At least Holly was here to bail me out if the questions became too much. If God was on my side this morning, I’d be able to deflect most of the questions in her direction as I tried to usher my parents toward the door. Now I’d get to see how good Holly was under pressure. You could learn a lot about a person by watching them squirm for the inquisition. There were probably ten people on the planet that wouldn’t wither under my mom’s penetrating glare. Step out of line, and she hit you with the look. Once she was locked on there was no chance of getting away until the problem was resolved.
The flames of the bombed hospital were easy enough to see as we drove north on the I-17. Thankfully, the morning traffic was still threadbare as we headed toward my folks’ house. Once we got off the freeway I pointed out directions to Holly. After the incident at Schlotzsky’s, I was keeping my eyes peeled for any other signs of the necrotics. So far I hadn’t seen anything, but that didn’t mean much. If one of them survived I was sure there would be more. Getting the P’s and getting out of town was all that mattered now. Everyone else was on their own.
It’d be another ten minutes before we pulled in the driveway. I took off my vest and started doing inventory. I had two of the mini smoke bombs left and a spare magazine. There were three shots left in the Desert Eagle so I swapped out the magazine and tucked the partial away. The sad fact was the Desert Eagle and the amount of ammo I had left wasn’t nearly enough firepower to make me feel comfortable. When things went sideways, and they eventually would, we were going to need a lot more than one gun and a hell of a lot more ammo.
Holly stopped in front of my parents’ house. The lights weren’t on, but it was early. Unlike the block wall house we raided earlier, their place had a modern touch. If by modern you meant it had a foundation and wooden framing like most of the houses in the Midwest. Nothing said newer construction in Arizona like stucco walls.
The front yard was spacious and well-manicured. Since the last time I’d been home, they added lights to the pathway out front and some seasonal flowers to the beds under the windows. The house looked like a million bucks and might have been worth that much at one time or another. The housing crash wasn’t very kind to expensive homes. Actually, in Arizona it wasn’t very kind to any homes.
There were a lot of good deals back then, if you had the money to buy. It was the same in the stock market. Funny thing after a downturn was how many new people jumped up the ladder. You can often find opportunity in disaster, but I think we all know more of those Wall Street clowns needed to go to jail. I mean how is it possible that one guy took the fall for Enron and no one took the fall for the subprime housing crisis, but we were here now, and dwelling on the past was only delaying the inevitable.
I looked at the house and then back at the car door. Reaching for the handle, I stopped my hand just over it and let it hover there for a moment. Was I really going to do this? Burst into my parents’ home raving about zombies, armed with a gun, before forcing them to come with me. It seemed like the last desperate act of madman, but it was the only option I had.
I jumped when Holly’s hand touched my shoulder. “It will be ok, Max,” Holly whispered. “They’ll understand.”
“Or they won’t,” I mumbled.
“Or they won’t,” Holly agreed sounding more confident. “It doesn’t change what you have to do.”
On that score Holly was right. It didn’t matter if they thought I was looney tunes as long as they were safe. My hand closed around the door handle, and it opened smoothly enough. A moment later I was standing on the lawn in front of their house looking at the front door like it was the mouth of some giant monster. I took a few deep breaths as Holly walked around our stolen car to join me. She gave my hand a brief squeeze, and we walked up the flagstone path to the front door.
Holly looked over at me as my finger hovered over the doorbell. She gave me a wink as if she was excited to see what happened next. Maybe she’d never seen a man this terrified of his parents before. My finger was frozen as I thought about what I was about to do. No one liked being woken up by the doorbell. When the ominous announcer of people at the front door went off when it was still dark out, the news was never good. Anything but bad news could obviously wait until morning. The last thing I wanted to do was give my old man a heart attack before I got to explain my story.
I paused for just another heartbeat and hit the glowing light at the center of the doorbell. The chimes seemed to thunder in the early morning chill, and I waited to see a light turn on. When the house remained oddly dark, I rang the bell again. After a minute of nothing happening, I started ringing the bell over and over. If my folks were home, I probably just scared the shit out of them, but when no one came to the door I started to wonder if they were even here. My heart seemed to drop into my stomach. Why weren’t they answering? I reached for the bell again, and Holly grabbed my hand.
“Maybe they’re not home.”
It was a reasonable assumption, all things considered, but I couldn’t leave until I knew for sure. I motioned for Holly to step back and sized up the door before kicking it as hard as I could. My foot hit right next to the handle, and I heard a crunch. The door didn’t open, but it splintered a bit. Two more kicks and the door ripped halfway off the hinges and hung limply in the entrance. No one screamed at us in challenge, and their alarm didn’t go off.
The lack of any noise or light from inside had my heart thudding a million miles a minute. They had to be ok. I was here, and the necrotics couldn’t have made it this far before we did. I carefully picked my way past the broken door, and into the home. The air was warm, too warm for anyone to be sleeping. Did I really just freak out and kick in my parents’ door when they were out of town? Maybe I should start paying attention to those emails they were always sending me. Now that the jackhammer in my chest was slowing down, I thought about the spare key in the backyard. I shook my head, feeling a bit stupid and wondering how much that front door was going to cost me.
Holly stepped past me into the house. “Nice place. You think they have anything to drink?” She wandered off in the direction of the kitchen.
“Probably some wine in the fridge, but if they’re on vacation chances are they turned the water off.”
Holly nodded as she walked into the kitchen and started poking around.
“They probably don’t have much food lying around either.” I called to her as I headed toward my parents’ bedroom.
There was no way to know if Holly heard the last thing I said, but if she did she just ignored me and kept poking around. I moved through the house until I reached the master bedroom. The doors were wide open, and the bed was made. My parents might have been fairly early risers but not this early, at least not since they retired. Nothing looked out of place in the room. Now I just had to figure out where they went.
It didn’t take long to fire up my dad’s old desktop, and from there it was simple enough to sync it with my mom’s calendar. A few moments later I had the answer. They were in California visiting family. Normally they only left in the summer, but I was thankful they decided to make an extra trip this year. At least they wouldn’t be here to see their home turned to ruins.
Peering up from the computer I looked out the large picture glass window and into the backyard. The chair scraped against the hardwood floors as I jumped up. There was a man in a bathrobe by the back gate trying to get in. Even from this far away, I was pretty confident that it wasn’t my dad, he wasn’t a robe kind of guy, and conveniently out of town.
“Holly.” My voice came out in a hushed croak.
She popped her head around the corner of the kitchen. “What?”
I pointed toward the window. “We may have a problem.”
Without trying to draw too much attention to myself, I started walking toward the sliding glass door leading to the backyard. Part of me didn’t want to know the truth, but the other part had to. If the infection had spread this far this quickly, then it must have already been out when
we discovered the house. That or someone from the hospital made a run for it before we had the entire place locked down. It’s what I would have done before I saw what happened to Garfield and Ramirez.
There was also the chance the guy just had the wrong yard. My folks lived on the golf course, and all kinds of people from the neighborhood walked it. Granted they normally didn’t do it in the dark with their PJs on, but more than a few of them liked to enjoy a stiff cocktail as they walked the course. I unlocked the door and slid it open, hoping that maybe this old-timer just had a few too many pills and got turned around. You’d be surprised how much that happens around here.
Three steps into the yard, and I knew all of my previous thoughts had been wishful thinking. The man’s robe was bloody from the waist down. It almost looked like he had a rod iron bar from one of the fences shoved through him. It didn’t matter what was poking out of his stomach. At the very least it was the kind of injury you didn’t walk around with.
A light shined over my shoulder highlighting his face. Blood dribbled from his lips as his teeth chittered together. There was something about the sound of his teeth snapping against each other that threatened to drive me nuts. The old man moaned, and Holly moved to stand beside me.
She handed me a golf club. I looked down at the seven iron and smiled. Lucky number seven, just the thing to get the job done. We might as well find out if a blow to the head worked just as well as a gunshot. There wasn’t a better time to test the theory than now, when I was pretty confident the thing couldn’t make it over the fence before I whacked him on the head.
“Sir, can you hear me?” I took a step forward.
His teeth stopped clacking long enough for him to gaze hungrily over at me.
“It looks as though you might have been injured.” I felt stupid saying it, when I could clearly see the truth, but if I was going to bash a man’s brains in with a golf club I had to be sure.
He moaned again, and the sound became more insistent as I drew closer. His hands scrambled at the short fence trying to claw his way over. Holly kept the light on him, and it was easy to tell from a few feet away that there was no way this guy was alive, at least not in the traditional sense. I hefted the heavy steel golf club over my head, and brought it down with everything I had. It slammed into his skull with a dull thud and bounced away.
The human skull is harder to crack than you think. They make it look so easy on TV, but then again those are supposed to be half-rotted corpses, and this guy’s only been dead for a few hours at the most. All the golf club did was rip a long jagged gash out of the flesh on top of his head. The man fell to his knees and then rose back to his feet and continued to try and claw his way through the fence.
The chunk of skin hanging off the top of his head had me grossed out. I felt a little better that the wound was bleeding all over the place like it would have if he were still alive. He must have lost a ton of blood from the wound in his stomach because head wounds tended to bleed quite a bit. Now that his status as a necrotic was confirmed, I decided to see if the golf club would work, and the only way to do that was to keep hitting him.
I felt the heavy club head hanging in the air behind me a split second before I brought it down. One. Two. Three. The third hit made a loud crunching noise, and I was reminded of the Tootsie Pop commercial. Only this time it was a man’s head that cracked open and not a lollypop. He didn’t get up after the third hit, and that told me a lot. It didn’t matter how you took out their brains, you just had to disrupt them enough, and it was over.
A light turned on in the backyard next door, and a lady came out in her robe. She looked over at me standing in my parents’ yard with a bloody golf club in my hand and then back at the body on the ground before scurrying back inside.
“Time to go.” It wouldn’t be long before she called the cops, and we couldn’t be here in our stolen car when they decided to show up.
Holly looked over at the neighbor’s yard and then turned back toward my parents’ house. “I second the motion for getting the hell out of here.”
We ran through the house and past the broken front door before sliding into the car. It was still running so I gunned it, and we were on our way. How had things gone so terribly wrong? Less than eight hours ago I’d been watching a basketball game, and now we were trying to outrun the zombie apocalypse. Maybe there was no way to contain something like this. Shit, maybe we were all already infected just like on TV. I hooked a right out of their neighborhood, and started heading north.
The only thing that mattered now was getting Holly to the lab in Flagstaff. If anyone had a chance of stopping this it was her. It didn’t matter if they turned me away as long as Holly made it. There was no way either of us would make it without picking up a few more supplies. Gun stores weren’t going to be open yet, so that meant we might have to do a little roguish plundering.
“There’s a gun and ammo store not too far from here. We’re probably going to have to break in, but it’s worth the risk.”
Holly nodded silently. “I’d feel a lot better with a gun in my hand.”
“And some ammo to go with it, no doubt.” I smiled over at her. “You’re going to love this place.”
It was true. If you liked hunting or were just a gun nut you couldn’t do better than Bob’s Basement Outfitters. The dude was a prepper to the extreme. The shop had everything we needed. Clothes, dehydrated food, and plenty of guns and ammo. There might even be a few compound bows in stock. As long as we could get in, it was exactly what we needed.
Holly looked over at me, her face pale. “Max, what are we going to do? This is so much worse than we thought.”
Taking one hand off the wheel I pointed at Holly and then back at myself. “We’re going to Bob’s, and then we are going to get you somewhere where you can do what you do best.”
“But what if I can’t stop it?”
“All we can do is try, Holly. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. Life will go on, as long as we have bullets and keep level heads we have a chance.” It was a nice line, but I was completely full of shit. As far as I knew, Holly was our one hope. That being said, it never helped to pile the weight of the world on someone’s shoulders when they were feeling down.
“I believe in you, Holly.” I shot her a comforting smile that she didn’t return.
“That makes one of us.”
“It’s ok to have doubts, but you can’t let them stop you from success. If you put the work in, you’ll get results, it just takes time.”
Holly cracked the smallest of smiles on the right corner of her mouth. “Did you just come up with that, or do you coach youth football on the weekends?”
“Kind of just came up with it. Frankly, I wish somebody had given me that advice a long time ago. I’ve always been kind of scared to succeed. When you’re moving up in the world so many people want to tear you down. I’ve always been happier just going along with the flow, but sometimes you have to take a stand.”
“To Bob’s then.”
“To Bob’s.” I punched the gas. We’d be there in twenty minutes if the traffic held for a bit longer. People were starting to wake up now, and there was nothing good on the news for them to see. A building blown up in downtown, a neighborhood quarantined, and reports of aggressive people attacking everyday citizens all over town. It was going to be one hell of a Monday.
ALSO BY BRADFORD BATES
Ascendancy Legacy
The Arena
Jar of Souls
Guardian of the Grove
Demon Stone
The Rising Darkness
Redemption
Ascendancy Origins
Rise of the Fallen
Butcher of the Bay
Night of the Demon
The Bozley Green Chronicles
Possessed
The Galactic Outlaws
Forced Compliance
Genetic Purge
Smuggler’s Legacy
The Black Citadel
; Fortune Hunters
Star Talon
Lost Signal
A Galactic Outlaws Story
The Marchenko Incident
Smuggler for Hire
Origin Ice
The Forgotten System
Reapers of Justice
Shadow of the Empire
Standalone Titles
Rise of the Necrotics
Crimson Stars
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Rise of the Necrotics (Books 1-4) Page 15