Victoria seemed to think about it for a few seconds, then put her hand on his chest, right over his ticker. She'd just got into a pre-medical program at Washington University, and she obviously knew some anatomy. “So, we woke up screaming today but one heart attack before breakfast wasn't enough for you? Is that what you're telling me?”
They both laughed a little at their playful banter, but he heard the doubt in her voice. He sincerely tried to hide it in his own.
“Two is my limit on heart attacks, but let's see if we can keep it at one.”
5
They only had the one shotgun, so he had to think of how to get down the stairs without leaving the two girls unarmed on the main floor. He called them back from the living room, so they were all close while he worked on the puzzle.
He could leave the gun with them while he went downstairs, but that seemed overly dangerous for him and Victoria. They could all go together for mutual protection, but he didn't like taking the girls into trouble if he could help it. He and Victoria could take the gun for themselves but leaving Sabella's daughters without any means of defense while zombies were close was an epic fail. When the mother came back, she would expect to find both daughters in good health. That's why she left them with him.
As he thought it through, he wondered if going in the basement was such a good idea. After standing there without a plan for a bit, he pulled Victoria aside.
“You may have a point about two heart attacks. Is this worth it? Maybe the arriving vehicle is a friend?”
Victoria looked at him using the diffuse light of her flashlight while she pointed it at the floor. Almost at the same time they shared a knowing smile.
“Liam, I hate having to say it, but the more I think about it the more I agree we have to go down there. They probably aren't friends. When is the last time we've been that lucky? We need to assume whoever is coming up that driveway is here to kill us.”
“Right,” he replied with a smile at her jab, “we need to find more weapons.”
Having a 20-gauge shotgun was a start, but it was a lot like having the small .22 caliber pistols. It was the bare minimum of security, but it couldn't get the job done against multiple enemies at the same time nor could it reach out and touch someone like a proper rifle would do.
She got super close to his face and whispered. “Why don't we all go through the basement door. The girls can wait on the steps while you and I explore down there.”
The truck's engine sounded like it was in the house because it was so close.
“Let's do it,” he replied.
Liam turned to Sabella's girls. “We're going to check the basement for supplies and weapons. We haven't seen any guns to go with all this ammo and I have a hunch they kept them down there out of sight. My dad did the same thing.”
He wondered about equating his father with anything that went on in this house, but it was too late to take it back.
“Won't the rescue truck leave without us?” Susan squeaked.
Liam couldn't promise anything to the little girl except that he knew they were safer in the kitchen then they'd be if they walked out into the world with only one small shotgun between the four of them.
“They won't leave,” he said as if it was positively true. “You guys are going to stand in the stairwell behind the closed door while she and I check out the bottom level.” Liam pointed to Victoria and her light.
Susan had hardly stopped the tears since they first discovered those baby zombies, but now she grabbed the hip of her older sister and tried to hide there.
“Can I have the gun?” the oldest asked.
“Maybe,” he replied without taking time to think it through.
“Liam?” Victoria said with surprise.
In the dark kitchen it was hard to see expressions or get a read on how serious Leah had been in her question, but once he'd agreed to it, the solution seemed acceptable to him.
“Trust me,” he said to Victoria with more calm in his voice than he felt in his stomach.
Liam went to the basement door and grabbed at the handle. After one check back to ensure Victoria was at his side and the girls were in line behind her, he had another idea.
“Here, you give me the light. You get the shotgun.” He held out the shotgun, safely pointed at the floor, and traded with Victoria.
He smiled at the other girls. “She's a better shot than me.”
None of the three could possibly see his hands shaking in the darkness. So much was riding on his decisions he felt the pressure return from those earliest days of the zombie apocalypse. The shaking wasn't crazy wild like the old days but having people depend on him to not be “that guy” who ruins things in the zombie apocalypse caused it to come back. Victoria always seemed so calm and collected when his insides were turning to spaghetti. Giving her the shotgun was the smart play.
He opened the door with a flourish, expecting zombies to be stuffed into the portal, but his light pierced the dark all the way to the dirt floor at the bottom of the steps.
“Let's go,” he said.
He and Victoria went into the stairwell side-by-side and went about half the way down. With a light touch on her arm he silently asked her to stop. The others were on the steps above him. When he heard the metal click of the door's latch, he knew they had some security at their backs.
“Hey, is this the way to fourth period math class?” he shouted.
The girls all jumped with the unexpected outburst.
“Sorry,” he said in a quieter voice. “I'm seeing if we are alone. You guys take math, right?” It was his intention to lighten the mood, but Susan was inconsolable, and he admitted it would have been better to warn them he was going to make some noise.
Despite the levity, he slid closer to Victoria and her gun almost without thinking about it. If a zombie did run out of the shadows of the creepy basement, she was going to save all their lives. The girls behind him seemed to close in as well.
They stood there for half a minute. He'd been holding his breath and finally let it out with a gasp.
“Ok, we must be alone. Victoria, give the gun to Leah. She'll guard our backs.”
Victoria didn't hand the gun over right away. She kept it pointed toward the basement as if sure the attack was still coming.
“Hey, we don't have much time,” he gently called over to her.
“Oh, right.” She didn't seem glad to release it, but she did hand the gun up the steps to the older sister.
“Thanks,” the girl said.
He took a monster breath. The door above was shut and he was about to walk into the basement with only a flashlight as a weapon. He gripped a belt loop with his free hand to keep it from shaking.
Victoria also had a flashlight and she started down the steps, causing him to follow one step behind.
They hit the dirt floor of the musty old cellar and swept their lights all over the place. Long ago, the owners had made shelves out of two-by-fours and plywood but now they were dingy and covered with black mold. The stuff on them wasn't in much better shape. It reminded him so much of all the old junk Grandma Marty kept in her basement, minus the mold.
The rumble of the truck was still evident, but it was much more subdued now that they were underground.
His light touched on numerous cardboard boxes on the edge of falling apart from age. There were old tools, wooden crates, pieces of rusty iron, and dozens of clear containers full of nuts, screws, and nails.
But no weapons.
“There's nothing here,” Victoria said in a whisper.
Despite advice from untold books and movies, he separated from her so he could search the back part of the basement further from the steps. It was a rather large basement, but the rows of shelving made it feel cramped.
“Let's search the whole thing,” he replied.
He walked down one of the rows and felt as if zombies were about to reach out from the other side of the shelves with each step he took. He found himself holding h
is breath again and he wondered if his heart had gotten to beating so fast it was impossible to tell one beat from the next.
I have to do this.
His father had a secret room in his boyhood home where he kept all his weapons hidden from prying eyes. Liam didn't believe it was a common thing by any stretch, but if anyone would have their booty hidden, it was going to be an illegal brothel and, uh, whatever else went on in this place. The owners made no effort to clean up the old shelves, but maybe they used a different part of the large basement.
Something crunched on the bare soil beneath his feet, but he refused to look down because that was always a mistake.
There was a door ahead of him.
“Victoria. I've found something.” He said it quietly, but his voice was smothered by the soggy boxes and other crap on the shelves as sure as if he was deep in rows of musty books at the library.
Like everything else, the door was covered in nasty black mold. It might have once been painted white or gray, but now almost blended into the tired red bricks that formed the wall in front of him.
His light focused on the door handle and he took some comfort that even though it was old copper or something, it was really clean. Like it had been used.
Got ya!
As he reached for the handle, an air horn ripped through the silence and caused him to jump six inches in the air.
“Shit!”
The truck was getting impatient.
He regained his composure and pushed the door open.
6
“I've come home,” he blurted out.
He entered the heating and cooling room for the house. The furnace area and the floor of the room was kept super clean, unlike the rest of the basement. Twenty-foot shelves lined the back wall.
“We hit the jackpot!” he cried out to Victoria.
The shelves were brand new and constructed with fresh-looking pine boards. Every type of gun he could imagine had been lined up on the new shelves as if they were on display at the sporting goods store. He giggled at the sight of it because his dad lined up his guns the same way.
She replied, but he couldn't hear her exact words.
“Liam, you're a genius,” he said in a quiet voice. “Liam, you're a brilliant boyfriend.” He ran through a few options for what he imagined her saying to him as he stepped closer to the guns.
It really did look like a gun store. There was a large plastic bin next to one of the shelves filled with every type of handgun he could imagine. There was another box filled with holsters and belts.
His light ran up and down the line and he didn't know which guns he should pick up. Some he recognized, like the AR-15 and AK-47, and there were a few big sniper rifles that reminded him of that one inside the box truck for that gun store he'd run across on the Arch parking lot all those weeks ago.
They were all there for the taking.
“Liam!” Victoria yelled from far away. He'd gotten good at reading the undertones of her voice. She wasn't in danger, but she did want him to come out there.
He laughed out loud again at the magical kingdom he'd stumbled upon.
He also took a step toward one of the big sniper rifles when something caught his eye just above the guns.
The outer wall was made up of tired old bricks and many of them had already fallen out, so it looked like the missing teeth of a hockey player. But it was impossible to miss the movement on the face of the wall.
One of the bricks shuffled from side to side like something was pushing it out.
He froze mid-step.
A pair of tiny eyes reflected his light from the weapons shelf.
Once he saw them, something kicked over in his mind. It took a mental picture of the whole room as his light beam swept it from one end to the other.
Movement inside the box of holsters.
A foot sticking up from near a line of AR-15s.
A face looking out of the furnace vent.
That shivering brick about to topple out of the wall.
“Liam! Help!”
He'd been wrong about her voice.
What do I do?
The stone fell from the wall and a little body slid out of the gap and landed on the weapon's shelf with a wet slap. Liam oriented himself in the house, adjusting the map as he left the kitchen, went down the steps, and came through the last door. The wall in front of him was in the backyard, under the blue tarp Victoria had warned him about.
“How many of you are there?” he said with some awe and complete fear.
It was almost as if he'd roused them from their slumber. More bricks began to shuffle behind the shelves, but he also noticed a hole in the wall near the furnace where a couple zombie babies fell out. They ran into a hole at the base of the furnace and climbed up into the venting.
“Oh, god. They're all over the house.” His shaking hands were now jelly.
“Liam, where are you?” Victoria shouted. That time she sounded close.
Everything below his waist was petrified, and he couldn't step backward. It angered him because he knew he was doing it, but the sight of each of the preemie zombies added a weight to his legs that he couldn't shake off.
Victoria burst through the door behind him.
“Come with--,” she started to say. “Wow. All those guns!”
Then, perhaps knowing his state of mind, she ran up and shoved him in the back to get him moving. “Just grab something and let's get out of here. These nasties are coming out of the walls. Bigger ones, too.”
“Bigger?” he said dreamily.
“Yeah, get us some guns and let's go meet that truck, m'kay?” she replied.
“Sure,” he said with a bit more confidence.
Victoria ran over to the rack and appeared to grab the first gun she could find. It was an old-looking rifle with worn out wood furniture on the stock and grip.
“This is an AK, right?” she said as she lifted it off the shelf. “Like we used before?”
“Yes, but my dad would probably tell us to take AR's. More common ammo.” He still wasn't out of his haze but talking about his dad's favorite topic helped.
“Is there ammo upstairs for this?” she said with insistence while still holding the black and brown AK she'd picked up.
“Yeah, plenty.”
She pulled another off the shelf and one of the preemie zombies fell with it because it had been latched onto the long strap.
Ignore that.
“Here. Now we both have the same gun. Let's go.”
“What about the girls?”
She slung the first over her shoulder and grabbed two more AK's. He didn't think Susan was in any shape to carry a heavy weapon, but he would have said the same thing about his tiny grandma, so he tried not to judge.
He used the strap of his rifle to put it on his back and also grabbed two more. If Sabella and Russ returned, they could use this model as well. They'd never have a better chance to load up on firearms.
The shotgun roared from the stairwell, but it was still a dull echo because of the dirt floor and numerous cardboard boxes packed into the basement.
“Go. Go!” He pointed to the door.
A tiny shape ran up to his leg and made a comical leap for him. He thought about kicking it, but Grandma's voice stayed his foot. Just as it did when he wanted to run over Angie with the car. It was just as easy to step out of the way and run like hell.
He pulled the door shut as he passed through. Other baby zombies shot out of the blackness of that room and a few bounced off his leg like playful cats. He continued to fight the urge to kick them, knowing that despite their hideous appearance they really couldn't harm him without any teeth to break the skin.
Victoria cried out as one of the tinies sprang from a high shelf and got tangled in her long hair. He hated to think of her cutting her long locks, but if there was ever a good reason he believed this was it.
“Get it off me!” she said while spinning around.
“Hold still,” he replied
.
As they swiped at the monster struggling in her tangles, he couldn't help but think of what they should call those baby zombies, but for once he was out of ideas. The horrific conditions on the farm, the desperate reasons for its very existence, and the terrible fate of the tiny creatures all conspired to prevent him from willing them to have any name at all.
The no-names.
“It's out,” he yelled when he saw it fall.
He hopped over where it landed and didn't look back. After a brief run they were out of the shelving area and back to the bottom of the wooden stairs.
Leah fired the shotgun again and the concussion actually blew Liam's hair back on his head.
“Good god!” he screamed. “It's us!” He held up his flashlight. “We have the lights,” he added as if more proof was needed.
“Look out!” Leah yelled as she motioned them out of the way. “There's some little kids.” Her gun pointed to the left of Liam and Victoria.
A dirt-covered zombie in old rags stood almost next to him. Several of its friends were dead on the floor nearby, mangled by the shotgun. They weren't babies, but it was hard to tell how old they'd been when alive because their skin was bloated and black and all shot up. The one nearest him stood taller than his knees but not as tall as his belt.
Liam peered down into its blood-encrusted eyes just as it seemed to notice him and look up. The animalistic youngster bared his blackened and bloody baby teeth as if to put Liam on notice he was now part of the game.
“Shoot it!” he yelled as he sidestepped away.
Leah pulled the trigger, but it clicked without doing anything.
“I'm out!”
She'd fired off the rest of the shotshells while they were in the other room. He'd given the gun to her but kept all the extra shells in his own pocket. There were also more rounds in the pillow cases, but there was no time to dig them out.
So, he closed his eyes and did the unthinkable.
He kicked the toddler like a soccer ball.
“Yee-oww!” he screamed because it hurt his foot and shin more than he anticipated.
The boy went flying into a low shelf and some boxes fell over on top of it.
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 193