He could certainly get sheets and blankets at the motel, and there were at least half-a-dozen cars in the parking lot.
And the sun was touching the horizon.
He couldn’t wait any longer. He made his decision and pulled off the 40, heading for the motel.
It was a two-storey L-shaped building with a parking lot facing the freeway. Kevin pulled in and scanned it, waiting, letting his engine idle. He knew the noise would draw any zombies who were nearby. After thirty seconds or so, he was satisfied that the area was unoccupied.
But he knew it might not stay that way, so he moved quickly.
He took a crowbar he’d found in the Cadillac and ran to the first car. The door was locked. He could just smash the window, but the car was a newer model and might have a still-functioning alarm; no point in drawing extra attention to himself.
The third car he approached was occupied – someone sat behind the wheel.
In the dimming light, it took Kevin a few seconds to realize what he was seeing: it was a dead man, unmoving. As Kevin neared, taking small cautious steps, he saw a dried splatter on the glass and a crumpled skull. He reached the car, and followed the corpse’s right arm down to a hand still clutching a revolver.
He checked the rest of the car, verified it was empty, and then reached for the door handle. It opened.
Holding his breath, he leaned in past the corpse to the keys that still dangled from the ignition, and turned them to ACC. The dashboard lit up, and the gas gauge moved to almost the top of the F. A full tank.
Pay dirt.
Feeling a surge of relief, Kevin returned to the Hummer and moved it up near to the dead man’s car. He popped the gas tank covers, unscrewed both gas caps, stuck one end of the plastic tubing into the dead man’s tank and sucked on the other end until he saw brown liquid swirling up, then shoved it into the Hummer.
By the time he was done transferring the fuel, the sun had set but the sky was still light. He knew that he should probably have left already, but he didn’t relish the idea of another cold Midwestern night on the rough floor of the Hummer’s rear area. The motel rooms beckoned a short distance away, their simple treasures irresistible.
After capping his tank and storing his siphon tube away, Kevin did one other thing before heading to the motel – he walked around to the passenger door of the dead man’s car, opened it and reached down to take the revolver.
The corpse’s hand was still tight around the pistol, and Kevin felt his stomach clench as he broke a dead finger with a loud snap, being careful to keep the gun pointed away from him in case it went off. It didn’t, and he finally pried it away from the cadaver’s withered grasp. He wasn’t sure he knew how to use it, but its heft was reassuring, and he held it at his side as he jogged to the Registration Office.
It was getting dark inside by now, but there was enough light to see that the motel was old-fashioned enough to have still been using metal keys, which hung from a numbered pegboard behind the desk. Kevin quickly scanned the office, saw nothing but dust and some old magazines, and he took the keys for Rooms #5 and #6. The keys for the first four rooms were missing.
He left the office and ran down the longer leg of the “L”, past #2, #3 and #4, until he came to #5. He opened the door and stepped in.
The room was dark. He flipped the light switch, and was surprised to find the motel still had power. He smiled to himself at the thought of the ice machine outside still functioning, making perfect square cubes that no one would ever use. Maybe he’d take some just to give the machine a last sense of usefulness before its electricity failed forever.
He moved quickly, stripping the bed of sheets and blankets. Glancing at the bathroom he decided to add towels as well. He also grabbed soap, shampoo and toilet paper. Carrying his loot to the Hummer, he dumped it in the back, and decided to ransack Room #6 as well. When it came to blankets, better too many than not enough.
After stripping #6, he knew he’d stayed too long. The parking lot was growing darker, even though a few sodium lights popped on, their timers still working.
Kevin threw the last armfuls into the back of the Hummer, closed the door, turned – and stared at a zombie staggering towards him.
It had been a middle-aged woman, with a stout build and styled hair, but her lower jaw had been torn away when she’d been attacked and dried gore stained her floral-print blouse. She made no sound as she staggered towards Kevin, which was why he hadn’t heard her. She was no more than ten feet away.
Kevin remembered he still held the pistol. He raised it and pulled the trigger.
The gun clicked on an empty chamber.
Adrenaline raced through Kevin as he tried to remember all the movies he’d seen in which gunslingers or cops had used revolvers. They did something with the hammer, didn’t they? Had to pull it back . . . was that how the cartridge turned and brought a chambered round into place? Or did this gun even hold any bullets? Had the dead driver used the last one on himself?
While Kevin’s mind raced through the possibilities, the zombie grabbed his arm.
He cried out and staggered back, but she held his hand in an iron grip. His finger pressed the trigger spasmodically, but the only result was an empty click – click – click—
She brought the teeth of her upper jaw down on his fingers.
Using all of his strength and fuelled by pure panic, Kevin jerked his hand away, dropping the gun. He stumbled back to the open door of the Hummer and fell into the seat, pulling the door shut behind him and locking it. The zombie pounded on the window, but Kevin ignored her, reaching for the keys he’d left in the ignition.
The engine roared to life and Kevin backed away, tyres squealing. He was shaking badly as he jammed the gear into DRIVE, and punched the accelerator, running the zombie down. He felt the wheels crush something, and he shouted victoriously. Then he turned and headed for the relative safety of the interstate.
He drove a few miles, then pulled over. He was miles from a town and didn’t even see any houses clustered near the freeway. He’d be okay here. Only then did he realize he was crying, from fear and anger at himself.
Kevin forced himself to calm down, turned on the Hummer’s overhead light . . . and froze in shock at what he saw:
There was blood on the back of his hand.
It wasn’t a lot of blood, but it was his blood, flowing from two small incisions the zombie woman’s teeth had made in his skin.
“Fuck,” Kevin said, to no one. Then, screaming, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
He pounded the roof with his clean hand, and then forced himself to think:
Maybe I can still catch it. The first-aid kit . . . clean the wound out, it couldn’t have spread far yet . . .
He scrabbled in the rear seat for the first-aid kit he’d found in Kingman. He managed to dump the contents as he lifted it into the front seat, but he found the anti-bacterial ointment, unscrewed the cap and squirted most of the tube’s contents on to his hand. He then used a cotton swab to wipe at the wound. He looked at it again.
The bleeding had stopped.
But he knew, in his gut, that he was too late. He thought back to everything he’d heard or read about the progress of HRV. Was it days? Hours? When would he start to feel it, working inside him, changing him? Killing him?
Kevin did the only thing he could do then: he cried. He cried at the unfairness of it all, at the absurdity of losing his life to a tiny wound inflicted by a dead woman with no lower jaw, at never seeing his friends on either side of the country again, while he died alone in a stolen Hummer.
No, fuck that.
After a few minutes Kevin rubbed his sleeve across his face and forced himself to stop.
How far am I from Virginia? I am going to see Bobby. And then I’ll ask him to be the one to put me down. When I come back.
Kevin almost started the Hummer up, to keep going, even though the sun had set and the freeway was already being eclipsed by darkness. But if he hit a wrecked car or a st
aggering figure that he couldn’t see because it was night and he was doing 70 miles per hour, he’d never make it to Virginia.
So he took a deep breath, locked the doors, taped cardboard up over the windows, and crawled into the back. He looked at a bag of candy bars, chips and plastic-wrapped convenience store pastries, but he couldn’t bring himself to eat.
He already feared the hunger that was to come.
POST FROM NYDSL FORUM
AUTHOR: TY WARD
SUBJECT: ANYBODY ALIVE AROUND RHONEBACH?
MESSAGE: IF ANYBODY ELSE IN OR NEAR RHONEBACH READS THIS, PLEASE POST A RESPONSE. A BAD JOKE, A CUTE CAT PHOTO, A POLITICAL RANT, ANYTHING. I THINK I’M ALONE HERE.
Chapter Six
TY DIDN’T SO much awake as roll out of bed. He didn’t really sleep any more. The following few nights after that first zombie had entered Rhonebach had been filled with the roar of distant gun blasts and an occasional shriek or shout.
Ty had stayed in the main house with his brother Rich and with Ben. Ben had spent a lot of the time on the phone with his mother, who had lived in Chicago since the divorce; but at the end of the second night the calls had stopped going through, and Ben had fled to his room to cry.
Rich and Ty had nailed boards up over the windows, but when things seemed to quieten down on the third day, Ben had taken his father’s car, intending to head to Chicago. Rich had pedalled a bicycle into town, planning to borrow or just steal a vehicle to follow Ben.
Ty hadn’t heard from either of them since.
He’d tried both of their cell phones, just in case. Ben had answered the first call, but said only that he couldn’t talk. Those were the last words Ty had heard him say; after that, the calls hadn’t gone through. Unable to bear the emptiness of the big main house any longer, Ty had returned to his guest house.
By the fifth day, Ty had barricaded the three windows and single doorway, but the moans of the dead outside kept him awake. He’d taken the additional precaution of taping plastic sheeting up over the windows to make them light-proof, he’d pushed his only heavy piece of furniture in front of his door, and he stayed as silent as possible, but somehow the dead still seemed to know he was here.
They’d ringed the house for two days, occasionally banging on a wall or board, their grunts and wails testimony to their desperation; but they’d finally given up, and it’d been three nights now since he’d heard them.
But he still couldn’t sleep. When he tried to close his eyes, he saw nothing but his own failures, written large on his mental viewscreen.
He’d abandoned Rhonebach. Its people had looked to him, depended on him (“war hero!”), and he’d deserted them. When push had come to shove, he’d done neither; he’d run and hid. He hadn’t been able to comfort Ben, or keep him from leaving.
Ty was a useless coward, broken beyond fixing. Even if he couldn’t fire a gun, he could’ve used a bat, a broom; he could’ve made himself a weapon, a spear perhaps. He could have talked to Ben. He could have gone with him.
And he would’ve been dead with all the rest. Or dead and undead.
The local channel on his television had been taken over by the Emergency Broadcast System; announcers kept reading lists of emergency shelters and telling survivors to make their way to the nearest one. The shelters were set up in high schools, churches, underground storage bunkers. The announcers were running interviews with people camped out in the shelters who were calm, even jovial. They made jokes about lines for the bathrooms and how many tins of canned beans they’d eaten.
Ty stopped watching when he realized they’d been running the same interviews for two days. He wondered if the families in those clips were even still alive.
The nearest shelter was the public high school in Red Hook, twelve miles distant. Getting there on foot was out of the question. Even without zombies, his war injuries made walking that far nearly impossible.
And even if Ty could find a car – there were probably plenty without owners now in Rhonebach – he knew he wouldn’t go there. If he did, he’d either find the remains of a bloodsoaked massacre, or resolute mothers and fathers, protecting their children, doing their best to convince the little ones that this was just like a big camping trip or summer camp, except Mom and Dad were there, too.
He couldn’t handle it. Even before he’d been packed up and shipped off to the war, he hadn’t done well with large groups. His family had made him attend a few town functions – a Christmas party, a town meeting – and he’d drawn into himself like a hermit crab, refusing to speak to anyone else and hugely relieved when they’d brought him home again. His computer repair service had eked by on word of mouth; Ty was better with motherboards and hard drives than he was with human beings.
No, pretending to be a decent, hardworking member of a survivors’ camp was out.
But how long could he last on his own? He had enough food for another three days, maybe six if he rationed it. He thought there might still be food in the main house – Rich had always kept a well-stocked pantry – but he dreaded venturing back there. If Rich, or even worse, Ben, had turned . . .
Suicide seemed like his best option at this point.
But he couldn’t imagine how he’d do it. He didn’t have a gun, or even a length of rope. He supposed he could cut his wrists and bleed out; that seemed the easiest and fastest way. Last night, as he’d finished off the last of his bourbon, Ty had picked up a steak knife and pressed the point against the skin of his inner arm; the blade was dull, and it would take some doing to saw through the veins. Fortunately he’d never been opposed to a little hard work.
He wasn’t ready for that yet, though.
Ty couldn’t even understand why he hung on. He had nothing to live for – no wife, no children, no real career, no passions. He would probably have been better off if he’d done it six years ago, after he’d returned from Iraq; hell, if he’d done it before he’d shipped out, there might still be a kid alive there.
But he hadn’t done it any of those times, and he wouldn’t do it now, at least not yet. He refused to believe he was finished; he supposed everyone felt this way – as if their life had a mission they still had to complete – but that recognition didn’t diminish his own determination to stay alive.
The knife’s meeting with his wrists would have to wait for now.
After checking his computer again (there was still no response to his post on the forum, and he knew that the electricity would fail long before any appeared) and trying a call to Ben (just in case), Ty made an attempt to scrub himself clean, then looked over his cans. He finally opted for tuna instead of pork and beans or tomato soup; he had no mayonnaise or bread to make a sandwich, but he didn’t mind eating it right out of the can.
He opened the container and was just raising the first forkful to his mouth when he heard something outside.
He froze mid-bite, ears straining. There: a shout. Ty set the can and fork back down and moved to the front door of the guest house, leaning forward over the bureau pushed up against it.
A woman’s voice, shouting for help. It was coming closer.
It was the first human sound he’d heard in days, and it paralyzed him for a few seconds. He knew he should just stay put, let her go by outside. Her calls sounded hoarse, and Ty wondered if something was chasing her. Maybe even something still alive. A dog. A man.
Bam! A gunshot sounded not very far from where he stood, safe inside his barricaded house.
The woman’s voice came again. She was close, possibly in his backyard.
“Help! Help me . . . is anybody here?”
He ground his jaws together and considered. He could stay hidden, and keep going as he was . . . to a lonely, probably self-inflicted death. Or he could push aside the bureau, open the door and let her in, which meant he’d probably have to share his food and it would cut his time in half.
He leaned against the bureau, but didn’t push yet.
She shouted again. Now she’d gone past his door.
“Hello? Help!”
He was safe right now. He was warm and had food.
And he was lonely. He’d been lonely for a long time, but goddamn, not like this.
Before he knew what he was doing, his shoulder was against the bureau, and he shouted, “Hold on!” as he pushed it across the wooden floor.
He heard a response outside. “Hello?”
With trembling fingers, he undid the locks on the door and flung it open.
A woman with unkempt hair and soiled clothing staggered to a halt near the corner of the guest house. She looked back at him, wary. Ty saw immediately that she was favouring one leg, but he didn’t see any blood on her; he hoped it meant that she’d just sprained an ankle.
He waved her frantically in. “Come on!”
She hesitated, and he saw she held a pistol in one hand. He glanced in the direction she’d come from and made out the shape of a body face down in the dirt fifty yards away, near where the backyard gave way to a rolling meadow.
Ty turned back to the woman . . .
An arm reached from around the corner of the guest house and grabbed her. She screamed and pulled back, but her attacker held her wrist firmly. As she struggled she pulled the zombie around the corner into view.
It was Ben.
The golden-haired, handsome sixteen-year-old boy who’d kept him going for the past seven years, who he’d hoped was in Chicago with his Mom. Instead, Ben had never even made it out of Rhonebach.
The sight of Ben – now ash-grey, part of his face missing, his eyes glassy – stunned Ty. He watched in shock as his nephew’s head ducked down to the woman’s neck. His teeth clamped on to the soft meat just above her shoulder, he jerked back, and came away with a bloody hunk.
The action gave the woman the leverage she needed to jerk away, and she raised the pistol. The word “No” died on Ty’s lips as she pulled the trigger, at point-blank range.
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