“No,” she said. Immediately her words sent the boy’s smile into a saddened frown of utter disappointment. “We need to save the ammo, for one, and two, the noise could attract some unwanted visitors.”
Chris’s eye’s widened. “Okay, I’m done.”
“Come on, let’s go downstairs and wait.”
Sean pushed Tim inside the cold metal frame of the shopping cart. At first, Sean held on to the cracked plastic handle, but as his speed progressed down the aisle of empty, cream-colored shelves and rat-infested boxes of stale Kraft macaroni and cheese, Sean let go, sending his brother full throttle into a lone white cooler that was, fortunately for Tim’s sake, empty.
“Aw, man, why did you let go?” Tim protested as he picked himself up.
Sean laughed. “Sorry,” was all he could muster between outbursts of hysterical laughter.
“You boys want to quiet down a little,” Steve said, holding his M-4 at the ready. “You do realize we haven’t cleared this place yet, right?”
The twins stopped, stared at each other with morbid fear, and immediately jumped behind Steve as he waited to see if anything moved where it shouldn’t.
“We need to get to the back warehouse and flip on the generator. Otherwise, we’ll be doing this in the dark.”
“Okay,” the boys muttered.
“Do you remember what we came here for?”
Sean answered, “Medicine and medical supplies.”
Tim shoved his brother for answering first.
“Yeah, that’s right. Once we get the lights on—if we get the lights on. We’ll split up and search, okay?”
The boys remained silent as Steve lowered his gun and walked a bit more casually. Nothing moved. Nothing barked or moaned. Nothing screamed or jumped out from a dark shadow and tried to gnaw on their flesh. It appeared to be as safe as safe could be for the time being. They continued to follow the dark corridor along the back wall lined with empty glass coolers and random sale signs that marked down the outrageous prices of milk and meat.
Steve found the split doors that led into the warehouse. Back when the store thrived, those doors would have opened into a heavily air-conditioned space, but when Steve and the twins pushed in, they were hit with heat, humidity, and the musty smell of decayed bodies.
“Back up,” Steve whispered. “Withered.”
He lifted his rifle and peered over his optic, then slowly took steps back, forcing the twins to move. They stumbled over each other and collapsed to the floor, getting tangled up together like a human pretzel, almost causing Steve to fall backward in the process. Sean landed on Tim. Tim grunted loudly. And brothers being brothers, Tim punched Sean as hard as he could, who yelled loudly, “Stop it.”
That was when the first withered attacked from the inky darkness.
It stretched out its arms and groaned hungrily for food. Steve fired two rounds into the shadowy figure. The muzzle flash illuminated the mummified face, its flesh petrified and pulled back tightly against the skull, exposing large black teeth that protruded out of its mouth. Its eyes were wide open, the whites stained yellow and the iris full of black with no room for the color to define them anymore. The rounds penetrated the withered’s face in the space between its mouth and nose. It dropped with a heavy thud to the cement floor.
Two more approached from the left as the boys fought to gather themselves and move. They pushed off each other’s bodies, only complicating the situation. Steve held his ground and put two more rounds into each carcass as they approached.
“Any day now, boys,” Steve commanded through his clenched teeth. “We need to move.”
A fourth withered approached head on this time, knocking Steve’s rifle down as it lunged at him. He fell back, landed on top of one of the twins, who let out a loud, pained yelp that morphed into a scream of agony. Steve rolled off the boy, taking the withered with him, and shoved the barrel into its head and fired. Dust, bone fragments, and goo erupted out of the hole in its head.
Another withered had managed to crawl up to the boys and had a grip on the younger twin, Tim, as Sean tried to yank his brother back by the shirt collar. Sean fell on his butt as Tim frantically kicked at the withered.
Steve grabbed the withered by its leg, pulled back as hard as he could, then stomped repeatedly on its head. It smashed open like a rotten pumpkin. What contents spilled out were unnatural and repulsive: black filament, little chunks of petrified brain matter, bone that looked more like swamp wood than an opaque white skull. He only hoped the man who had once been wasn’t alive inside there somewhere.
Steve looked up and found Tim bent over, holding his leg with both hands. His face was worn with agony and grimaced in pain as he cried. The boy’s foot was turned a ninety-degree angle and was bleeding.
The fall, Steve thought. Dammit. I broke his ankle when I fell.
“Sean, run back to the coffee shop now,” Steve commanded. He slung his rifle and Tim over his shoulders and made a run for it.
Jody dumped several handfuls of specialty roast coffee beans into a newspaper, folded the paper over the beans, then crushed them into a fine powder by rolling a French press coffee maker over them.
Greg smelled the acrid aroma as each pod gave way and formed into semi-fresh ground coffee. The excitement was more than Greg could bear as Jody giggled like a toddler.
“Are you seriously over yonder gigglin’ like a schoolgirl?” Greg said.
“Why, yes, I am, my friend,” Jody responded jubilantly.
Greg scoffed at his friend with both amusement and confusion.
“Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting to make coffee? Not just have a cup, but make a cup. My friend, this is an apocalyptic dream come true. And you should be grateful to bear witness to such a wonder.”
“I reckon so,” Greg said as he turned back to his newspaper.
The front page read:
Big Pharm and The Fountain of Youth—Have They Gone Too Far?
Apollo Biopharmaceuticals CEO Albert C. Tomlinson announced Monday that the company has received approval from the FDA to move forward with clinical trials of their controversial, anti-aging drug dubbed “The Fountain of Youth.” The drug has shown to be successful at reversing many effects of old age such as arthritis, cataracts, and muscle loss in animal testing. Tomlinson claims there is also evidence that indicates it may even help with senility. When asked when the drug may be available, Tomlinson says, “The Youth Project has wonderful scientists working on it. Seriously, these guys are the best in the business. If it weren’t for all the hurdles we’ve jumped over to please Uncle Sam, Grammy would already be ballroom dancing again. Soon, very soon, is the answer.”
“If anyone looks silly, it’s you sitting over there reading a newspaper from, what? Oh, I don’t know, a decade and half ago? Why do you care to read about what we witnessed?”
Greg lowered the paper and observed his friend as he smiled smugly.
Jody poured the coffee grounds into the French press, then pulled a small pot of boiling water off a fire he had built in the sink using old newspaper and some weatherproof matches he had been saving. He carefully poured eight ounces of water over the grounds, then began the process of pressing. He did all of this with the biggest and most genuine smile of happiness he had ever worn, at least recently.
When he finished, he set the press down on the table and waited. It was only a matter of minutes before his freshly brewed cup of coffee would be ready.
Finally, a fragrant, rich aroma of chocolate and earth exploded in Jody’s nose as he sniffed the little bit of steam that billowed out of the ten-inch-high plastic jug. He wanted that coffee so badly, he could already taste the rich, smooth complexities of those tiny beans of happiness.
It’s time, he thought.
Jody carefully poured the coffee into a mug he had found while at Greg’s. It was sea-green with a gun metal image of the Tennessee flag engraved in it. Once he finished, he set the French press down and tried to take a
sip, but it was still too hot. The steam burned his lips, so he had to wait a minute longer. It pained him to put the mug down and wait. But what good was enjoying a hot cup of coffee if drinking it meant burning blisters into your mouth?
He waited impatiently. He tapped the fingers on his right hand rapidly on the tabletop, propping his chin on his left hand. He heaved a heavy sigh.
“Come on,” he muttered.
But all of his frustrations were quickly interrupted as Steve slammed through the front doors, carrying Tim over his shoulders.
At first, the shock of Steve busting through the coffee shop doors sent his heart racing. The coffee became nonexistent. But when he watched his coffee go flying off the table as Tim’s body slid in place of it, his heart sank with a moment of selfish pity.
Where the French press and coffee mug had sat a moment ago, Tim now lay on the table with his foot dangling off his leg like a broken tree branch. Sean cried helplessly as he leaned over his brother and watched him take unconscious breaths on the long bistro table meant for sipping coffee and typing on laptops, not holding a wounded teenager.
Steve propped his M-4 against the counter and tried to speak but was only able to gasp for air from the exertion.
It took only a second for Jody to collect the scene that presented itself to him. His days of being a combat medic kicked in. He pulled up Tim’s pant leg and looked at the swollen bulb that had become his ankle. The two bones had separated entirely from the joint, which wouldn’t be easy on the kid, but could heal up. The white skin had grown red from inflammation, and bruising had already begun. He could probably stabilize the joint with a makeshift splint, and Tim would have to deal with the pain for the next few weeks while it healed.
But the reality of the situation was that triaging the break wasn’t the issue. The problem was the chunk of meat missing in his calf.
Tim had been bitten.
8
Your Everyday Disaster
Tim had felt his body transform seconds after the bite happened. Only he hadn’t known he was bitten. He’d thought it was his bones escaping through the muscle and flesh of his leg. He’d heard the pop-snap of his insides break. He’d felt the searing pain of his nerves as they sparked to life from the sudden trauma of a two-hundred-plus-pound man in full kit collapse onto his frail, teenage body. But he hadn’t seen the withered latch onto his foot and pull its weak corpse onto his own to take a bite out of his calf. It hadn’t been until Steve rolled off his body that he’d seen the tan, wrinkled flesh and frayed, thread-like hair of the zombie and known something more had happened. But even then, it hadn’t occurred to him he had been bitten.
Lying across Steve’s shoulders like a dead dog, he had felt his body temperature spike. His heart raced and thumped at sonic speeds. The nausea was overwhelming, and he’d swallowed back vomit, only to choke on it and spit it out his nostrils across Steve’s back and down his side. It was then that he’d passed out and the nightmares had begun.
He watched his mother die. He watched as his father suffered. He witnessed the violent death of his little sister all over again. He choked on sadness. He suffered in silent agony as he relived every waking fear that had been his life up until the very moment he had been bitten.
Tim opened his eyes and found Sean, his older brother only by seconds, leaning over his body, living out pure hell. Tears poured down Sean’s face like raging waterfalls after a rainstorm. Tim wanted to reach out and console him, but couldn’t get his mind to connect with his body. His muscles wouldn’t work so much as to wiggle a finger or toe. His eyes closed again, but in the coffin of darkness, all he could hear were the muffled sounds of his friends. He held onto their voices like an anchor to reality.
When Tim opened his eyes for the last time, he reached out, grabbed his brother’s head, and pulled him in close. He’d wanted to hug him minutes ago, but now he found himself drawn in by the fragrance of his brother’s flesh. He could smell the familiar odor that had been with him since the womb. There was a time when that smell brought innocent joy to his heart and peace to his mind, but now it filled his mouth with saliva, and forced his jaw to chatter uncontrollably. He needed him. He needed to feed on him at all costs. The urge was overwhelming.
He was no longer running on conscious thought and logic. He was fueled only by the sensation to feed on that smell. The desire to hug was gone, obliterated, as if it had never existed. Feed. It wasn’t a thought. It was a chemical dependency. A synapse his brain sent continuously through him. It was what his mind told him to do, and that was that. He couldn’t feel love, sadness, or fear. He heard noises that told his brain food was close. He smelled the metallic odor of blood and needed it desperately.
He yanked down on his brother’s head, latched onto his throat with his teeth, and tore away the flesh. Like a small rubber band tied too tightly, the artery snapped and sprayed thick streams of blood that pumped at the speed of Sean’s panicked heart. The warm, metallic flavor of blood rushed through Tim’s mouth, flowed over his tongue, and drained into him.
His brother’s cries of agony were nothing more than noise.
Chris had watched Tim die and knew it. Deep down inside, he knew Tim passed away and was turning into one of those creatures. He didn’t know how to express what he was feeling to the others, so he stood by quietly and hoped Matt, Jody, or anyone, for that matter, knew what he was feeling also. But that hadn’t happened. No one seemed to notice Tim die other than himself. It was so subtle and peaceful, like he had closed his eyes to catch his breath. Then, his eyes opened as widely as his mouth had, his chest jolted up from the table, and he pulled his brother in and bit him.
Chris jerked and froze as Sean’s neck pulsed blood across the room. It didn’t seem real. He considered maybe he was stuck in some sort of nightmare and when he woke up, he would be next to his mother, and she would be rubbing his head telling him to go back to sleep. That would have been nice. But when he began to pee himself, he realized it was no dream.
Tim was eating Sean.
At first, no one moved. It had happened so fast, from the moment Steve ran through the doors with Tim over his shoulders to the moment Tim turned into a rager and sank his teeth into his brother’s neck. No one moved.
It took Sean’s scream to snap the room into motion.
Steve wrapped his arms around Sean’s torso and yanked back, releasing him from his twin brother’s death grip. Jody pushed himself back, knocking over his chair in the process, and took only a light coat of blood to his chest and neck. Greg pushed Tara out of the way as Tim screamed and clawed the air blindly to feed on another. Matt walked through the space created by Greg and Tara, pulled out a long knife with a thick blade and an elegant maple-brown handle, and stabbed it deep into Tim’s forehead. The impact of the blade penetrating flesh and bone popped grotesquely, causing Chris to quiver and resist the urge to vomit.
Tim’s cries abruptly stopped, leaving only Sean’s dying whimpers and gurgles to fill the air. And even those tapered off into faint moans.
“What the hell, Steve,” Tara cried out. “Why didn’t you tell us he was infected?”
“I didn’t know. I never saw him get bit.”
Steve looked down at Sean’s limp body dangling in his arms. The blood spray had trickled down to a small squirt every few seconds. And he no longer cried. Just stillness.
“Dammit,” Steve barked. “He’s dying.”
He adjusted Sean’s body and laid him on the blood-soaked table next to his brother. Matt pulled his knife out of Tim’s head and held it loosely in his hand.
“Steve, he’s gone,” Matt said somberly.
“I know that, goddammit.” Steve paused. “What the hell happened?”
He paced in confused circles, his hands clasped on his head. His rifle clanked off his kit as he wandered in a loop of confusion and anger.
“Son.” Greg placed a gentle but firm hand on Steve’s shoulder. Steve looked up and lowered his hands. “Son, you need to tell
us what happened. Why did you fall back?”
Steve took a deep breath and sighed as he tried to find the memory hidden by stress. “They were playing in the shopping carts, being loud. Sean pushed Tim hard, and he crashed into an empty cooler. We waited, then headed down the back of the store toward the warehouse area to find the generator. As soon as I pushed through the door—”
Tara interrupted him. “Withered!”
Steve looked up. The creatures that had taken the twins’ lives were now yards away, approaching the coffeeshop from outside.
Tara lifted her rifle, but before she could sight in, Matt ran over and placed a hand on her optic. He pushed the barrel of the gun down.
“Don’t shoot. We can hold out in here. If we’re lucky, they won’t be able to break the glass. It’s thick and should hold.”
She nodded and stepped back.
“Everybody, lay down. Don’t move, don’t make any fucking noise at all,” Matt commanded.
“What about Sean?” Steve asked. “He’s going to turn.”
Matt looked around as if trying to find a missing piece to a puzzle. The horde was close now, too close. He had to think, and think fast. He focused on Sean. What to do? What to do? Then, it came to him.
“Steve, help me move his body to the door. Tim’s, too. If the horde smells their infection, we might be able to keep them away.”
Steve didn’t say a word. He took two massive strides, grabbed Tim behind the knees as Jody latched on under the boy’s armpits, and moved his body to the door. They placed him gently against the glass. He looked peaceful. If his body hadn’t been covered in blood and a milky blue color, he would have looked like a normal kid napping. Matt and Greg did the same with Sean’s body. Then everyone got low and quiet.
The hum and groan of the withered horde reverberated off the dust-covered walls of the coffee shop. They slammed into the doors and windows, peering through them in search of prey. The faint smell of everyone inside was hidden behind the infected blood. Dried hands covered in leathered flesh banged and groped at their own reflections. They snarled, their jaws snapping. Teeth cracked and fell from their dry, rotted gums before they finally moved on.
A Thousand Miles to Nowhere Page 8