Waiting to Die ~ A Zombie Novel

by Cochran, Richard M.

  Slowly, Billy turns, following the gaze of the others, and his jaw drops as the dead come into focus. Bodies pack the street behind the truck. Stumbling, shambling forms wrench passed one another as they moan out in unison, letting their voices gather into one enormous howl.

  Ron couldn’t believe what he was seeing as he read the text in the little bar at the side of the screen. He spent most of his days chatting with people all around the world. It made him feel important, like he had friends everywhere. But tonight was different. Tonight, someone was saying that bodies were washing ashore in Florida.

  User fiskiri: It started an hour or so ago. They’re all black and shit. It’s like they’re covered in tar.

  User ronontop: Really?!!! Is there anything on the news about it?

  User fiskiri: No. No one has said a thing. Total media blackout on this side of the country. Are you hearing anything on the west coast?

  User ronontop: Nothing. Same fucking stories that are usually on the news this time of the day.

  User ronders: you should go out and poke one with a stick just to make sure Lol

  User ronontop: STFU dude, this is serious.

  User fiskiri: Wait. BRB… Some of them are moving - they might still be alive.

  User ronders: shit I was only kidding

  Over the course of a few months, he had tried desperately to woo the girl from Florida. She was all that he could think about. He even copied her thumbnail picture and printed it so he could pin it to the wall in front of his desk to imagine what it would be like to be with her. He loaded up an image of himself and pasted it in the frame to make it look like they were together. It was all he could do to actually be with her.

  For hours, he tries to message her, but she hasn’t come back onto the chat room page since her last message. He worries over what might have happened to her. At the end of his rope, he reserves himself to the thought that she might be detained by the police, being questioned, all alone without anyone to support her. His palms are sweaty from the idea and he wipes them on his pants leg and fidgets with the keyboard, outlining the edge as he finds himself deeper in thought.

  As unnerving as it is, he logs off the internet. He needs something to divert his attention until he can talk to her again. He switches on the television and starts to get absorbed in a Science Fiction flick on cable. He stuffs his face with Twinkies and washes them down with a couple of bottles of Mountain Dew while pondering over what she was doing, what might be happening to her at this very moment.

  Later that night, he turns his computer on and notices the connection has failed since the last time he used it. He unplugs the wireless and connects his laptop directly to the line, but nothing happens. Angrily, he slams his hands down on the countertop in the kitchen where the connection is.

  “What the fuck,” he says and rests his head on the edge of the counter.

  He slicks back his hair and tries to regain his composure, but the thoughts of what she might be dealing with keeps battering his imagination.

  He gives up on the computer and switches on the television to one of the news networks, hoping to find something out, but the same stories are being replayed from earlier in the day.

  “Everybody out, we’ve got to get to the building,” Johnny yells.

  “We can’t,” Ron says. “The fence will never hold ‘em all!”

  “We don’t have a fucking choice here,” Johnny says as he jumps out of the truck. “Now move!”

  Everyone exits the truck except Ron.

  “I’m not going out there,” he says, holding onto the dashboard.

  Johnny shakes his head. “Let’s go,” he says and guides Scarlet toward the gate as she ushers the children along.

  The howling mass is at the back of the truck when Johnny glances back at Ron. “Last chance, man,” he says, trying to reason with him.

  Ron slams the driver’s side door as the first decayed fingers swipe at the glass. He shakes his head back and forth, mouthing the words, “No, I’m not going back in there,” as he still grips at the dash.

  “Crazy son of a bitch,” Johnny says and clasps the gate behind him. “Hurry, into the building.”

  As they push through the front doors of the gas station, Johnny can hear the ignition clicking away over the moaning dead. He begins to close the door when he hears the engine crank over.

  “He got it started,” Scarlet says, shielding the children behind her.

  “It’s too late,” Johnny says as he slams the door. “Move to the back.”

  As the dead approach the gate out front, Ron hits the gas, sending a trail of dust up from the wheels as he speeds away. In the rearview mirror, he can see the bodies begin to buckle the fence, but he shakes his head and continues swerving along the frontage road out of town.

  “That motherfucker,” Johnny remarks as he winds along behind Scarlet.

  From behind, the dead begin to scatter through a buckle in the fence and stagger toward the front doors. The corpses howl and moan as they slap against the glass and beat at it with gnarled hands, leaving bloody, brown waste in their wake.

  “There’s a room back here,” Scarlet says as she pushes the children through.

  Still clutching tightly to her rifle, Emma enters the back room, closely followed by Billy. They’re guided by Scarlet as she glances back, praying to see Johnny coming up behind her.

  Once everyone is in, Johnny slams the door and braces himself against the protrusion as the dead pummel it from the other side.

  “Up the ladder,” Scarlet says. “Get up on the roof!” She turns her attention to Johnny. “Come on, hurry!”

  “I can’t, they’ll get through,” he says, pressing all his weight into the door. “Just go, I’ll hold them off.”

  Scarlet bites her lip and watches the children as the poke through into the sunlight that is coming from the hatch. She looks back and forth for a moment and breathes heavy when she makes her decision.

  “I’m not leaving you,” she says and presses herself against the door beside Johnny.

  “Are you crazy?!” he yells. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  “I said I’m not leaving without you.”

  Emma stares through the hatch from the roof, waiting for Scarlet and Johnny to appear.

  “Shut the hatch, Emma,” Scarlet yells. “Don’t open it for anything. No matter what you hear, don’t open it…” Her voice drowns out below the sounds of the screaming dead.

  “No…” Emma says.

  “Close it, Emma!” Johnny shouts.

  The girl does as she’s told, letting the hatch fall with a heavy thud and backs away toward the edge of the roof.

  Ron begins to slow the truck down once he’s far enough from town. His mind is telling him to keep on going, but his heart tells another story. His lips tighten as he swings the steering wheel and make a u-turn in the middle of the road.

  “You can’t leave them there,” he tells himself. “You can’t let them die like that.”

  He floors the gas pedal and speeds back toward town, angry that his heart got the better of him.

  He stays locked up in his apartment for days, waiting for the internet to come back on. He can hear shouting on the streets and gunfire as he watches the lights flicker and fade. His neighbors left at some point, but he can’t place exactly when. He knows he should go, but can’t bring himself to look out the window to see what’s happening outside.

  When night comes, he plugs his ears with cotton and tries to drown out the noises, but nothing cancels out the pleas for help. There comes a dull thud from the apartment below and he waits silently, trying to place the sound. It is as if something has been dropped and broken.

  It is not until he can smell smoke that he dares to open his front door. A thin mist builds in the hallway and he can smell the wiring burning as the sounds of popping assaults his ears.

  The farthest door down the hall buckles and explodes outward and he is knocked to the floor from the explosion. He shakes o
ff the impact and looks at the fire building through the exposed apartment.

  He’s back on his feet as the panic sinks in. The hallway is a whirl of smoke and orange glow as he runs, looking back as the floor begins to buckle and collapse behind him. He takes to the stairwell as the flames lick at the ceiling overhead.

  He gets outside in enough time to see the building rage in flames behind him. There are people everywhere, stumbling around through the smoke. They see him and begin to approach. He stumbles over something and falls from the sidewalk, landing on a body sprawled out halfway onto the lawn. He turns on the ground and faces a corpse, a blank stare shooting off toward the building, a clean hole where the man’s forehead used to be. He kicks away and stands as the others come closer.

  “Stay away,” he says, fear in his voice. “Don’t come any closer!”

  An old hunting rifle lies on the ground next to the corpse, partially obstructed by the remnants of meat that cling to the butt of the gun.

  “Stay back!” He grabs the weapon and shakes it to dislodge the decay. “I’ll shoot! I swear I will…” His voice is quivering as the people get closer.

  He can see the milk white of their eyes through the smoke. Their stares are empty and encompassing like they were trying to look through him. Their mouths hang slack as if they were all at the edge of an epiphany.

  He fires the rifle and hits one of them before they are able to fully surround him. “I told you I’d shoot!” he cries.

  The woman keeps coming with the same stare in her sunken sockets, a hole leaking out thick, dark blood from her shoulder as she stumbles and jerks across the lawn.

  “Get back,” he says, shuttering. “Why won’t you get back?”

  He takes off along the strip of lawn, away from the bodies and runs as fast as his feet will carry him. Everywhere he turns, there is nothing but destruction and death. Cars burn and bodies litter the streets. He can smell charred meat in the air along with wood and the same acrid electrical odor like back in the hallway of his apartment building.

  “Help me, please, God help me,” a woman cries from the second story window of a house. “You there, catch my baby,” she says, cradling an infant under its arms. “Please, he’s about to get in.” She sobs. “Please, just save my baby.”

  Ron shakes his head in fear as his stomach sinks. “No, I … I …” he stammers and takes back to running. He can hear her screaming as his feet slap against the cold concrete. Her shrill, cackling voice cracks right before it is torn away.

  A baby cries and then only the battling sounds of chaos come like silence in war.

  He’s hated himself these many weeks as he has rolled over the scenario in his mind. Countless times, the images assault him. He felt like a coward, but no longer. He can’t make it up to the woman or her baby, but he can make it up to those people he left stranded.

  Cocking the steering wheel, he veers across the road when he sees the gas station in the distance. He can see the children pace along the edge of the roof. Through the battered windshield, he can make out the alleyway that is blocked off by the fencing at the rear. Somehow, it has managed to hold up against the onslaught from the dead.

  “He’s coming back,” Billy says. “He’s coming back for us!”

  Emma looks to the road and can make out the blur of the truck as it speeds closer. She runs to the hatch, but stops short when she hears cries of pain and guttural howls coming from inside. She staggers back as she hears the man crash into the light pole alongside the building and braces herself for the impact.

  “Shit,” he yells from below, “jump!” The light pole teeters and cracks. “You have to jump in the back.”

  The children look down at the truck. It seems farther down than they remember having climbed.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” Billy says.

  “You have to,” Emma replies. “Just hold my hand and close your eyes. On the count of three, we’ll jump. Okay?”

  “Hurry, they’re coming,” Ron yells, watching the dead scrape at the fence.”

  “One,” Emma says and grips Billy’s hand. “Two…” She looks down at the bed of the truck. “Three!”

  The children launch themselves off the building and flail their legs on the way down, screaming as they fall. With a soft thud, they land on the boxes of food and water, crushing them, but effectively breaking their fall.

  As soon as the children hit, Ron hits the gas and sends up a cloud of dust as he backs up along the alleyway, not daring to look behind the truck at the dead who were inches away. He puts the truck into drive and grazes the light pole as he passes, breaking it loose and sending it toppling over onto the roof.

  A corpse clings to the tailgate and Emma lifts her rifle in time to see its hazy stare over the trim of the truck bed. She places the bead of the sight between the creature’s eyes, directly above its nose, and pulls the trigger. The quiet snap of the .22 is almost inaudible as the corpse’s head cocks backward gracefully as if it were at the cusp of realization. It tumbles away, rolling as Ron makes a tight turn and throws the children down to the bed of the truck. “Hold on!” he says after the fact.

  They can hear a crash from outside and the muffled voices of panic before they hear a vehicle speed away. There’s a thud on the roof and then only the rasps of the dead on the other side of the door.

  “I didn’t think it would end this way,” Scarlet says as her face reddens from the force she’s exerting on the door.

  “It doesn’t have to,” Johnny says, motioning with his head to a chair positioned against the wall. “Go get that chair and we’ll wedge it under the handle.”

  “You sure you can hold it?” she asks, letting up on the door.

  “Yeah, I’ve got it.” He nods.

  Scarlet scurries to the chair and drags it back.

  “All right,” he says. “Now slide it under the handle.”

  She scoots the back of the chair below the handle and it skids across the floor with a shrill scrape as the dead thrash from the other side. Johnny places his foot under the legs and kicks it into place.

  They breathe heavy as they stare at the buckling chair, held in position by the groove between the floor tiles. The grout chips away, little by little until the leg of the chair finally wedges into place and sets firmly.

  “Now what?” Scarlet asks.

  “We can figure that out once we’re on the roof.” He climbs the ladder and pushes at the hatch, but it won’t budge. He steadies himself and puts his back into it, but it still won’t move. “It’s stuck,” he says. “There’s something blocking it.

  “We’re trapped in here?”

  Johnny sighs and climbs back down. “That’s what it looks like.”

  She shakes her head slowly from side to side. “I don’t want to die like this, John.” She backs up against the far wall and stares at the door. “I don’t …”

  He reaches out and puts his arms around her, pulling her closer and brushes the hair out of her face before he hugs her tight against his chest. She begins to sob with slight convulsions that he can feel vibrate all the way through to his spine.

  “If they get through, just hold onto me as tight as you can,” he says with a crack in his voice. He swallows deeply and holds her for all he’s worth. He presses his head into the curve at her neck as the door crashes open. He squeezes her tighter as the first bite sinks in.

  ·21

  Ron glances at the signs along the frontage road and veers right onto an overpass, heading toward a rural highway that bypasses the freeway he’s been driving along. There’s something secured to one of the signs and he slows down to read it.

  Refugee rescue is 5 miles ahead on Hwy 93.

  He stares at it for a long time before the message finally registers.

  “Hey, kids, I think we’re going to be okay,” he says with a smile.

  “We should just keep going until we get to the mountains,” Emma replies, “like we were doing before we met you.”

 
“That sounds like a fine idea and all, but I can’t keep looking after you two,” Ron says. “There are soldiers there who can look after you better than I can.”

  “We shouldn’t go there,” Billy says. His face is stricken with fear. “The soldiers are bad.”

  “Now, come on,” Ron says. “The military is there to help us. I’ve just spent some of the worst weeks of my life stuck in a gas station. It would be nice to have someone else protecting me for a change.”

  “We shouldn’t go there,” Billy whispers to Emma.

  “I know.” She nods.

  For over an hour, Ron follows the signs, weaving through the occasional wreck in the road and traveling through the ditch when necessary. The bodies have thinned out since he’s left town and only a few stragglers remain, lost to the pilgrimage of the damned. Their moans remind him of why he never left the gas station, and chose to remain a prisoner rather than have to face them.

  Every few miles he sees a new sign which brings hope of finding the base. The old street markers are covered over with official stenciled lettering with an indication of how many miles are left for any refugee that may discover them. Between the lines, the messages offer freedom to Ron; they show that there is still some type of civilization to be had. He smiles to himself and tightens his grip on the steering wheel. “Not too much farther now,” he says to the children. “A few more miles and we’re home free.”

  In hushed whispers, Billy tells his story to Emma. He tells her what happened to him back at the Anderson’s house and of how the soldiers fired on him. His eyes are laced with tears as he recounts the memories and he tries to push the emotions back so she won’t see him cry.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “If anything happens, we’ll run. We’ll get as far away as we can. We won’t look back.” She rubs his shoulder, trying to convince him as much as she’s trying to convince herself.