“It’s okay, they won’t come any closer.” He smiles, looking proud of himself. “I do need your help, though. There’s more today than normal, I’m guessing they smelled or heard you all banging around in town.” He frowns with a tut.
“Is he saying I smell?” I look sideways at Mikey. “Did you just say I smell?” I shout to Dean and scowl.
“What? Well, yeah, we all do.” He shrugs.
“I do not!” I start to move forward, the eyes of hundreds of hungry undead watching my every movement. The closer I get to them, the more riled up they seem to be. And the stench—sweet Jesus, they stink so bad. I feel even more offended that he had the nerve to say I smelled when standing next to these deaders. That’s just fucking rude.
We come within arm’s reach of the deaders, most of us gagging and spitting out bile. It’s not only the smell, though that’s horrendous—kind of like rotten month-old raw toilet sewage mixed in with shitty baby diapers and left in the sun too long. It’s the sight of them too. The years have not been good to them, wherever they’ve come from.
Dried out flesh hangs in ribbons from their puckered faces, rotten eyeballs dangling from graying sockets. Bloated stomachs are stretched far beyond normal limits, and I wonder why they haven’t exploded or somehow released the gasses they contain. Then I realize that it more than likely isn’t gasses inside them anymore, but flesh, skin, bones, people. Human fucking bodies are inside these walking nightmares. A deader moves, stretching its arms out to us, and as I look, I can see fingers and feet pressing on the stretched skin from the inside of it. It’s when I can see the shape of an arm, though; that does it for me. Why an arm out of everything else, I don’t know, but it’s an arm—particularly the elbow joint that is most visible—and it’s that that makes my head spin.
I turn and heave, wanting to purge my stomach of its contents, but my stomach stubbornly refuses to let go. With every new retch I get a new image of each person that these things must have eaten: a mother, a father, a child, a daughter. My knees go weak and I clutch onto Mikey for support.
I should be used to this. I thought I was used to this, but I guess you can never get used to this sort of hell. Every time I think I’ve seen it all—thought it all—a fresh new horror is shown to me. I’m not scared, I’m horrified. These were people once, and inside them are people. Fuck, why have I never considered what happens once they eat? Why has it never dawned on me that they don’t shit and piss, that they hold onto their meals for all eternity—or at least until it rots away inside them.
Holy hell, they’re like those little Russian dolls—a body within a body. Or should I say a rotting corpse within a rotting corpse?
Chapter 13
Dean is still smiling like the cat that got the mouse, the cream, and maybe even a side order of catnip. Even little scaredy cat Anne is smiling, though she doesn’t look happy about how close they are to the deaders and backs up a little.
“It’s okay, they won’t come any closer,” Dean says again. Yet even as he says it, and I see it for myself, I have trouble believing it.
“How is this possible?” I whisper, still staring at the bloated corpses. I take a few steps forward, but Mikey’s hand clutches my forearm.
“Don’t,” he says without looking at me.
Dean walks toward us, his head held high and his chest puffed out, obviously feeling pleased with himself for freaking us all out. “I told you, they…won’t…come…any…closer.” He emphasizes each word, making me want to slap some sense into him.
“But how?” I ask, finally dragging my eyes away from the dead and looking at him. “Why? I don’t understand.”
“Anne told you, I’m a whiz with electronics. This town was swarming with the sick people at one point, and Anne and I were hiding out in my grandpa’s basement. We had practically run out of food, it was getting colder . . . I didn’t know what we were going to do. It seemed like we were going to either starve or freeze. But then one day there was a huge bang—the hydro plant had exploded after a bad storm. You couldn’t get near the place without getting electrocuted or burned. Believe me, we tried. We were worried that it would burn down the whole town, but then the fire died out and the strangest thing happened: all the sick started heading for the plant and away from town. I eventually figured out why—well, sort of. I worked out that the frequency of the live current being emitted from the damaged plant was attracting them somehow. So I worked out a better system to keep the frequency going—we didn’t want the hydro plant to just stop one day and the town end up flooded with the sick again—and voila.”
“Is that possible?” I look at Mikey and then to Alek. “I mean, that can’t be possible, can it?”
They swap strange looks before Alek speaks. “Well no, technically it shouldn’t be possible, but then there’s fucking walking corpses over there and that ain’t possible either.” He shrugs.
“Of course it’s possible,” Dean shouts, his face flushing red. “I made it possible—well, sort of—and I’ve maintained it and made it more efficient. The evidence is right before your eyes.” He continues to shout, riling the deaders up as he gestures angrily toward them.
“Listen, with respect, we’re not going to take the word of someone who believes that those,” I point toward the smelly deaders, “are just sick, and that everyone who ran away from here however long ago it was is going to come back here one day like nothing has happened, all cheery because their insurance premiums aren’t going up. Get a grip,” I bite out.
“You know, lady, you can be a real bitch,” little mousey pants pipes up, her blonde hair blowing around her face. The steam seems to go out of her as fast as it went in and she goes a crimson color after her little outburst.
I laugh. “Please. Tell me something I haven’t heard before.”
Emily nods, her mouth quirking up as she does.
The deaders are freaking me out with all their gross staring and protruding bellies, exposed bone and rotting flesh. I shudder as a fresh breeze wafts their scent toward us all.
Emily tugs on my elbow. “Can we go now? I don’t like the way they’re staring at me.”
“Yeah, let’s go. Mikey, Alek, you coming?” I back up a couple of steps, not wanting to turn my back on the deaders for a second. I don’t care what Dean and his little mouse say, I don’t trust anything but a bullet to the brain to stop the dead.
“Wait, I thought you said you’d help us?” Dean hurries forward, worry tainting his voice.
“We never said anything, buddy.” Mikey turns to walk away. “And the fact that there are over a hundred dead standing at your back gates means that we’re going to be getting the hell out of here. Right now.”
“But you said…” Dean splutters.
“Again, with the ‘you said’ business. We didn’t say shit, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” I finally turn my back on the gruesome scene and walk away, but curiosity gets the better of me. “What is it you wanted us to do, anyway?” I say over my shoulder.
“We need you to help us cull the herd.”
I frown, still walking. I glance at Mikey, who’s looking more and more pissed off by the conversation with every passing second. “Did he say cull the herd?” I turn around. “Did you just say cull the herd?” I look at Dean, seeing a boy in front of me, not a man. And Anne, she’s just a kid too, a frightened one. How the hell have they survived this long by themselves? Oh yeah, the whole hydro-plant-attracting-the-deaders-and-keeping-them-out-of-town bullshit.
Dean catches up to us. “Yes.” He reaches for Anne’s hand as she comes beside him. “We need your help.” For the first time since we met him, I see real fear in his eyes.
“You were trying to get us to leave a few minutes ago,” Emily says with a raise of her eyebrow. I get the warm fuzzies at my trademark look on her face. My girl’s learning.
“And we want you to…just not quite yet.” Dean drags a hand down his face. “Look, I’m trying to protect us both and this town. Whatev
er it takes.” He takes a deep breath. “And it takes a lot. We could really use your help. The group of sick is getting bigger and bigger. They’re surrounding the hydro plant, crowding it. We’ve so far managed to keep them to a minimum and only kill them when we really have to—I don’t want to get into too much trouble with the police when everything calms down. Most of the time we can attract them and get them to follow us. We lead them away from the town, and they seem pretty stupid, forgetting about us once they don’t see us. But it’s not been working so well recently, and I need to get them away from there now and build some better defenses for it. Otherwise they’re going to crush the power supply and then. . .” His words die off.
He doesn’t need to say the next line, we all get it: the deaders will come and the deaders will kill, the deaders will destroy, blah blah blah. That’s what always happens.
“But you said that it was dangerous, that the deaders were being electrocuted.” I grimace at the thought of deep-fried deader, the smell of their burnt flesh filling my nostrils.
“No, I managed to contain the current.”
“Clever,” I say.
He shrugs. “I’m good at this stuff. I was graduating early because I was so ahead of my time, but I’m one guy, and I’ve never done anything on this scale before. My real worry is that if the herd keeps on building like it is, they are going to knock down the fence surrounding the plant and possibly disrupt or destroy whatever it is that created that frequency in the first place.” He looks behind him. “And then…” Again, he doesn’t need to finish the sentence; it’s obvious what will happen.
I glance at the herd of deaders. “Fine. But let’s talk more back at the house, I don’t want to look at these guys anymore. They’re freaking me out.”
“So you’ll help us?” Dean smiles, the fear vanishing from his face.
Mikey looks at me, a frown etched across his face. He rubs a hand across the back of his neck, looking unhappy—grumpy even. “Well, I want to know more about it before I agree to anything. But I agree with Nina, let’s get back to the house and you can talk us through your plan.”
We all turn and begin to walk back the way we came. Fresh snow has begun to cover our tracks already, and with it fresh worry about getting the hell out of here anytime soon. Sure, there are worse places to be stuck, but one look at the angry mob behind us tells me this is a horror story waiting to happen.
*
“How much food do you guys have?” Emily asks between mouthfuls of corn chowder.
“We pretty much got everything and stored it all. It took a long time, but we had nothing better to do, so . . .” Anne shrugs. “I wanted everything to be nice for when my mom came back. She doesn’t know that it’s safe now. She doesn’t even know that I’m still alive.” Anne wipes at her eyes.
“How did you both get left behind?” I ask as tactfully as I can. But we all know there’s no nice way to ask ‘so, you were forgotten, huh?’
Anne looks into her food as she talks. “When the sick attacked, I was at school. The teachers decided to evacuate everyone and get us all to the town hall—that’s pretty much standard for an emergency. I got onto one of the school buses. It was crammed way past the point of dangerous. The driver lost control and our bus crashed. When I came to everyone was gone—or dead.” Dean pulls her into his arms. “I couldn’t believe it—friends, cousins, my teacher, all . . . gone in some way or other. I climbed out of the wreckage and headed for the town hall.” She looks up at Dean with a shy smile. “On the way I met Dean. We went to school together. He was in the year above me. He hadn’t gotten on a bus—instead he stupidly wanted to go home and find his mom, but he couldn’t get near the place. There were sick everywhere. When he found me, I was cornered by some of them. He came in all guns blazing and…”
“He had a gun?” Emily asks.
“Well, no, but I had a baseball bat,” Dean chuckles. “I put a couple out of their misery and then dragged Anne to safety. We wanted to get home, but the whole town had gone crazy. I managed to get us to my grandpa’s house, but he was gone, there was blood everywhere. I didn’t know what else to do, so we went down into the basement, barricaded the doors, and stayed put until it went quiet. My gramps was a real nut-job, always believing in that end of days crap, so we had enough to survive for a while.”
“How long were you down there?” I ask.
Dean and Anne look at each other sadly; something crosses between them, but I can’t say what. “Couple of weeks, maybe a month…or two.”
Emily gasps. Even Alek turns from the window to look at us.
“It was longer than that,” Anne says, still looking at Dean.
Silence encompasses the room, a thick and heady tension of what we have all had to do to survive this long.
We slowly continue eating, the sounds of forks in cans and chewing our only accompaniment for a long while. I’ve learned the hard way that’s it’s best to keep my opinionated trap shut in situations like this.
“They’ll come back soon,” Anne whispers.
I look up from my empty food can with a deep sigh. Looking at these two, I know that they are clinging onto hope the best they can, but can they really believe that the people of this town will magically come back? For all they know, the deaders—sorry, the sick—out there are what’s left of their town. I decide that it’s not my place to break any hearts today. Let them believe, hope, if that’s what keeps them going, keeps them fighting. Look how well they are doing. They’ve fared much better than most of the world. A question is still niggling at me, though, a thought I can’t quite grasp onto yet, but I know it will come. Something still doesn’t sit right about this place.
Later that day, Dean moves us into a different house—one where we can use the beds, but more importantly the fireplace, while we stay in town. Apparently it was up on the market after the old couple that used to live there moved away. Morally, Dean is okay with us staying in it as long as we don’t make too much of a mess, since it wasn’t anyone’s home anymore. It still seems kinda stupid to me, but since he isn’t trying to make us sleep on the streets, I guess it doesn’t really matter.
As the night draws in, Dean and Anne make their way back home, leaving my little group to contemplate the next day’s events and get some shuteye. Emily heads up to bed pretty much right away, exhausted from the day’s antics. Alek stays up with Mikey and me, sipping on a bottle of homemade wine that Dean brought us. It tastes like crap, but it gives my brain a nice fuzzy feeling to it; and that, combined with the crackling coming from the fireplace, is all it takes to send me to sleep.
Chapter 14
We head over to the hydro plant as soon as the day breaks: no point putting off the inevitable. We promised we’d help; I only hope that we can. As we get closer to the plant, I see the group of undead looking even larger than it did yesterday.
We slide down a small embankment at the back of the hydro plant, the noise from the waterfall louder now. We land one by one in a muddy stream at the bottom with a splash. Mud coats my boots and legs and I grimace. Overnight it rained a little, turning the ice into sludge. I should be grateful that it didn’t snow anymore, but these days I tend to disregard being grateful for anything, since you never know what strings come attached to it.
“How is it even possible that you have electricity?” I ask as I climb up the other side of the embankment.
I look up to see Dean shrug and roll his eyes dismissively. “Again, that’s the hydro power. The river still runs, and I guess it’s keeping everything going. I mean, it’s not very efficient—there’s nothing to spare, everything is going on the defenses—but we don’t use electricity in town, since we didn’t want to disrupt anything else after the accident. I mean, whatever caused all this to happen,” he gestures to the herd of deaders around the plant, “it was a miracle, and I don’t want to mess with it any more than I have and have it turn off or whatever. Plus, we’ve managed pretty well without electricity so far, and we don’t want
to attract any attention to ourselves.” He shares a look with Anne. “We’ve both seen those types of movies where people are their own worst enemy. We decided it was best to be on our own until everyone came back.”
Again with the ‘everyone coming back’ crap. I roll my eyes.
As we get close to the main fence of the plant, a loud humming can be heard—oh, and a chorus of deader moans, of course. Can’t forget that sweet sound.
“It’s there.” Dean points up ahead. “You guys sure you’re up to this?”
“No,” I say wholeheartedly. And I mean it, too, especially after seeing the amount of them. There’s definitely a couple hundred more.
Mikey scratches his beard, frowning again. It’s becoming an all too familiar look on him. “I’m not happy about this.” He looks around at the surrounding fields, stray deaders making their shambly way over to the exact point that we need to get to.
“Look, Lovers’ Lookout is just over that hill, the truck’s over there. It will be easy—we’ve done something similar before.” He looks around and I don’t miss the anxiety that crosses his face. “Of course there weren’t nearly as many of the sick then.” He shrugs. “I only need them distracted long enough to get this fence secured.”
I take a deep breath. “Let’s just get this over and done with. Anne, Em, you’re both with me then. You know the plan.” I start to walk away but Mikey catches my elbow and turns me back around. He reaches down for my chin, tugging my face up to his as he kisses me.
Odium II: The Dead Saga Page 10