of the place he shared with the girl sodden and ruined, black stuff growing on the walls. He moaned once, and a dead boy sitting in the middle of the candy aisle moaned in return. He peeled the crinkly and shiny paper away from something colorful. Dropping the paper, he placed the colorful thing into his mouth, retched, and spat.
He made his way slowly to the back, where there were hundreds of little plastic bottles all over the floor; a few were also on metal shelves. He picked one up. It rattled.
Unlike his random thoughts in the night, one now came to him with some logical connection, though it was as unbidden and unpredictable as any of the others. He remembered the girl needed what was inside these little bottles. He remembered opening them for her and very carefully counting out two of the little white disks into her palm. He fumbled with one bottle now, but there was no chance of him opening it. He raised it up to look at the label, but the print was too small for him to read. When he noticed this problem, he instinctively reached for his shirt pocket: he remembered there was always something in that pocket that would help him read things that were too small, though he couldn’t remember what the device was called or what it looked like. But his pocket was now empty.
He began going through all the bottles, arranging many of them on a counter there in the back of the store. He couldn’t read any of the labels, but he tried different ways of arranging the bottles—from biggest to smallest, or in an u
ndulating “wave” of descending and then ascending sizes, or separating the round bottles from those with squared corners. Then came combinations of the various organizational methods he’d tried. He was very careful and spent most of the day on this project. He didn’t know why he did this, or what exactly guided his hand, but he knew when he had the bottles arranged in the “right” way, the way that formed the perfect pattern on the counter. He stepped back to admire it. Then he stepped forward and counted the seventh bottle and removed it. Stepping back, the pattern still looked “right.” Counting another seven, he removed a bottle, and still the pattern looked to him unmarred by this removal. He repeated this process five more times, and, when he was satisfied the remaining pattern was still the correct one, he looked at the seven bottles he had chosen. He nodded. These too were correct, he thought, and put them in the hole in his stomach, next to the metal band he had taken from the woman. He walked from the store and continued down the street, feeling somewhat more full and satisfied than before.
Eventually he worked his way back to another highway. I-10, the signs said. NEW ORLEANS 50. His mind buzzed and he walked and walked. The sun sank and rose, and he walked and sometimes he sat down and closed his eyes or pulled the round thing out of his stomach and held it. When the sun got too hot on his skin, he sought peace in the shade of the forest or beneath one of the large wheeled things or sometimes even inside one of the smaller ones.
He walked and walked, and sometimes those like him walked with him, side by side, as if he had someplace to go and they wanted to be there with him. Other times they ignored him, busy with their own broken journeys.
Once he came across a dead man being pursued by four others. The man crawled and gasped and tried to stand, but the four grunted and pushed and would not let him rise, battering him with loose fists and rocks, bashing away his nose and shattering his teeth. He moved toward them, wondering in some way if he could help the man, but the others pushed him away and lashed at him with sticks. One of them tried to take the things in his stomach. He slapped them back and, as they turned their attention to the pitiful shape writhing on the ground, crept away.
The Living Dead 2 Page 59