Necrophobia 4

by Jack Hamlyn

  I leaned there in the doorway, breathing hard, nearly giddy from the warm stench of decay that reminded me of rotting, fly-specked fruit. I stumbled down the hallway, nearly delirious with horror. If another zombie had come at me at that moment, I would have been done for. I wouldn’t have had the strength to fight.

  Sucking in some cleaner air, my head cleared.

  I heard Tuck shooting again, firing nearly non-stop as if he was surrounded or hemmed into a corner. Then I heard a grenade go off with an echoing roar.

  There was no time to lose.

  I jogged down the hall towards the landing…and skidded to a halt. I saw forms coming up the stairs. For one mad moment I thought it was my friends, but it was the dead. Four of them were coming up to meet me. The one nearest the top was another naked woman, grinning at me with stark white teeth. Her blackened gums had receded and her jaws looked like the fangs of a wild beast.

  My NVGs chose that moment to malfunction.

  The green field flickered, dimmed, then died. The last thing I saw through them was the burning, luminous eyes of the things that had come to devour me.

  I swore and pulled the goggles away from my eyes.

  What saved me at that moment was the tactical flashlight bracketed to the rail of the Mossberg. I clicked it on and the brightness of the beam momentarily blinded me…then I saw the monster coming for me.

  It had been a woman, yes, but Zombpox had turned her into something else again.

  She was skeletally thin to the point of emaciation, her skin like white clinging rubber. Her pelvic girdles jutted like wings, her ribs standing out like the rungs of a ladder. Her face was shriveled dead-white, mottled by purple sores, eyes bulging from black-rimmed sockets. When she grinned, her teeth seemed to slide out of the gums like those of a shark.

  Here was death coming for me again.

  I think I froze for a second too long. The sheer terror of the situation made me hesitate. It hadn’t been the first time. Sometimes the fear that the walking dead generate is just too much and it overwhelms you, strips your gears. Anyone who says that it doesn’t is lying.

  The undead woman, I think, was counting on my fear paralysis. Though in general there’s not much going on in the heads of the risen, now and again you’ll see something more, a stark glimmer of evil beyond imagining. And that’s what I saw in the drowning pools of her eyes—a cold, mocking intelligence, the way I’d imagine a spider might look at a fly trapped in its web. That’s what I saw. A sense of triumph that she had me and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  Or so she thought.

  She reached for me and I squeezed the trigger.

  One second she was smiling at me with a terrible death rictus, white scabrous fingers reaching for my throat…and the next her head was blown off, raining down on the others in a gory rain of blood, brains, and pellets.

  The others were still coming.

  No hesitation now.

  I fired, racked the pump, and fired again. By the time I was done, the stairs were red with dark corpse drainage, limbs and bones.

  I jogged down through the human detritus, pausing at the bottom to reload the Mossberg.

  And that’s when the front door crashed open.

  HIDE AND SEEK

  I brought the Mossberg up and then lowered it because the intruders were Jimmy, Sabelia, and Carrie. They speared me with the beams of tactical flashlights, M4s trained on me.

  “We heard the shooting,” Sabelia said.

  Of course they did. I would have come running, too, only I really didn’t want them here in harm’s way.

  “Tuck’s upstairs,” I told them, mounting the left staircase. “He needs my help.”

  “We’re coming,” Jimmy said.

  “No,” I called down to him. “It’s too narrow up there. We’ll bottleneck.”

  That stopped him, but not Sabelia.

  “Steve…” she said.

  “Stay down here. I’ll holler for you if I need you.”

  I felt like some fool hero from a cheap action movie. You just wait thar, honey. This ain’t no place for a woman. This here’s man’s business, so don’t worry yer pretty head none. She didn’t appreciate it and I knew it, but the less crowding up there, the better.

  It was unbelievably black up there, but I hated announcing my presence with the tac light. The corridor was empty as far as I could see. I took off my NVG set and rapped it against the wall. I remember doing it in Iraq once and it worked. I got lucky: it worked again.

  I clicked off the flashlight.

  I studied my surroundings in the green NV field. Nothing that I could see. I checked the first room, then the second. Both were empty. The layout was slightly different on this side of the duplex. The corridor abruptly ended, then turned off to the left. I came around the bend quickly.

  What I saw was disturbing.

  The blast from the grenade was obvious. The wall was burnt, the plaster pitted with shrapnel holes. Several of the ceiling tiles were blown free above, others dangling and ripped apart. On the floor, I saw the remains of what must have been two deadheads. They had been blown to pieces, anatomy splattered in every direction, blood and bits of tissue splashed right up the walls.

  I stepped over a trunk.

  Several fingers squished under my boot.

  I saw a leg, part of an arm, and a head that looked like it had been split by a cleaver. In a pool of blood amongst all this, I found an M4 rifle. It was glistening with hemoglobin that looked black in the NVGs. A bit further on, I found Tuck’s ammo bag. The extra magazines were in there, but the other grenade was gone.

  I had a very sick feeling in my gut.

  There were bullet holes in the walls, but no sign of Tuck.

  By that point, I guess I wasn’t expecting to find him alive, but I was determined to destroy his corpse so he would not walk again. He was like a brother to me and I owed him that much.

  I moved down the corridor.

  Ahead, it ended in an archway that led into a room. There was blood and other fluids on the floor. A smeared trail led down the hallway and into the room at the end.

  I heard movement behind me.

  I turned quick and two zombies were coming at me.

  One of them was a pouchy middle-aged woman in a filthy bathrobe. She had one fluffy slipper on, the other foot bare. Her face looked like raw, moist suet, one eye fixed on me, the other staring blankly up at the ceiling. With her was a man in a dress shirt and tie. He looked like a guy who’d just come home from the office…save for the fact that beneath his nose his face was a mass of ruptured pustules. It hung in frayed jowls, teeth and gums chomping.

  I blew both of them away with head shots.

  Then I approached the archway.

  Sucking in a deep, nervous breath, I stepped into the room. The first thing I saw was a girl, maybe seven or eight at the time Necrophage got her. She was squatting on the floor next to a mutilated corpse, digging her hands into its stomach cavity and stuffing loops of entrails into her mouth.

  I thought she was feeding on Tuck.

  I really did for a moment…but the corpse was that of an overweight man whose head was blown apart. It had opened like a flower, gray matter spilling to the carpet.

  The girl had her feast; she had no interest in me.

  She looked at me with eyes that seemed to glow in the NV field, her face black with blood from her meal that she continued to gobble ravenously. I blew her head off and then others started coming out of the darkness of what looked to be a large living room. There were seven or eight of them. They came after me and I dropped two, turned, and three more were coming through the archway. I shot them down, racking the pump on the shotgun as fast as I could. I only killed one of them, but I took the arm off one and blew a hole the size of a dinner plate through the other.

  They dropped, but I knew they would not stay down.

  I ran through the archway, kicking out at the one without the arm and driving him into the
other. They both stumbled into the living room and I popped the pins on both of my grenades, and threw them in there as I dove to the floor down the hallway. There was a deafening concussion as they went off nearly at the same time. Smoke and dust blew out of the doorway. Then I went back in and killed anything that still moved.

  I stood there, the room painted with zombie remains.

  They oozed down the walls and dripped from the ceiling. I stepped through the wreckage, sighting a closet door that was slowly swinging open. I moved towards it, my Mossberg held high for killing and I found myself looking at the bald head of Tuck.

  “Nice work,” he said, palming his last grenade.

  Sighing, I relaxed. “You have no idea how ugly you are when seen through NVGs.”

  “Piss off.”

  By then, Sabelia, Jimmy, and Carrie came through the archway, flooding us with light.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I killed the others, but I saved the ugly one.”

  Tuck ignored me and gave us a truncated version of events. When he went up the left staircase, it was quiet. Then the maggot-eaters came from every direction. He shot down a few, blew apart some others with his first grenade, and then it was strictly hand-to-hand fighting. They got his rifle and ammo pouch, but they didn’t get him.

  “So you hid in the closet?” Sabelia said.

  He scowled. “Just me and my grenade. If they got through, I was pulling the pin.”

  Nobody commented on the grim tragedy of that.

  “I figured I’d come out when the time was right,” he said, trying to lighten the mood.

  “That’s right,” I said. “It was only a matter of time before he came out of the closet.”

  The four of us shared a brief laugh, but not Tuck. He stomped past me, giving me a playful thump on the head with his knuckles.

  “Just you wait, smartass,” he said.

  PSYCHO CITY

  By this point, it was after three in the morning according to Robin’s watch. We were all exhausted and strung out from the lack of rest. We decided since we had fought so hard for the house, we might as well go and enjoy it. The downstairs anyway. The only thing that concerned us was that we had never checked out the cellar. We canvassed the lower floor and found no door that might lead to one.

  Satisfied, we linked up with Robin and the others and made an organized retreat back to the house. The streets were quiet and it seemed like a good sign. We were all looking forward to some rest.

  We set up downstairs since the upstairs was a little too full of remains for comfort. We found some candles and chased away the gloom. We chose the game room that Tuck had told me about. Once we hauled the pool table out of there, it was plenty roomy enough for the lot of us. Besides, it had a stout door with a lock on it and that was the most important thing of all.

  Robin, being her nosey self, started looking around in a closet. After some looting around with Ginny, she came back with an expanding multi-pocket file folder tied with string. She emptied out its contents on the floor.

  “Charles and Vivian Emery,” she said. “Tax returns. Let’s see what old Charlie boy was up to.”

  Diane had joined them now, too, as they looted through the private papers of Charles Emery. It kept them busy and pretty soon Carrie was involved in it. Tuck kept his eye on the door. I smoked a cigarette, sitting on the floor with Jimmy and Sabelia. It was going to be a long night and I doubted any of us were going to get too much rest.

  “What do you got there?” Diane asked.

  Robin held a paper up, bringing it closer to the candle. “A W-2 form for 2008. Charlie, damn, you made three-hundred grand after taxes. Not bad, buddy boy, not too fucking shabby at all.”

  “What the hell did he do in this shithole to make that kind of scratch?” Diane said as she looked through some bank statements.

  Robin didn’t answer right away. She brought the paper even closer. “Hey, this lists Charlie’s occupation as a research biologist/virologist. Funny place for a guy like that to live.” She looked over at me. “It says he was employed by the CDC. Isn’t that the—”

  “Center for Disease Control,” Sabelia said.

  Nobody had picked up on the significance of that or maybe they had and preferred to keep quiet about it. I went over and sat by Robin. She handed me the paper. I read it through two or three times.

  “Funny, eh?” she said.

  It was funny, but I wasn’t laughing. “CDC SPB,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Tuck asked.

  “Special Pathogens Branch,” I said. “They deal with unknown infectious viruses, the sort of things that could start plagues like Ebola and the like.”

  All eyes were on me by that point.

  “And how do you know something like that?” Sabelia asked.

  Some of those there had already heard my story of encountering a village in Iraq during the war that had been infected with Necrophage, but I went over it quickly again. The village had been called Et Ukhbar—now destroyed—and it was full of the walking dead. The infective organism was called Necrovirus, but it was just an earlier version of Necrophage.

  “The point being,” I said, “is that after the mission we were debriefed by a couple labcoat johnnies from the CDC’s Special Pathogens Branch.”

  “Maybe Charlie just retired here,” Robin said.

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’s all it is,” I said.

  Diane lit a cigarette and walked over by Tuck. “What else could it be? A research virologist just happens to retire to a weird town with cameras everywhere. What could be more normal?”

  Nobody bit and I was glad. We had too much on our minds and we hadn’t had enough rest to really properly process it all. Seppy and Scott never said a word through the whole thing. Maybe they were smarter than I thought.

  We ate some MREs and then stretched out. Sleep came right away. Dead, dreamless sleep that was black and heavy like the night itself.

  Unfortunately, a few hours later, somebody was shaking me awake. It was Sabelia. “Sandy’s gone,” she said. “And so are Scott and Seppy.”

  I should have been more surprised than I was, but I figured there was something going on with those two guys. The more I thought about it, the more I was certain they had never really been up to anything as I originally feared. They just wanted out. And when we were asleep, they went. Sandy, apparently, had gone, too. Unless she saw them leave and followed. It was hard to say. Sandy’s brains were so scrambled by that point I don’t think she even made sense to herself.

  “Maybe they slipped out to take a leak,” Tuck said.

  “Girls generally don’t go off to piss with guys,” Ginny pointed out.

  “They may have left ten minutes ago for all we know.”

  Jimmy shrugged. “Could be. But my guess is that it was once we were all sleeping soundly. Who knows why? But if they went outside, just about anything could happen to them.”

  “Then they brought it on themselves,” Tuck said, clearly not interested.

  We hashed it out for a few more minutes. Tuck was against going to look for them, saying it was crazy for the rest of us to risk our necks because they were being reckless. He had a point. Robin agreed with him. So did Diane. Jimmy, Sabelia, and I thought we should go find them. At the very least, just make a quick tour of the neighborhood and see if they were in any kind of trouble. Ginny and Carrie thought we should just wait because they might come back on their own.

  “Well, I’m going to look,” I said. “Just to be sure.”

  Sabelia volunteered to go, too, and Jimmy said, “Count me in. Sleeping on the goddamn floor is killing my back anyway.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Tuck said.

  “We’re going anyway,” Sabelia told him.

  “Don’t do it, Big Steve,” Robin said and I knew there was serious concern for my safety behind her words. “They’ll come back when they’re ready and if they don’t, fuck ‘em.”

  She talked tough but I knew that had her leg bee
n better she would have been coming, too. Same went for Diane and her head.

  We took M4s, extra magazines, and grenades. I told them we’d be back in fifteen or twenty minutes. I really wasn’t trying to play hero. I just had to know if they were okay or not. It was a motherly impulse I had.

  Before we left, Tuck stopped me. His hands gripped my arms and I could see real concern in his eyes. “Steve…Booky…don’t do this, man. It’s not a good idea.”

  “I have to.”

  He stared into my eyes like the caring, loving older brother I’d never had. “Just watch yourself…just do that, will you.”

  “I will. You know I will.”

  “Shit,” he said.

  At the door, I turned one last time and looked at him. We smiled at each other.

  “See you when I see you,” he said.

  He wanted to come with. I know he did. But to do so would have been admitting he agreed with my fool’s errand and he couldn’t do that. And it wasn’t pride, it wasn’t that at all. No, he was thinking of the unity of our little group and trying to reinforce the fact none of us belonged going out there. That unless there was a common consensus, no one had any business threatening the well-being of the all.

  He was right.

  I knew he was right.

  But I was worried about Sandy, so I went anyway.

  They locked the door behind us and out into the streets we went.

  As earlier, it was quiet out there. Quiet, but tense, as if the city was just waiting, every muscle and sinew drawn taut and bunched, waiting to spring. We moved down the block until we reached the end. There was nothing. No sign of violence, no sign of anything.

  Jimmy said, “You want my opinion, Steve?”

  “Always.”

  “Well, they hightailed it back to the Silo.”

  “It would take them a week to walk back up there,” Sabelia said.

  Jimmy nodded. “Sure, but when people get scared and desperate, they don’t think straight. They run. And I think Scott and Seppy ran and Sandy went with them. I don’t think it would have taken much convincing for her. She was looking for a way out and any offer would have sounded better than what she had.”