“Sir. My name is Private Lightfoot, and I regret to inform you that you’ll need to leave your house. Sir.”
“Saywhatthefuck?”
“Sir. A terrible gas leak has forced us to evacuate the neighborhood. This paper explains it all.” The guy handed him a sheet of paper. Les scanned it, but his eyes fell on just one particular section: the part that said he would need to seal his house and get out of the neighborhood. The blocks of military script were followed by several apologies. Well, as his daddy used to say, apologies were for assholes who couldn’t think of anything better to say.
“This’s some kind of joke, right? I can’t just leave my damn house. Where the hell am I supposed to go?”
“No, sir. It’s real. It’s signed by the mayor right there.” He pointed at a sprawling signature that had the Washington state seal over it. “Tomorrow morning, someone will be by with more information. This’s just a courtesy visit, sir, so you can get ready. Pack up the essentials, since it’s just for a day or two. You’ll be notified when it is safe to come back. Just fill out the little form on the bottom, and be sure to include a phone number where you can be reached. You’ll hear from the National Guard when it is safe.”
“Get ready to leave? Yeah, that shit ain’t happening.” Les turned away. He was going to let this joker eat a big face full of wooden door. Leave? He wasn’t going any goddamn where. In the morning, he would call his lawyer and find out if they could really make him leave. Jerry would have all the answers.
“Sorry. Sir. It’s not really a request. There will be a state of emergency declared, and we can’t allow anyone to stay. I understand how you feel.” Then the guy snapped to attention and turned to leave.
“You do? Oh that’s a relief.” Lester looked around. “Hey, do you smell that?”
“Smell what?” The soldier sniffed at the air. His nostrils actually twitched.
“Not gas. That’s what.”
“Oh that. Trust me, sir. It’s there, but you wouldn’t ever know. By tomorrow, it’ll be worse, and that’s when it will get very dangerous to anyone who stays here. Very dangerous.”
“So if I stay, I might die?” Lester smirked.
“Very likely. Very likely, sir.”
This time, Les paid attention. He listened with his eyes, ears and brain. The guy was genuinely scared of something. It was in his eyes. The soldier looked behind him, snapped his head right around like he was waiting for some kind of order. When he looked back at Les, he lowered his voice.
“I know it sucks, but trust me, man, you do not want to be here tomorrow.” Then Private Lightfoot snapped off a salute, spun on his heel and marched down the stairs like he was headed to an inspection. Back stiff and shoulders squared.
“Well okey-fucking-dokey, then.” And offered a salute with his middle finger.
He slapped his hand to his side and wondered why he had done that. The guy was just doing his job. It wasn’t like Lester had anything against the guy. Hell, in his shoes, he would probably hate his life.
Johnny Lee
The man in tattered green-and-orange cargo pants stood in front of the fence and screamed at the top of his lungs. His shirt was new about a decade ago. It might have been a sweatshirt at one time, but now it was missing both sleeves, and the pouch that made up the front was torn and hanging from his stomach like a flap. The logo on the front was from the long-defunct XFL league. The team name was obscured by dirt and a yellow stain that looked like piss.
He had a shaved head and a white beard that looked like a Brillo pad after a hard day of work scrubbing pots at the local diner. The skin under his eyes hung like a ball sack, and when he rubbed it, a yellow mucus that smelled like dirty feet coated his forefinger.
Johnny Lee LeBeau, ex-Marine, ex-husband, ex-father and ex-member of society, yelled curses, and when he ran out of his formidable collection of words, he resorted to babbling at high volume. The creatures on the other side of the fence moaned at him. Some tried to climb the chain-link barrier, but a fresh batch of razor wire along the top sent them falling back, hands slick with blood.
It was just after dawn, and Johnny was lonely. In a way, he missed Sticks, Cid, Blackjack, and Crazy Kelly. Not a bad crew to run with; he’d been around worse. Not a lot of love on the streets, but they had a pact of sorts, watched out for each other, provided there was a golden nugget. A sip, nip, toke or shared smoke. What came around went right back around. Sure, you could make it on your own, but why take the chance? There was safety in numbers and an occasional back against your own to get through a cold night.
They didn’t have the slightest inkling that Johnny Lee LeBeau once spent an entire month up to his neck in swamp and blood. Stank-ass and malaria. Bugs and the worst case of crotch rot a man should never have to experience.
But he was old now, and the years had not been kind. Back then, he was somebody, and he was from somewhere. That was before his platoon got blown to hell and back. He and a white guy by the name of Eddie Stacks were stuck in the shit. The piss-pile, dog-rot hellhole known as Nam.
“They gimme a gun, I shoot all ya’ll.” He cackled through what was left of his teeth. Had a bad run with meth; that seemed to go with the territory. But he was clean now, clean of that shit at least. If it wasn’t clean and green and from Mother Earth, he didn’t indulge.
Johnny stopped yelling for a moment, took out a pouch of Tops tobacco from his pocket and slipped a rolling paper from a pack. The thin material snapped in the breeze, but he bunched up one end and poured a healthy row of tobacco in and then scrunched the top down tight. He could practically smell the acrid smoke. Could already taste it. If he had a joint, he’d be smoking that instead.
He rolled the smoke one handed while he stared. Just before he lifted the white paper to touch his tongue, he paused to unleash a fresh howl at the people on the other side of the fence.
“Never seen no shit like this afore. Never seen the like. Seen them skinny gooks with ribs poking out ‘cause they live on maggots and rice. Never seen no yelling foaming dead folk walk. Ya’ll SHUT THE FUCK UP! Blood all over the damn place!”
They didn’t care what he said. They were content to push on the metal fence, to test it and, every once in a while, jump up toward the top. None made it, of course. The parking lot was currently under construction, and it had a huge fence surrounding it. If he had a gun, like his cherished automatic in the Corps, he would have been set up behind one of the cars and blasting away for all he was worth.
He was knee deep in it before he was eighteen. He wanted a waiver out of his pops, but damned if that old man was ever home. So he bullshitted his way in, got a smile and a strong handshake. “Welcome, son. Welcome to the only home you will ever need.”
The guy hadn’t even been slick, not back then. Kids were brought up in the shadow of their fathers’ exploits overseas during the Second World War. That or the Korean get-together a few years later. His own pop hadn’t served, but he sure talked about how much he wanted to be a fighter pilot. How he had gone up for the training, but they said his eyes weren’t too good. Probably nothing to do with that, more to do with the color of his skin.
Maybe it was the booze. The old man was drunk more than he was sober, and praise Jesus if LeBeau wasn’t the spitting image of Pops in that regard. He preferred to be half-drunk all the time instead of dead drunk half the time.
“Hear that, ya damn deaders? Only drunk half the time, or half-drunk like now!”
He sputtered laughter and then sucked on his hand-rolled cigarette.
Marines, boy that was some shitty job.
They taught him how to take the weapon apart, how to clean it and apply oil to the parts. They taught him how to go for a week without a drop of hot water. He got the rot once or twice. A shitty growth on his feet that stank worse than the men around him. Doc applied some stuff, but it never seemed to work all that well. What was that doctor’s name? He wore a thick pair of glasses, BCs or Birth Controls, because there was no w
ay in hell you were getting laid wearing those things.
Once, they thought he had a damn leech up his dick and almost sent him to the hospital. Johnny wouldn’t hear of it, and after getting knocked up on enough morphine to make him pass out cold, they (so he was told later) shoved a tool up his wee hole and got the obstruction out. It was a bug, but no one knew what kind, and that was the end of his days going in the water without something to cover his junk.
The parking lot he currently called home felt closed in. He glanced around at the other survivors, and they glanced at him. If he saw them on the street with their dark looks, he would have howled words at them. It was the most fun he had nowadays, making the whiteys scared of him. Most of the time, he was content to sit on a street corner and beg for a little change.
He didn’t yell at them anymore. These were his fellow warriors. These were his people now. They might not be the most ideal group of mother fuckers, but they were all he had to work with.
Not a one of them had a gun. One of them looked like he’d know his way around if he weren’t nine hundred years old. He might even be packing a weapon, but he kept a poker face like he had a full house. He stared around at the others with a measure of something approaching contempt. Johnny had already forgotten the man’s name. So for now, it was Poker Face.
There was a twenty-something little piece of ass all dolled up in a summer dress. Her blonde hair hung long and loose, and when she looked down, it framed her face, which made her reach up with one slim finger to slip it behind her ear. A practiced move that was probably meant to be cute. Now, she kept straightening her hair and staring at the ends like she expected them to be different from the last time she checked them out. They were surrounded by the dead, and all she wanted to do was look good. She was sitting in a white BMW someone had parked toward the back of the lot.
If they didn’t pop their heads out then, the deaders just wandered away. The first time one of the fast ones got a look at them, it howled for their blood and launched itself at the fence. Johnny howled back and struck out with a metal bar he had found tossed in a corner. It was probably used to block entrance to the lot if stuck in a hole. Now it made an effective, if not very heavy, weapon of deader-smashing destruction.
When the blood-red eyes settled on him from behind the fence, Johnny Lee felt a chill in his bones like the reaper himself had reached into his chest and squeezed his soul. “See that, son? That’s not really yours, and I’m coming for it soon.”
The thing drooled a line of red-flecked foam that ran down its chest. It didn’t take a Harvard-educated asshole to see it was tainted with flesh and blood. It snarled like a dog, slid down to the ground and attacked the fence again in a frenzy. Hands grabbing metal, lips curled back, teeth on display, some broken, others just plain missing.
Johnny was just about sick and tired of the asshole, so he swung as hard as he could, a big overhead loop that punched into the fence and struck the snarling man in the face, caving in part of his skull. The creature’s eyes met his one last time, and then the body slid, lifeless—again—to the ground.
He grinned and then spit at the thing. Fuck you, buddy. Fuck you very much.
Kate
They ran into the shit at the bottom of the stairs.
Anders ranged ahead with Anne. Kate brought up the rear as Mark pounded after his friends. The building was stifling, especially in the staircase, but they took the old dark stairwell like the floor above was about to come down around them.
Down flights of stairs with guns pointed in every direction. They hadn’t swept this part of the building, so anything that moved would be deader bait.
They hit the ground level and came to a door that had several chairs wedged against it. Those went into a pile. Mark pushed, but the door wouldn’t budge.
Anders joined him, and on the count of three, they threw their weight against the door, but it wouldn’t open. They looked at each other and did it again. It was a heavy double-paned job that was clearly built to withstand the elements. But against these two, it gave on the third try. The glass didn’t break, but the door made an unholy racket when it smashed against the wall.
“Two front. I see two more across the street.” Mark made some gestures, and Anders dropped to a knee. They opened fire, taking out the nearest two. Others poured into the street and dropped before they got up to speed. But whatever advantage they might have had was long gone.
Not that they had much luck, either, Kate reflected as they broke for the alley between the two buildings. They were fucked from the moment they left the stadium grounds an hour ago. Now they had to fight their way back. Now they got to see just how tough the group was.
The street was a mess. Bags of debris littered the sidewalks and streets. It reeked like a dump. Kate wasn’t much into the whole city pride thing, but this was a real shame.
Three deaders caught sight of the survivors and angled toward them. Guns bristled from the hastily constructed squad as they moved around the corner of the alleyway. Kate fired first. She wasn’t waiting around to see if the deaders wanted to have coffee. She popped one in the head and aimed at a second, but Anne beat her to it. Her gun spat, and a guy dropped in his tracks as his brains exited his head at high speed.
The third was a girl around fifteen or sixteen years of age. She wore pajamas, and her long, silky blond hair hung almost to her waist. It would have been quite pretty if not for the blood that matted it against her face and neck.
Mark couldn’t seem to do the job. He fired, but the shot missed by a mile.
“Pussy,” Kate whispered. Her first shot went wide, but her next two blew the girl onto her back.
Then they arrived. There were ten. Then twenty. Soon it had to be a hundred. They flowed from side streets and alleyways. Jackson Avenue was soon overrun with the dead.
The alleyway offered a quick shot to a cross street. They ran to it, hung a left and kept going.
At the next alley, they pause to take stock. Kate kept her eyes glued to the oncoming mass and considered her choices. If she left her new comrades, she would probably reach safety twice as quickly. She could flat-out run for a couple of minutes as long as she kept her breathing under control.
On the other hand, they probably wouldn’t stand a chance, just the three of them. Even with four, it was tough odds. The group of deaders was just too much; they would have to stay mobile.
“Ready?” Mark’s face was intense. He stayed close to her while the other two crept ahead.
“Let’s do it already!” Kate exclaimed.
What was she even doing? Kate was not the kind to go down in a blaze of glory. But her options were diminishing by the second, and she couldn’t say why she stayed, although she glanced at Mark more than once.
Then the gang that they’d watched earlier arrived on the scene, and it was chaos. They moved across the street, directly toward the deaders. The men looked like soccer hooligans. The guy in the lead charged one of the deaders with a roar. There were at least ten or fifteen, maybe more, and they were all armed to the teeth. One had a huge machine gun that looked straight out of the twenties, complete with a huge round magazine. He opened up and dropped an entire row. The gun beat at the sky and rose over the howls of the deaders. Others opened up with an assortment of weapons. They had handguns and spiked bats. Long hunks of wood and metal pipes. They went at the deaders with roaring madness.
Kate wanted to join them, to get in the fight and deal a little lead herself, but she had no idea what intentions the others had. At least with her group, she knew who her enemy was.
Then the dark man in the leather jacket she had seen earlier caught her eye. He extended a hand and performed a little bow in her direction, then lashed a huge stick around to crack into a deader’s head. The dead man had been running full bore, saliva and blood drooling down his chin. Now his own forward momentum had turned into a deathblow that flipped the fucker over and onto his back.
Anders was the first to open up. He crou
ched down and sighted along his gun, then, with slow and methodical shots, thinned the herd. The others joined him, so Kate took a few steps toward the center of the street and checked her weapon.
She slid the bolt assembly back and found one already primed. She let it slam shut, lifted the gun, sighted along the iron cross, and blew a deader’s brains out through the side of his head. She was selective and shot one at a time, took a second after each one to make sure none of the gang fell under her sights.
The chamber locked open, and she was already reaching for a fresh mag. Popped one loose, slid it into her bag and found one that was full. She slapped it home, pressed the release and got a satisfying clank. She resumed shooting. After ten rounds, she stopped, because she didn’t want to use it all here. Besides, the deaders had been thinned out considerably.
Anders and Anne whistled for them and then made a break for it.
A fresh bunch of deaders had taken notice and moved in on their position. Anders did his best to butt down a few with the stock of his rifle. Anne stayed close to him, drew her handgun and shot a pair before they could get within fifteen feet.
Mark grabbed Kate’s arm to guide her, then pulled gently to urge her to follow. She didn’t need any other messages and backed up, firing as she moved.
Anne’s gun jammed, and while she jacked the slide back and forth, a pair of them got too close. Anders kicked one in the gut, but the other was already on them. The deader was tall and skinny, with jet-black hair that hung to his shoulders. Anders pulled away, but the creature was fast. Unfazed by the rifle butt, it leaped off the ground like some wild animal and plowed into Anders.
The men went down in a heap. Anne screamed for help while trying to clear the jam. Kate had concerns of her own as one of the deaders looked her in the eye. Filled with rage, it broke from the pack and came at her. Kate exhaled, drew a bead and put two rapid shots through the deader’s head. The first was off center and took off part of the girl’s face and ear. The other put her down for the count.
Among the Dead Book 2 (Among the Living) Page 16