I guess that’s old age talking. Well, not old age in the sense I’ve always known, but old age in the apocalypse. Most people don’t live as long as I do, and maybe that’s a godsend. Still, I find that I’m becoming more sympathetic, to an extent, as the years go on. Hell, I’m more sympathetic since I found Lilly and Abby, since I’ve gained traveling companions. Darlene would be proud.
With a screech, Abby falls backward and takes a seat on the floor, not far from the growing pool of cold blood leaking from the cut-up zombie.
“Got it!” she says.
I walk over to her and help her up.
She smiles at me. “You know how to handle yourself.”
“I guess.”
Roland and Lilly come over. Roland pats my shoulder. “You okay, Jack?”
“I’m good, I’m good.”
It was just one zombie. Stronger than the ones I’ve recently put down, but still just one.
“We would’ve helped,” Lilly says. “Quit being so proud.”
I put up my hands, that I’m innocent gesture. She’s right, though. I could’ve used help. I’ll never admit it, but she’s right.
I walk over to the vending machine. The damage Abby has done to it is almost as bad as what I did to the zombie. I lean forward and peer into the gash her hook left in the front. I see stacked cans of soda. Coca-Cola, diet, Minute Maid Lemonade.
My fingers reach inside until I find the release latch. With a swipe, the front of the vending machine swings open. I swear the darkness hanging around the laundromat slightly disappears, like each can of expired, sugary sweetness possesses its own form of radiance. Reaching in, I take out a can of Coke and toss it to Roland. He catches it.
“It’s not Christmas,” I say, “but it’s pretty damn close.”
For a while, as we down can after can of flat soda, Abby, Roland, Lilly, and myself are all smiling.
11
The base is two warehouses, one right across from the other. A traffic light stands nearby with dead bulbs that once flashed yellow or maybe even red to warn oncoming traffic about employees crossing. A rusty sign on the pole the light is connected to shows a shadow man in a hardhat. The sign reads MEN AT WORK and SLOW right under it.
Only one of the warehouses has a light on. It’s dim because the windows are painted black, barely shining through.
We made it here without incident. It took longer than I would’ve hoped, but we’re here, in one piece, and that’s the most I could ask for. The entire slow walk, my stomach sloshed with flat soda pop. I drank three Cokes and a lemonade. Abby mixed her Coke with the lemonade like an insane person, and Lilly drank diet. She said the diet tasted like straight poison, but she drank it regardless. Roland sipped at a Coke and is still sipping on it now. The dude must be a camel or something.
We are perched behind a semi-truck’s trailer. The truck part is nowhere to be found. We watch the warehouse, trying to understand patterns, comings and goings, guard watches.
It’s been nearly half an hour. The sky above is the color of death.
“Plan?” I ask Abby.
“Forming one,” she says. “We need to get closer.”
But we are already pretty close—any closer, and I think we risk setting off alarms. That would be bad. My goal is to find a working vehicle and steal it, get in and get out. No bloodshed, no violence, no noise. Easy peasy. The problem is that is rarely how it goes. Last time we had a covert mission, we wound up blowing one of the Overlord’s gas operations sky high. Sure, we got out of it relatively unscathed, but it would’ve been better to sneak in and just steal more than one drum of fuel rather than blow all of it to hell.
We don’t know how many men and women are cooped up inside this place. We don’t know what kind of weapons they’re packing, though I’d guess pretty good ones, judging by the zombie cleanup they did by the Speedway on the outskirts of the city. Worst of all, there’s only four of us and three guns with limited ammunition.
As I watch the warehouse, Norm’s voice pops into my head.
What the hell are you doing, little bro? he asks. You’re Jack-Fucking-Jupiter. You’re a badass. And you got a mission to complete here. All that stands between you getting to Woodhaven and busting that one-eyed fuck’s face in is a working vehicle. So go in there guns-a-blazing and get your vehicle. These people are not your friends. They killed two of your own. You think they’d apologize to you for that shit? Hell. No. They knew what they were doing when they laid the traps. Zombies, humans, fucking raccoons—whatever came through that place would trip the wire and get blown to smithereens. So fuck these guys.
That voice is mostly right. I have a mission, I have a goal. I don’t care about the people inside any more than I care about the zombie I killed back in the laundromat.
I stand up from my crouch and pull the handgun from my waistband. I flip open the cylinder and check how many rounds I have. Not many, which I already knew, but find myself hoping for more to have magically appeared.
Can’t waste them, I tell myself.
“What?” Abby whispers.
“New plan, huh?” Lilly says. “I can tell by his face. Jack, are you hearing voices again?”
I don’t answer her. Instead, I relay my plan. “Roland and Abby, you two go to the door there. Lilly and me are going to the opposite side. There’s a parking lot over there, so there must be an entrance. Main entrance, probably.”
“Only three guns,” Abby reminds me. “Four of us.”
“One for each pair. Whoever’s not holding better have their blade ready,” I say.
Roland pulls his free. “Way ahead of you.”
“Actually…you weren’t,” Abby begins, brandishing her hook, and I wave her snark away.
“Deal,” Lilly says.
“In and out,” I say. “Less bloodshed, the better.”
“Jack,” Abby says, shaking her head and looking at me sympathetically, like I’m an adult who still believes in Santa Clause. “There’s always bloodshed. You know that as much as I do.”
I don’t say anything, but of course, she’s right. Bloodshed makes this world go ‘round, and it follows me like my own shadow.
Lilly and I circle the parking lot, dodging between rusted relics of cars. SUVs and sedans on four flats, their windshields long since obscured by the dust of years.
There’s a door marked EMPLOYEE ENTRANCE at the end of the lot. The windows here are also painted black. The faint light still streams out. I point ahead, motioning Lilly to follow me. Together, the two of us move silently across the cracked asphalt.
Each one of us posts up on either side of the door. I press my ear against the metal. It’s cold, vibrating with the voices of men and women inside. The problem is that I can’t see through the windows. I don’t know where the inhabitants are at. Judging by the sounds of their voices, they might be far, then again, it might just be the acoustics playing a trick on me.
“Stumped?” Lilly whispers.
“Huh?”
“You have this blank look on your face. Either you’ve had a brain aneurysm, or you don’t know what our next move is.”
It’s amazing how fast Lilly’s gotten to know me, to understand my tics and tells. I don’t know if I like it, either.
Am I that readable?
I nod at her. Unfortunately, she’s right. Our next move is a mystery to me.
My eyes scan the wall above us. The nearest blacked out window is about ten feet off the ground. No chance I’d ever make it jumping—not when I was a younger man, and especially not now. I’d need a fucking trampoline to do that. Dragging something over to boost myself up on is out of the question, too. The nearest object sturdy enough to hold me is a large recycling dumpster, the metal a rusty green color. It looks like it weighs about a thousand pounds, and it’s about twenty feet away, near the edge of the parking lot. Even if I could drag it over here, it would make a hell of a lot of noise. Noise is exactly what we don’t need.
I try to imagine the peopl
e inside. Grizzled, rail-thin, dirty. They’re probably sitting around, smoking, and playing cards. Obvious night owls. A gun or two wouldn’t be far off. As soon as they hear something, they’d come right out with said guns in hand. Do a sweep of the perimeter. Probably find us.
Less noise, the better.
Less violence, the better.
Lilly snaps her fingers at me. “Did you have a stroke?”
“No. Thinking.”
“How about this?”
“What?” I ask.
She thumbs the latch of the door handle.
Almost instantly, I strike out and grab her wrist before she can open it.
Looking abashed, she says, “What?” in a too loud voice.
“Are you insane?” I say.
“No more insane than you. By the way, it’s unlocked.”
“That’s—wait…it’s unlocked?”
Lilly nods. “Amazing what a little less thinking will accomplish sometimes, isn’t it?”
I stare at the door handle for a moment, then I blink stupidly. I could push it open, just a crack, and get a better handle on who I’m dealing with, how many are sitting around, how many have guns. Maybe I can even slip in undetected and find a set of car keys hanging on the wall. I’ll grab them then get us the hell out of here.
No, Jack. That’s just wishful thinking. Be a realist, here.
My hand is not a realist, though, because it grips the handle and thumbs the latch again. With a soft snick and an even softer creak of the hinges, the door opens.
As soon as the crack is wider than a few centimeters, an alarm blares like a million screeching bats out of hell.
“Shit!” Lilly says. “Close it! Close it!”
But it’s too late. The damage is done.
I kick the door open all the way and draw my gun.
What sits before us instantly makes me drop the weapon and say, “Dammit.”
12
The first thing I notice is an old-time radio, the kind with the square plastic window in the front. Tape rolls inside. Voices come from the speaker, voices I thought belonged to actual human beings.
But there are no human beings here, only the voices, only the radio playing.
“It’s a trap,” Lilly says.
I give her a look that kind of says No shit.
Across the street, at the warehouse without lights on, I hear a garage door bang on its tracks.
“Surround them,” a deep voice says. “Don’t let them—”
That’s the extent of what I hear, because I’m grabbing Lilly by the arm and pulling her in over the threshold. Then I kick the door closed.
She breaks free of my grip, grabs the closest chair, and wedges it under the handle. It won’t hold them off for long, but it might hold them long enough for us to think of a defense.
But what kind of a defense?
Really gonna have to pull this one out of your ass, bro, Norm says in my head.
“I know,” I reply.
“What?” Lilly asks.
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
Jesus Christ, I’m going insane. It’s official. I’m now replying to the voices in my head, the voice of my dead brother. Aloud. Throw a straitjacket on me and lock me in a padded cell.
Sometimes I can be reckless. I know. I’m a man with nothing to lose—well, I was a man with nothing to lose. On the road by myself for those years after Haven fell, I hoped for death, prayed for it. But now I’ve found purpose and family again, and I’m not sure I want to go. Not yet. Not, at the very least, until the one-eyed man suffers for what he did to Darlene and Junior, to my home.
Was it reckless, sneaking up to this warehouse with the hopes of finding a vehicle? Maybe. What were my other options, though? I could’ve walked up the middle of the street and shouted for them to come meet me, like some old movie gunslinger. I could’ve shot first and worried about the consequences later.
But I didn’t.
Why didn’t I just walk on with the others? Keep walking through the city until we found an abandoned settlement, a working car, or maybe a horse—hell, a few bikes?
The answer is simple: the way the world works now, that would’ve never happened. Horses unattended for too long get eaten. Cars without upkeep are all dead, only rusted undercarriages and flat tires. Bikes are probably the same. Schwinn is no longer around. And walking? That’s the least safe way to go about anything. With the zombies, the traps, the explosives, the terrible settlements still existing along forgotten stretches of highway, we’d be dead before we ever reached Woodhaven. That’s the truth.
Even when I try to be careful, when I try to play things by ear, when I try to crack open doors to get a better view of my enemies, things don’t go my way.
That’s life, I suppose.
A voice outside yells, “You’re trapped. There’s nowhere to go. Throw your weapons down and come out with your hands up!”
Lilly looks at me and smirks. Over the wailing of the alarm, she says, “This guy can’t really be serious. What does he think this is, a police standoff?”
Right now, I see no other option.
Hope fills me the way it used to. Visions dance around in my head of me walking out the same door I came in through, but with my hands up. I’ll get on my knees like I’m being arrested. I’ll show I’m no danger to these people. I’ll tell them what my mission is, and they’ll be people who hate the District and the Overlord, and they’ll give me the keys to a car and maybe some food and ammunition and water, and then we’ll be on our way.
Bullshit, Jack, Norm says. These aren’t nice guys. You know it as much as I do.
And he’s right. I do know it.
But it’s worth a shot.
I walk forward, ignoring Lilly’s questioning voice, which I can’t hear anyway because of the alarm. I move the chair propped up under the handle, and I pull the door open.
Before I’m an entire step out, the wall just to my left explodes in a spray of brick and dust. I step back inside quick.
The motherfuckers have shot at me.
“Guess it’s not a standoff,” Lilly says loudly.
My upper lip rises in a snarl, and in my head, Norm says, Told you.
“Dammit.”
Here comes more of that reckless behavior. I know it.
Suddenly, the alarm shuts off. Outside, the deep voice doesn’t say anything. A heavy silence lays over us like a blanket.
Lilly’s looking around, scanning the inside of the warehouse. It’s not much. Just a bunch of machines, probably for making tire molds. There are assembly lines on the far side. There’s another door to the left that leads to offices and a couple of emergency exits that are padlocked and chained. We’re trapped.
“There!” Lilly says, pointing above me.
A small service ladder runs up the far wall. It rises up about three stories and connects to a thin walkway. Really, it’s more like a tightrope than a walkway. I can already imagine being up there, feeling my weight straining the old nuts and bolts, seeing how all the big machines look tiny from that height, hearing the creaking of each step. Not exactly ideal.
I run my eyes along the walkway and see it offers a pretty good vantage point to a blacked-out window near where I’m standing.
“So we’re shooting?” I ask Lilly.
“I don’t see any other option. Give me the gun. I’ll do it. I know you don’t like heights.” She sticks her hand out for the weapon.
“I’ll do it,” I say. “You get someplace safe and make sure they don’t storm the door.”
“Jack, I’m going up with you.”
“I don’t think it’ll support us both.”
“You calling me fat?” Lilly scowls.
My mouth gapes. She really threw me a curveball there.
“I—uh, no,” I say, looking her up and down. She’s quite fit, if I’m being honest. Pretty, too. I suddenly feel gross for checking her out.
“Relax. It’s called a joke, Jack,” she says and she
smiles at me. “I’m coming. We’re not splitting up. We need each other now more than ever.”
She’s right, so I nod. If we fall from the walkway, at least we’ll fall together, right?
No more wasting time. We take off across the warehouse floor, our soles slapping the concrete, weaving in and out of monolithic pieces of machinery that look both complicated and dangerous.
We reach the ladder. So far, the door remains shut. I hear more voices outside, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. I just catch snippets and syllables.
The ladder feels sturdy enough, but again my fear comes flooding back. I think of Pat Huber. I think of falling off the roof of the Woodhaven Recreation Center.
If I fall now, there’s no bushes to cushion me. If I fall now, I’m busting my head open like Pat Huber did.
I hesitate about halfway up. Lilly is just below me and she punches me in the ass, telling me to hurry. I swallow down the fear.
It’s funny. Zombies, crazy, gun-toting assholes—they barely frighten me. But falling a couple stories onto concrete, maybe even winding up landing on one of those machines…that scares the hell out of me.
I take a deep breath and climb the rest of the way, imagining that below is not a sea of bone-crunching floor, but a nest of pillows instead.
It doesn’t work.
Still, I reach the walkway and pull myself up. Thankfully, it doesn’t sway under my weight, and when Lilly steps onto it, it stays solid enough.
She pushes past me, runs along the metal grate, toward the window. I follow her. I’m really trying to do my best not to look down. Somehow, I think this is even worse than when I was in Chicago on that scaffold however many stories up. If I fell off that, I’d have had a long time to accept my fate, accept that I’d splat against the sidewalk and die pretty much instantly. But if I fall off here, it’ll happen quick. I probably won’t die, but I’ll be severely injured: broken legs, punctured lungs, twisted arms, that sort of thing. I’ll lie there in pain, unable to move, until the assholes outside come in and put an end to my misery.
Dead Last: A Zombie Novel (Jack Zombie Book 8) Page 5