“If the phone lines are down, I think the cell towers would be, too,” I say.
He ignores me.
“I’m Jack.” It comes out stilted and awkward. I’ve never been too good at talking with people I don’t know. “We could use a little help.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says.
I linger, expecting more.
He moves the phone away from his squinted eyes and says, “Damn it.”
“What’s your name?”
“Pat. And no, I’m not helping. I don’t plan on sticking around.”
“Believe me, I want to leave, too. I got a fiancé, but it’s too dangerous — ”
He cuts me off. “Yeah, yeah, save it, kid. I get that you’re scared. I just don’t give a shit.” He’s frowning. It reminds me of someone, but I don’t know who.
“Whatever,” I say, turning toward the other couch.
“Whatever,” Pat echoes, trying to mimic my tone.
I scoff, then the black guy and I lift up the other couch and drag it toward the two entrance doors. Abby shows up with a cart full of weight plates. She wheels them over to me. I stack forty-five pounders near the legs of the couch so none of those things can push it over the tile. I don’t know how well it’s going to work, but it’s all we have.
The old man comes back. He has jump ropes draped around his necks like scarves.
Abby smiles, takes the jump ropes, and wraps them around the handles of each pair of doors. It’s not much, but Abby must’ve been a girl scout because she ties a complicated knot that I know I’d never be able to untie without a pair of hedge clippers.
Abby looks pale and near death. “My mom,” she says. “Is she going to be okay?”
I nod. “Yeah, she is. Don’t worry.”
I’ve always been a good liar. Sometimes, I can even convince myself. So I have no problem convincing her. Truth is, I don’t know if anyone is going to be okay. Not even Darlene. I push the thought away again.
She smiles, then goes back to tying her jump rope knots.
Most of the doors are covered by various workout equipment.
Through a crack between one of the couches and the glass divider, I see our ravenous cop has finished with Toby’s stomach because most of it is gone. Now she works on his face. Bits have been chewed away already. His teeth stretch up to his nose with the absence of his upper lip. One of his eyes hangs from the socket near his ear on a tangled optic nerve.
Most of the carpet is stained red. There’s blood on the community cork board. A sign for a lost Chihuahua is almost completely drenched, soggy and falling from its thumbtack.
There’s another scream from inside of the rec. Not Miss Fox’s.
The scream came from behind the front desk. It’s Kevin. Doaks must’ve turned already. We’ve been infiltrated. We’re screwed.
I turn to run toward my old friend.
Abby Cage says, “Wait up!” from behind me.
The offices behind the desk are a maze. Sounds seem to echo off every wall.
I see a ray of sunlight cast across the hallway floor. A blast of heat hits me. The screams are louder.
I reach a white room. The sheriff is passed out on the table, bloody towels still stuck to the wound on his neck. Every few seconds, he turns his head back and forth and clamps his eyes shut tight, wrinkling the skin, making him look much older. He hasn’t turned. He’s not locked in, either. I pull the door closed, hoping it locks automatically, knowing it doesn’t.
Where is Kevin?
I don’t linger much longer. I follow the heat and dwindling sunlight streaming in.
Around the corner at the end of the hall, an emergency exit is open. One of the zombies has Kevin’s arm in her blood-slimy hands.
Yellow eyes bear into my soul, freezing me to the spot.
“Help me!” Kevin says. “Don’t just stand there. Help me!”
11
I unfreeze, but the woman doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, she just opens her mouth. Blood lines her teeth. Clumps of saliva hang from her lips. She moans like a person suffering from the worst case of the flu.
I’m scared as all hell, but I plunge my hand in the tangle of limbs. For a second, I go numb all over my body. I think of Darlene. I think of the life we could’ve had together. The kids, the house, the vacations, the white-picket fence.
Then my fingers close around the woman’s arm. Her skin is burning hot. I pull with all my might. Kevin breaks free, falls to the ground and starts scrambling away.
Abby grabs him around the waist and pulls — a futile effort. That’s all well and good except now I’m the zombie’s sole focus. I try to let go, to turn and run, but she weighs about a thousand pounds.
Dead weight.
We topple over. I hit the carpet with a lung-exploding thud.
Spit drips onto my cheek. I smell that road kill scent of death.
“No!” Abby screams.
I hear what sounds like a stampede coming for me. Then something whizzes by my face. It’s a size fifteen Nike. The toe connects with the zombie’s face. A few teeth fly out of her mouth along with her whole body being lifted off of me. She goes crashing into the wall, half hanging outside into the beautiful July day.
I get up fast.
It’s times like these I wish I was stronger. Which is why I was in the gym in the first place. Losing most of my life, being picked on and ridiculed in high school can have a damaging effect on the kid, one that bleeds into his adult life. I, Jack Jupiter, am a prime example.
“Are you all right? Are you hurt?” Abby asks me.
I nod, wiping my face off with the bottom of my shirt. I am dazed.
“Holy shit, did I kill her?” Kevin says. “Fuck, I killed her.”
His voice is usually deeper than the ocean, but now he sounds like a kid in the throes of voice-changing puberty.
“No, they are already dead,” I say. “We have to remember that.”
“Oh God, I’m a murderer,” he says, then turns back to look at me. “This never happened. Anyone asks, this never happened.”
The zombie’s up against the wall like a crumpled piece of trash. There’s a checkmark branded on her forehead. More blood runs near the wound — it’s her blood this time.
Abby echoes my thoughts. “I-I think she is dead…”
“We need to be thorough,” I say. “Go get me scissors, or a knife. Something sharp.”
“Uh, guys…” Abby says.
Too late.
She points to the crumpled woman. I turn to follow her gaze.
That death rattle fills the air. A hand reaches out to grab at us. Kevin is quick, but I’m not. That’s what sitting around playing video games and writing gets me. Her cold hand grabs my ankle, then the other one wraps around my calf.
I try to shake her off me. It doesn’t work. Instead, I fall to the floor. Kevin is on me, about to yank me to safety like he did in the lobby.
But the zombie is determined, and apparently, hungry.
Two gunshots ring out in the small hallway.
My eardrums feel like they’re about to explode. I scream, closing my eyes but don’t hear myself.
When I open them, Doaks stands shakily, the towels still wrapped around his neck. He holds his gun out in front of him. A wisp of smoke flutters into the air and his arms wobble one last time before he lets them drop to his side.
This dead woman is now missing a chunk of her head. Blood drenches the pale walls; its rolls down the cracked emergency exit door in round droplets.
“Now, she’s definitely dead,” I say to Kevin.
Doaks takes a breath then promptly falls down on the floor at Abby’s feet.
She yelps.
The gun bounces off the carpet and rolls toward me. I pick it up.
Kevin grapples the sheriff, starts taking him to the athletic trainer’s room, leaving us. Abby’s face is a mask of tears. She’s red. Her hair is no longer in a tight ponytail, strands hang over her forehead into her eyes.
> I don’t what to say or do to comfort her. Really, what are my options? So I don’t say anything at all. I go toward the emergency exit.
“Help me move her outside before more show up,” I say.
Abby nods.
I grab her feet. Abby grabs her arms.
“This is not how I expected my day to go,” Abby says. “Why couldn’t this crap wait for another month and a half?
“What’s in a month and a half?” I ask, grunting with the zombie’s weight.
“When I move out of this hellhole.”
We go through the door.
I drop my end of the dead woman. We are too late. Part of the crowd has already moved from the front to the side where this emergency exit exits to. They are drawn by sound. Basic primal instincts keep them going. What sound is better at attracting the dead than freaking gunshots?
I don’t intend to get devoured today, so I pull the pistol out of the waistband of my gym shorts.
How hard can it be to shoot a gun? I’ve never done it, not except for video games when there’s assisted aiming and, most importantly, no consequences.
So I pull the trigger, unsure of where to aim, just knowing it’s into the crowd. When the gun cracks, I pull the trigger a second time, just for safe measure.
“Oh, God,” Abby says from behind me in a muted voice.
The nearest green dumpster is drenched in brains. Spots of red and bits of flesh stick to the metal bin like a paint. Fireworks of death on a green canvas.
One of the dead is down while the others trample its lifeless corpse. The other shot went wide, hitting a young man in the chest, driving him back a foot, but not doing much to slow him down.
The sight sickens me and excites me at the same time.
I raise the gun, not knowing how many bullets are left, aiming at the closest zombie, which is a man in a tank top. I imagine it’s Freddy Huber, my vivid imagination kick-starting. Hopefully this will soften the guilt.
I don’t get to pull the trigger. Abby grabs the back of my arm and pulls me inside before the dead wash over me.
Another five seconds and I would’ve been a meal.
She slams the door, pulls out her trusty key, and locks it.
“What are you doing? Trying to get us killed?” she says. “If they get in, we’re dead. You said it yourself!”
I say nothing. I know my reasons. Crazy as they may be. I thought I could clear a path, I thought I could get to Darlene.
Kevin is standing around the corner, he holds a broken broom handle, muscles flexed. He relaxes a bit when he sees us, but still somehow looks like King Kong.
“The sheriff,” he says, “he’s mumbling, and he’s talkin’ about the end of the world again. I-I think he’s gonna die.”
12
Doaks does look like he’s going to die soon, and there’s nothing I can do to help him. The room is quiet, except for the slightest buzz of cool air escaping from the register under a sink counter. Cool air that does nothing for us.
The power is still off. Everything on is running on the backup generator, and the temperature suffers from it.
Doaks smells the way my grandpa smelled in his hospital bed three days after his stroke, the day he died.
His eyes are wide open. He studies Abby, Kevin, and me like we’re works of art on display at some museum. He looks at us, but I’m not sure if he really sees us.
“It…it hurts,” he says. “She bit me and…and it hurts bad.”
I lean closer, part of me still thinking this is just some cruel prank. I’m covered in blood enough as it is so it doesn’t matter to me as I reach out to move the towels off his neck. They don’t come easily. It’s like they’re glued to his skin. Dried blood snags on the fabric. Doaks winces as I pry it free. A ripping noise fills my ears, and I smell rotting flesh. Old, spoiled chicken breasts you forgot in your car on a ninety-degree day after a trip to the supermarket.
I’m curious. I want to see if it looks like I’d imagined, like the bites in my zombie novel. But I’m also disgusted. Let’s call it morbid curiosity.
Abby squirms and shuffles away behind me. Kevin makes an “Ew” sound.
“They don’t die…” he says.
The wound is gruesome.
“S-She was just a kid!” Doaks screams, and he does half of a sit-up with the shake in his voice. “She was just a kid, and I shot her…three times. B-But she k-kept coming. She wouldn’t die. All I wanted to do was get through that damn festival. I didn’t want to kill anyone. What was I supposed to do?”
I know how he’s feeling because I am in the same boat. Doaks is a danger as long as he’s left alive. I will have to put him down before he can turn. I don’t want to.
I have to.
Doaks eyelids flutter. I see the pain on his face, hear it in his voice. “She died…they all died. I felt their pulses. They weren’t breathing. Then…then they rose. All of them. She bit me. The little girl bit me. Her teeth were like…were like a bear trap. I couldn’t get her off of me. I-I panicked. Then she bit Fred and Stacy. The florist lady. Mayor Gunther got it, too. I couldn’t do my j-job, I had to…had to run. There were too many. The whole town…dead. Dead!” He screams and shakes, pain wracking through his body.
“It’s okay,” I say. But somehow the way Doaks describes it is worse than I thought. It’s not okay. This is real, and it’s not okay.
From the hallway, bangs come from the other side of the walls, almost like gunshots. It’s the zombies outside — my mind’s eye imagines Fred and Stacy, Mayor Gunther, and whoever else was bit. They want in; they want us.
“Everything all right?” the old man says from the front desk.
“Not really,” Kevin says, poking his head around the door frame into the hallway.
“What the fuck’s goin on back there, y’all? I heard gunshots.”
“Yeah, you did,” I holler. “Kevin, go let them know what’s going on.” He does. Then I look at Abby, and in a quieter voice, I say: “How many other doors are there? How many other ways can those things get in?”
She cups her left elbow with her right hand, looks up to the ceiling. “Uh, let’s see…there’s the front doors, but we got those barricaded. This exit, which I locked, exits on the opposite side of the building near the basketball courts, the other near the indoor soccer field, and the loading bay. Yeah, I think that’s it,” she says.
They all lead to a place too close to the front of the building which kills my delusions of escape.
“Are they all locked?” I ask.
“Should be.”
“Should be? Go check,” I say. There’s venom in my voice, but I’m sorry, I don’t want to end up like Doaks or Toby. I don’t want to be shot three times and still be alive and craving human flesh.
Abby leaves.
It’s me and Doaks in the small athletic training room. Every time he squirms, the legs of the wooden table creak under his weight. I put my hand on his, and tell him it’s going to be okay.
He shakes his head.
“It burns, son. You have to help me. Please,” he says.
This man is beyond saving. He wouldn’t make the trip to the ambulance even if the damn bus backed up over all those freaks outside, crashed through the building, and opened their doors right here in this very room.
So I lie again.
“It’s going to be okay. We’re gonna get you some help.”
He scrunches up his face. His eyes take on the same look of a deflated balloon. Then the look passes. He’s kind of normal, almost serene-looking.
“Just shoot me, kid. Just s-shoot me in the fuckin head.”
My eyes drift toward the gun I have in my waistband — his gun — and I think about it, like really think about it. I know where this is going, this day, this night. We aren’t going to get any help unless we help ourselves, and the odds are stacked against us.
He shudders again, creaking the table with the movement. It’s like the scream of a small animal caught in the spo
kes of a bike tire. I almost can’t take it.
“Please, kid. Please. It burns.”
The screams get louder now. My head pounds with the force of the now-deceased marching band drum.
I got to get out of here, got to get away from this guy.
“We’re going to get you help,” I say. “I promise, Sheriff Doaks.” But even a deaf man could hear the lie in my voice.
He shakes again, this time bringing his arms up and crossing them over his body as if trying to keep himself together. It’s a sad sight to see — a man at the end of his rope, begging for death. I turn to leave, to not put myself through this any longer.
I am no Johnny Deadslayer. I am Jack Jupiter, and it’s so much harder to kill someone who isn’t already dead.
I leave him there, bucking and screaming in pain, locking and closing the door behind me.
“Please kill me…pleaseeeeee,” comes through the door.
13
The front doors are secured. I see through a crack in the stacked equipment and couches that most of the people outside haven’t figured out how to work a doorknob, and haven’t even broken into the lobby yet.
But there’s more than before. They moan and death rattle together so it’s loud enough to hear on the inside. Hands and faces press against the glass. I see teeth, yellow eyes, disfigured faces.
Soon, they will break that glass, and soon they’ll be closer to getting in.
The old man, dressed in his basketball jersey, stands against the waist-high brick wall that separates the running track from the waiting area opposite the front desk. He shakes his head, runs a hand through his white hair. I watch this from the door that leads to the front desk. He doesn’t see me, either, when his lips move silently and he looks up to the high ceiling, with its dimmed lights, and he does the sign of the cross.
God can’t help us now.
“Give us the gun!” someone yells.
My head snaps to the left, where the crowd of survivors is grouped in the cafeteria area. It’s the sweaty guy who’s yelling. Pat is his name, and I can already tell he’s a total asshole, the type of guy who bullies people thirty years out of high school and cheats on his wife when the opportunity presents itself.
Dead Haven (Jack Zombie Book 1) Page 6