“Yes, they went into the woods. A young man named Joel Spence was able to rescue the young woman, though.”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened, from the beginning.”
James told Perkins the whole story, giving him the Margie and Lenny’s full names and a description of each of them. He recounted what they knew, which wasn’t a lot.
“We’ll keep an eye out for them. I will relay your descriptions to all the men. In the meantime, I wanted to tell you that we have the fire going. The entire town is now caged in by a wall of flames. If you could deliver that message to Sheriff Daniels, I’d appreciate it.”
“Thank you, Sargent. I’ll tell the sheriff.”
“Keep us posted.”
James hung up the phone and leaned back in the chair, waiting for Rob to return.
* * * *
“What do we do now?” Lenny asked, his voice quivering.
“I don’t know, but I think we better move,” Margie said.
They were surrounded with nowhere to go. The living corpses moved in closer to them, moaning as they closed in on their next meal. Margie looked left and right, seeing the dead on either side of them. They were screwed and she knew it.
“Move to where?” he asked.
They couldn’t move ahead on the path because there were four zombies blocking that direction. They couldn’t go back toward the hotel because even more were arriving from that way. She was too afraid to go off the trail for fear of getting lost in the woods while it was still dark. She was desperate and her mood was becoming even darker. She felt cornered and decided that she was going to have to make another tough decision.
She looked over at Lenny. His constant complaining was starting to getting to her worse than before. Her anger was rising up inside her even more. Not only was he a sneaky little cheat and a chickenshit when faced by their current situation, but he was also far more annoying than she’d realized.
Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.
“Just thinking we may have made a mistake.”
“What?”
“You want to see Helen again, don’t you?” she asked.
“Helen’s dead,” he said. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“Because there is something we need right now,” she said, bending down to pick up a broken branch beside the trail.
“What’s that?”
“More bait,” she said, glancing over at him with a dark look in her eyes.
Before he could respond, she swung the branch and cracked him hard across the side of his skull. He dropped to the ground as a large gash opened up above his ear and began bleeding down the side of his face. She watched him bleed as the dead moved around him, closing in on his barely conscious form. He tried to get up once they began grabbing him from all sides, biting him and tearing at him with their fingers and teeth. Blood spurted in all directions from his wounds. She turned and ran, his agonized screams tormenting her as she darted into the trees.
CHAPTER tWENTY-EIGHT
Day Five
Rob was glad to see the sun finally come up after a night of trying to keep everyone alive. They say everything looks fresh in the light of a new day, but the view out in the parking lot looked like something out of Hell. The dead were walking around, broken bodies writhing on the pavement.
Everyone had gathered in the dining area upon Rob’s request. He didn’t want anyone alone this morning. If they were all together, he could keep an eye on them until they could come up with a plan to escape.
“I called Sargent Perkins a few moments ago,” he said. “He said James told him about what happened last night and they are going to watch for Lenny and Margie.”
“What are they going to do if they find them?” Julie asked.
“They will arrest them for assault. They could even be charged with attempted murder. If I could I would go after them myself, but the troopers are in a better position to watch for them. We couldn’t get twenty feet from this place without getting killed. Our main goal is to get out of here, today if possible.”
“That’s if they even get out of the woods alive,” Ron added from a few tables away.
“Margie was always a good kid before,” Rob said. “She may have had some anger issues before, but she never broke the law. She must have snapped from seeing all this carnage and commotion.”
“I imagine her jealousy played into it, too,” Shirley said. “She saw Helen as competition for Lenny’s affection.”
“She saw every woman as competition for Lenny’s affection,” Joel added.
“Either way, she crossed the line and they are both wanted for questioning and charges pending now,” Rob said.
“Sheriff, I think we need a better way to keep in touch with each other,” Emily said. “If we are going to find a way to make a break for it, we might get split up.”
“We have the phones in our rooms.” Rob pointed out.
“True, but if we are going to find a way to make a break for it, we might get split up. Some people didn’t have their cell phones with them when they arrived and others had no chargers, so their batteries are either dead or dying. If we get separated out there, we need to be able to communicate. I think we’ve all been through enough together that we want to see everyone make it out alive.”
“What did you have in mind?” he asked.
“Well, there are prepaid phones in the hotel shop, prepaid cards as well. The phones have chargers and we can activate them with the cards. We can make sure we have everyone’s numbers programmed into each one before handing them out.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Rob said. “Then we could get ahold of anyone at any time. Do you have enough of them?”
“There is an unopened case of them as well as the few that are on the shelf,” she answered.
“I guess we better get them programmed and handed out,” he said. “The sooner we find a way out of here, the better.”
* * * *
In the office, Rob, Joel and Julie had begun activating and programming the prepaid phones. Joel could see the value of having them as a means of communication, once Rob had explained they may get split up in their attempt to escape.
“If they light the entire perimeter of the town on fire, how are we going to get out?” Julie asked.
“We’ll figure out something,” Joel assured her. “Between all of us here, we are bound to come up with something.”
“Do you think everyone else in town is dead?”
Joel looked at her, seeing the underlying fear in her eyes that she’d worked so hard to hide. “I think so. There’s no way they could have survived this unless they found a place like this to hide in.”
“There has been no answer from the local police department, and I have not been able to get ahold of my nightshift deputies,” Rob said. “I think we’re all that’s left.”
“This is like something out of a horror movie,” Julie said.
“In the movies, you can kill zombies with a shot to the head, though,” Joel pointed out. “These zombies don’t die that way, at all.”
“There has to be a way to kill them, besides burning them.”
“I have been going over the notes a good share of the night, trying to figure out what I may have missed. I have found no way of eradicating them other than fire yet.”
“How about organophosphate poisoning?” Julie Suggested.
“That takes way too long,” Joel answered. “We need immediate results, not something that will hit a central nervous system in a few days.”
“What would hit the central nervous system immediately?” Rob asked.
“A massive electrical shock would work,” Joel replied. “But we have no way of creating one from here, especially without putting ourselves at risk as well.”
“We may have to lure them into one location so we can burn them all at once,” Julie suggested.
“We just have to find a way to get them all into one location,” Joel pointed out. “And
considering this affects animals as well, that would be impossible.”
“We don’t have that kind of time,” Rob said. “We have a bigger problem that I haven’t told anyone, yet. There are few people I trust but I do trust you two.”
Joel could see the worry in Rob’s eyes, as well. “What’s up?”
“The national guard wanted to destroy the town today.”
“How long do we have to get out
“Sargent Perkins told me he talked them into giving us until tomorrow at the latest. They can’t risk this getting out over a handful of survivors.”
“I’ll start looking for a way out of here today,” Joel said. “They may not give us until tomorrow.”
“Not if they keep having more and more of the dead trying to get out. He said they’ve been burning them up, but they keep getting to the outskirts.”
“Let’s get these phones done. Someone else can hand them out while we look for an escape route.”
“You need rest,” Julie said. “You haven’t rested since we got here.”
“I’ll rest when we’re out of here and back to civilization.”
“You’ll die of exhaustion before then,” she said.
“I’ll be fine,” he promised, hoping he was right.
* * * *
Margie continued to fight her way through the woods. The trail was fragmented in spots from lack of use. Parts of it were on private property so after a certain point it was no longer broken in. The foliage was ankle high in some areas while it was knee high in others. The trees were thick in some portions of the woods, forcing her to push some branches out of the way and duck under the thicker ones. She kept hoping she would come out of the woods soon, but she hadn’t seen a clearing yet.
Her arms were scratched up from the branches and her legs had cuts on them where the thorns had torn her skin. The irritation of these minor wounds was overshadowed by the relief she felt from surviving the night. She no longer had to fight through the dark as well as the trees.
She hadn’t seen any of the dead for the last couple of hours and was beginning to feel a sense of safety. She felt a small amount of guilt for leaving Lenny to die, but her jealousy and sense of survival had taken over and changed Margie into a person she’d never been before. She didn’t have the regard for human life she once had, apart from her own life.
Suddenly, she could see a break in the trees ahead. Light was shining through much stronger there and she had a refreshed burst of energy to get there. She realized that she should have gotten more rest before taking on this journey, but it was too late to have regrets about that now. Her legs ached and she could feel the lack of sleep threatening to overtake her. She just wanted to lie down on the side of the path and go to sleep. The sight of the sunlight and the clearing she had been searching for was the most welcome sight in the last couple of days.
Margie was just thinking about sitting down on a tree stump for a few moments to rest her legs when she heard the distinct groan from one of the dead a few hundred feet behind her. She decided against the rest and pushed on, praying that they would not catch up to her.
CHAPTER tWENTY-NINE
Sargent Perkins watched the wall of flames in front of him, finding it unbelievable that these fires surrounded the entire town. It was like a looking at the boundaries of Hell itself. He watched the fire burn, watched the officers shield their eyes from the brightness of it during the night and back away from the heat of it now that the day was upon them.
Making even more like a scene from Hell was the fact that they occasional saw one or two of the dead trying to make their way out from behind the boundary to enter the world of the living. They would hear the moans, see the first limb protrude from the flames, and then they would here the terrible sound of agony and the screaming of the living dead as they were driven back by the fire, often completely igniting and burning up on the other side.
He found himself wondering if this was what the end of the world would be like. Would there be fire and torment accompanied by terrified screams and cries of agony? He found himself wondering if it was possible that this was the beginning of the end of the world taking place before his very eyes. He pushed these thoughts out of his head, making sure he was able to keep himself focused on the job at hand.
This would be the most ridiculous report he would ever have to file, and he could only hope they would not laugh him off the force. At least he had enough eyewitnesses to back him up, should it come to that.
His thoughts were interrupted by another agonized scream from another one of the dead attempting to break through in search of a new food supply. He closed his eyes and tried to put the sound out of his mind. This incident would undoubtedly haunt his dreams for weeks, maybe even months.
“Sargent, we are keeping the wood on the fire, but what are we going to do if it starts to rain again?” a young State Trooper asked. “What if the wind picks up?”
“If the wind picks up, we have the fire departments from a half dozen counties lined up to control the flames from spreading,” he said. “If it rains, we may be screwed. There is not supposed to be any storms today, though.”
“I hope they’re right, Sir. The department sent over some food from one of the diners in the next town. There are fresh sandwiches and soups over by the main tent. Why don’t you get something to eat?”
“I’ll be there shortly. Make sure the others get some food.”
“Sir, you’ve barely eaten since this started. At least let me bring something to you.”
“Sure, bring whatever looks good.” he agreed, though his appetite had been squashed by the sights he’d seen of the animated corpses being burned up.
The officer ran off to get Perkins some lunch, leaving the man to return his gaze to the inferno before him. He prayed Rob and the others would find a way to get out before the word was given to wipe out everything.
* * * *
Shirley was peeking one of the lobby windows, the blanket pulled back just enough for her to see through. Lorraine was right behind her, puffing on a cigarette. The two women had come out here to smoke, trying to stay away from the others who may not be able to stand the aroma.
“I don’t think the blankets over the windows are working, anymore,” Shirley said, watching the dead stumbling around out in the parking lot. “I think they still know we are in here.”
“I think you’re right,” Lorraine agreed. “Their actions have changed over the time we’ve been trapped in here.”
“What do we do if they get in?”
“We set fire to the hotel and run like hell, hoping they burn up with the building,” a voice coming from behind them answered.
Shirley turned to see Joel walking toward them. He was looking tired, like he hadn’t been getting any rest. His eyes had dark circles beneath them and his face was sporting the beginnings of a beard from days without shaving.
“Joel, you scared the shit out of me!” Lorraine reprimanded him, putting her hand to her chest.
“Sorry, Lorraine,” he said. “I was just checking things out around the hotel.”
“You look tired, Joel,” Shirley said, walking over and putting her hands on each side of his face. “You look pale, are you sick?”
“No, I’m fine,” he assured her.
“Are you getting any sleep?” Lorraine asked.
“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” he said. “I’ve been going through the notebooks, trying to see if there is anything we can do.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Shirley asked.
“There’s nothing that would help immediately, I’m afraid. Anything that would help would take weeks to hit the nervous system, and none of the chemical base factors would spontaneously combust by throwing any sort of chemical catalyst at the dead out there.”
“Are you feeling responsible to all of us, or mostly to one person in particular?” Lorraine asked
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“We are in a situ
ation we may not all get out of,” Lorraine sighed. “Why don’t you stop burying yourself in work and talk to Julie?”
“We’ve talked about a lot,” he said. “She’s been helping the sheriff and I out this morning.”
“You know exactly what I am talking about,” she said.
“Things are a little more complicated for everyone that that, right now,” he said.
“Put the notes away and think about what’s important, just in case we don’t have tomorrow.”
“She’s my boss, Shirley,” Joel pointed out.
“She was your boss. Now we’re all just people hoping to survive. You may not get another chance.”
Joel nodded his head before starting back down the hall, leaving the two women in the lobby to finish their cigarettes.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Rob and Julie wrote a name on each phone with a black permanent marker. Each phone had everyone’s number programmed in with their name corresponding with the number. Once the phones were marked, they took them in and laid them out in alphabetical order on the first table in the dining area so everyone could collect their phone as they entered for dinner.
Rob had also programmed Sargent Perkins’ cell phone number into each phone so that if anything happened to cause the group to get separated, everyone would be able to contact the State Trooper directly. He wanted everyone to have every possible opportunity to survive and reach safety. Especially if he happened to be one of the group who didn’t make it.
“This was a really good idea Emily had,” Julie said as they set the last of the phones out.
“I just hope the idea will be enough to keep us all in contact while we figure out a way to get us out alive.”
“I hope it will,” she said. “There is still so much I want to do before I die.”
He smiled at her. “We all still have things we want to accomplish.”
“How will we get out of town if we manage to escape the hotel?” she asked. “We know we can’t drive out, they would be all over the cars.”
Threshold Series (Book 1): Threshold Page 17