The bulldozer took out half a dozen fence sections. It drove through campus and into a building, stalling after it crashed halfway through a wall. The bodies dispersed. They wandered into their own freedom. Guards fired at them from the roofs.
We drove into the field, back to the spot where we saw the woman cowering on the girders. I stopped near the woman’s shadow.
Audrey called to the woman. We waved her to the truck, but she was frozen with fear. Stragglers surrounded us. Audrey and I pushed them back with the pistols, cleared them out to thirty yards. Plenty of room for the lady to climb down.
Audrey helped the lady into the back seat where she was at once hidden in shadows. The lady’s heavy breath caressed my neck.
“There are more,” the lady said. “They’re in the gymnasium. I told them they were wrong. I wasn’t bit. It’s just a bruise,” she was exhausted.
“But they threw you in.”
“They did, and I was up there three days.”
“Show me the bruise,” I said.
Audrey slapped me twice. My cheek and temple stung. My eyes watered.
I turned to the woman. “Show me.”
She pulled her shirt up to the bottom of her breasts. Her stomach and side were scratched and bloody, a fingernail embedded in her skin at the end of one of the scratches. She peeled back a piece of skin and the flesh below seeped a yellowish fluid.
“Wasn’t a thing wrong with me until I got thrown in that pen.”
“Where’s the gymnasium?” I asked.
The guards outside had quadrupled and flanked all around the stadium. The shamblers spread out faster than they could be contained. They moved tirelessly, continuously, never stopping for fatigue, never considering which way to move.
“The gym is that tall building back there,” she turned in the seat and pointed. “That’s where they keep everyone else.”
Behind the gymnasium was a ghost-town place. An awning shielded piles of retired school equipment from the flustering snow. Empty barrels, broken desks and chairs covered in graffiti and carved insults.
The double doors to the rear entrance were chained and padlocked. I swung the truck around, shifted into reverse, and sped backward. The tires spat out snow and mud, rocks clanged against the frame. We rammed the door and stopped abruptly. Our heads snapped against the headrests, our brains like mush. I plowed the truck into the doors again. The chains snapped and whomped against the truck bed.
“Give her some of our rations,” I told Audrey.
“I’m not hungry,” the woman said quickly.
“Lady. How are you not hungry, held up under the bleachers three days?”
“I’m just not. And my name is Jean-Anne Huston, I thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And I happen not to be hungry because…” she trailed off.
“You happen not to be hungry because why, Jean-Anne?”
Her face soured. “Because right now, the thought of food makes me sick.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I hate to keep sitting in this truck. Then we’ll all be sick. They’ll be on us in a minute.”
Jean-Anne sighed. “He’s right. I don’t know how they know, but they just follow you all over. Does that make sense? I must have crawled through a mile of bleachers. Those heathens always knew where I was. They’ll come for sure.”
I threw open my door and the cold air whipped us sober.
The sirens whistled sadly. Sporadic gunfire on top of it. We limped and shuffled and hastily dragged ourselves into the gymnasium. We dumbly went in the godforsaken place we’d been trying to avoid.
WE ENTERED THROUGH THE PUMP ROOM, where we stumbled over filter tanks, chlorine tanks, and twelve miles of plumbing. I used the Remington as my sight stick, slamming the muzzle into walls and wires. The pool was in the next room. We stayed close to a wall of foldout bleachers to avoid the cold, still water.
Shortly, we came to a door. It was stuck, but it gave when I leaned into it. The door slammed against the tile wall and echoed.
“These are the showers,” Jean-Anne said. “My niece had swim lessons here a couple of years ago. The lockers are just ahead. The gymnasium is after.”
As we approached the locker room entrance, we heard the murmuring of hundreds of voices, the humming of the lights, the cathedral echo of the gymnasium.
We left the locker room and hid in the steel spider web under the bleachers. Not talking, we huddled deep within the framework. We watched through the slits of the folded bleachers. The gymnasium was set up like a Red Cross tent. Cardboard partitions separated nurse stations and examination rooms.
We could see into the exam room. A man sat on a crate, the doctor was carefully covered in surgical gown, head cap, latex gloves, and shoe covers. The doctor examined a bite on the man’s leg. The flesh was gone, muscle gouged away. The doctor pointed to the scale. The man stepped up and the doctor opened the cabinet behind the scale. The doctor twisted a valve on an air tank, picked up a small hose, and held a bolt gun to the back of the man’s head.
The man’s legs buckled. He fell in a heap. A small stream of blood rolled down his neck. The doctor knocked on an exit door and two men, covered head-to-toe like the doctor, hurried in. They hauled the man outside to a waiting trailer. The doctor wiped up the small streak of blood, shut the valve, and closed the cabinet. The doctor called in the next patient.
We maneuvered through the bleachers and looked out to one of the several waiting areas. No fewer than fifty people—children, women, grandparents, a man in a wheelchair—waited with various wounds. They came for help.
I pressed the muzzle through the gap in the bleachers and aimed into the waiting room. When the doctor stuck his fat head in again, I fired. I missed.
The gymnasium roared in panic. Patients in unseen waiting areas screamed—the partitions wobbled and guards threw the doors closed.
The doctor grabbed for a pistol under his gown. He struggled to get to it under all the layers. I fired again. He fell face down on the glossy wood. Guards stormed in and fired into the waiting crowd. I hit one guard in the shoulder, another in the shin as he crouched behind a chair. They fired straight at us. The bleachers opened, the steel beams crossed like scissors, unfolding and swinging. I saw shadows of men dancing through the moving framework, leaping through the interior scaffolding. I retreated to the entrance. Audrey and Jean-Anne were far ahead of me. I knelt and fired at the leaping shadows, one fell face-first into the metal tracks. The other landed with a thud.
I rejoined Audrey and Jean-Anne in the hall, but there was a swarm of prisoners—injured and bleeding—rushing to the exits. They found the exits chained. And they realized they were prisoners.
Ten of the camouflaged men joined the melee in the hall and opened fire. Blood splashed the navy blue and gold walls. In the cattle chute hallway, the crowd of two hundred cowered from the guards. Guards blocked the doors and sprayed the innocent with bullets. Dust from cinderblocks fell like snow. The guards fired desperately. The crowd finally assembled against a pair of double doors and crashed through them. They spilled into the cold air, leaving us and the guards. I took cover behind a vending machine. I’d lost sight of Audrey and Jean-Anne.
But there were shamblers among us. A small, fragile-looking woman overpowered a man and rammed him into a trophy case, plate glass falling and ripping through them both. The woman didn’t notice. I saw it was Jean-Anne, her face expressionless and her body rigid. She tore into the man’s face with her hands and mouth. Her teeth sank into his cheek, raking through zygomatic major and minor, ripping temporal from occipital.
Quickly and violently as she attacked, she stopped. Tar bled from the man’s face, his screams quieted. He stood fixed, eyes hollow. Guards peeled into them with gunfire. Bullets sank into their bodies and passed through. Blood seeped from the holes but they made a straight line for the guards. Finally, they made a headshot. Jean-Anne collapsed. But there were more. One overtook a guard by the far exit
. Several crashed through the opposing locker room.
I slipped out a side door and saw the infinite limping shadows closing in on the gymnasium. They seemed to materialize from darkness. I searched for Audrey in the hallway and saw nothing but bloodshed. I crept along the shadows outside, following an awning until that, too, was unsafe. Guards and prisoners scurried in every direction. I turned a random door handle. It opened. I hid inside and tried the flashlight. It flashed intermittently and died. I felt for a wall and followed it until I was stopped abruptly by the sound of splashing water.
No voices. Only splashing. Waves that lapped and crashed.
“Jack?” Audrey yelled from the darkness. “Is that you?”
“Yes! What the hell is that noise?”
“They’re falling in,” Audrey said.
“Falling in?”
“Yeah. They’re walking straight into the pool.”
“Let me come to you,” I said, “I need—“ but something grabbed my right arm. I panicked and fired the Winchester into the pool.
“It’s me,” Audrey said. My heart raced. “I found another room, and I think another exit.” She pulled me into a room and shut the heavy door behind us. There was no sound. Even the splashing water was silenced. We stood in complete stillness. It was warm, the air moist.
Quickly, we reached the opposite end of the room fifteen feet from the door. We searched for another door but felt only a bunch of rubber hoses like dry, leathery tentacles.
Audrey yelped. “I found a body.”
“Shoot it.”
“It’s not moving.”
“What’s it doing?”
“Standing. It doesn’t have a head.”
I shuffled toward her and ran my hand over its firm chest, over its headless, armless torso. “A mannequin. It feels like it’s wearing a wetsuit.”
She took my hand and pulled me to another wall where she made me feel the items on a shelf. I picked up a diving mask with a snorkel attached. Respirators and a weight belt. Then, she shoved an air tank around in a wooden bin. The scuba cylinders crashed together like an oversized wind chime.
Fingernails scratched at the steel door.
“Well. We’re stuck, aren’t we?”
“We’ll just push through them.”
“We don’t know how many there are,” I threw the rifle on the bench.
The scratching got louder. The door shook in its frame.
The tiny room lit up like day. Audrey held a bright silver light, it cast her pale and white.
“Look. A light,” the large lights were attached to a camera in bulky underwater housing.
Eighteen air tanks were stored in the wooden bin, and nearly every square inch of the wall was covered in tools or equipment. A clothing rack with soggy wetsuits, a barrel of fins, and a shelf of broken knives. A long, two-inch crescent wrench rested on metal pegs. I picked up an air tank and the wrench.
“We’ll use the tanks,” I said. “They’ll plow through anything.”
“You’ll kill us.”
“So will they.”
The metal bench scraped and screamed as I slid it across the concrete floor. I placed it directly in front of the door and set a cylinder on top.
“Keep the light on the valve.”
Audrey held the light as I raised the wrench over the valve.
She covered her eyes and the light dipped away. I swung the hefty wrench against the stem. The valve flew off, a deafening sibilance filled the room. The bouncing valve skittered across the floor and the tank flew furiously into the door. The door burst open and the tank, spinning deliriously, sent six undead crashing into the pool. The tank tumbled into the water after them, gurgling and whistling.
Quickly, I set up another air tank and struck the valve. It took off and caught the doorframe. The tank spun like a propeller and skipped across the water. I set up cylinder after cylinder. I released ten of the tanks into the dark, moaning pool. I struck the last cylinder. The valve crashed off the wall and landed in my eye. I fell straight down. Blood dripped into my mouth.
I dragged the pack and the rifle behind me, spilling out into the chlorine air. The infected writhed on the floor outside the equipment room. The pool still slapped and splashed. The silver light bounced behind me, and I waited for Audrey to join me. There was darkness in my right eye. It was warm and sticky and it hurt to blink.
With the light, we saw the bodies as they collected in the pool. They sank and waddled eerily at the bottom. Their hair drifted and bobbed. The light caught each individual hair. There must have been thirty or forty and they kept falling in. We left the pool for the pump room.
We closed ourselves in with the pumps. A rat fell from the top of one of the tanks to a lower one and scurried across a pipe. Snow had blown in the pump room, scattered and melted and tracked with blood and sand and dirt. We hurried to the truck, which was as we’d left it. The doors were wide open and snow covered the seats. It chimed with the keys still in the ignition.
I climbed onto the seat and pulled the door closed. Audrey shut her door and we were back in silence. Stillness. I propped my leg on the dash and let my head roll back.
At the end of the world, you press on. You don’t stand still in case the earth collapses beneath you.
I started the truck as Audrey stretched the Glock in front of my face. The cab exploded. Powder burned my eyes and the hot shell spiraled around the cab. Something collapsed in the snow. I rubbed my ears and looked out the shattered window. A guard was less than a foot from my door, hand twitching around the stock of his rifle. His eyeball hung from its socket and dripped like an uncooked egg.
I dropped the truck into gear and turned on the auxiliary lights. We sped across the parking lot and bounced through a ditch. The truck spilled sideways into the road. The cold air bellowed in the window and my ears rang. The sirens continued to wail across campus. I sped half a mile down the road before stopping on the shoulder.
I examined the dark eye in the mirror. There was a deep gash across the whole socket. I pried the lid open. The eye was flooded with blood and looked pretty well gone. I sat back and took deep, angry breaths. I opened the console, the glove box, and the door pockets. Desperately, I emptied them all to the floor.
“Jack, what are you looking for?”
“I smell wintergreen. I know there’s some in here.”
“Gum?”
I pulled down the visor. A can of tobacco fell in my lap. “Not gum.”
I tore open the can and stuffed a large pinch in my lip. “I quit this shit when I was fifteen. I figure it doesn’t matter much now. You want some?”
“I think it’s nasty.”
I stuffed more in my gums. My mouth flooded with spit.
She reached out and took a few threads between her fingers and packed them in her lower gum. I spit out the open window. The tobacco stained the snow brown.
I waited on the side of the road until my gums burned and my head felt light. Then, we headed for the downtown area, a single strip of road that ran half a mile. The area was circled in blue on our map. The Sheriff’s office, police department, and Alfie’s Outdoors were all drawn in with little squares.
Halfway there, Audrey leaned forward and held her head. She swiped her finger swiftly across her gum and pulled out the tobacco.
“It feels like I just smoked ten cigarettes.”
“It’s strong if you never tried it before.”
“Please stop the truck.”
I slowed to a crawl. Before I could stop she opened her door and leaned out, retching a putrid streak of black sludge to the snow. She heaved again. And again. By then, she had nothing left to throw up and dark strings hung from her mouth. She didn’t move for a long time. In the dark, I couldn’t tell if she was still breathing. I kept my hand wrapped around the Glock.
“I don’t think that was good,” she said finally.
We followed the tire tracks downtown. There were bare spots on the road where trucks had been parked.
An Igloo cooler was left on the side of the road, a steaming cup of coffee on top of it.
“See if there’s a map for emergency drills. Something like that.”
“I don’t see one.”
“Well, they all went to the same place. They wouldn’t just abandon town. They have a plan for everything.”
“I said there isn’t a goddamn map.”
I stomped the brake pedal and the anti-lock system pulsed in the snow. “Give me the maps.”
Audrey held the maps tightly.
I snatched the bundle from her and pulled out the second map in the stack, Emergency Plan. I’d seen it at least six times already.
“Good, you found it.”
“Do you have a problem?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you have a problem?”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”
I unfolded the emergency map and examined the guard positions. Red dots were positioned all along Main Street, “Roof” was scribbled above the locations. The jail had a large red square drawn around it, ten dots marked for roof patrol. Sanctuary. I folded the map and continued toward Main Street. “I’m asking if you just didn’t see the map or if you didn’t look for it.”
She was silent.
“Why?”
She kicked the floorboard. “Because you’re not puking black shit, Jack. You didn’t get bit and I’m just…counting down.”
Kill Town, USA Page 8