Beyond Dead | Book 1 | The Cough

by Frost, Christopher

  On the night that Cassandra went into labor Kevin Ross was overseas in England. She didn’t want to go through it alone and had called Paul. She hadn’t given him a choice about taking her to the hospital. When she was checked in no one questioned who the man bringing her in was, they believed, and why wouldn’t they? Both had wedding bands. They were husband and wife and that was the ruse.

  Paul had left Cassandra behind at the hospital. An end to an affair and a loose end. Once this – whatever it was – was over and things returned to the way they were he could think about filing for divorce without any interference of a mistress coming up in court. It made him smile, as he jogged into his driveway, how well things were shaping up for him.

  “Marie?” he called when he went through the front door. “Marie!”

  “Paul,” his wife yelled down from upstairs. She came to the top of the stairs. His smile faded as he looked up upon the image of his overweight wife with her lack of makeup and graying hair that she never went to the salon to take care of. Cassandra had been a knock-out. That was over now, but looking up at his wife, he couldn’t help but wish the situation had been reversed. “Where have you been?”

  “I got caught in this shit.” He pointed out the door. “Where’s Amy?”

  “At a friends’.”

  “Get her ass home.”

  “I can’t. The phones are all down. Even the cells.”

  “Okay.”

  Think.

  Think.

  Think.

  And then it came to him.

  “Pack me a bag,” he told her.

  “What?”

  “Are you going to question every fucking thing I have to say? Just fucking do it.”

  “Not until you tell me what is going on.”

  “Do I look like I have a fucking clue what is going on? Is my job with the CDC or the fucking Army? No. So just do what I fucking tell you so I can go get our kid that you don’t seem all that worried about.”

  “Stop it! How dare you.”

  “How dare I? Are you fucking crazy, Marie,” Paul was screaming and pointing to his head as emphasis that he believed she was crazy. “You left our daughter out in this, this, this, whatever the fuck is happening and you’re doing what exactly? Watching General Hospital on the DVR?”

  Marie walked away from him. That was fine. He didn’t need her nor want her with him. This was perfect. Cassandra was taken care of and now he had a plan to take care of Marie as well. He should get Amy. That spoiled little brat that was just as spiteful and rude as her mother. He was sure that she was safe at her friends. If not, she could come home. He had made it after all. Marie only needed to think that he was going to get their daughter. Instead, he would take the car, the only other car since his was back at the hospital, and drive north out of this mess. They had a summer home up on the lake and he would hole up there until all of this blew over.

  In the kitchen he packed as much nonperishable food as he could into a tote bag along with some bottles of water. Just enough to make it up north. Paul ran to the garage and threw the bag in the passenger seat of his new Audi and turned the key to BATTERY. The tank was almost full. Almost. No need to take chances. He grabbed the three gallons of gasoline he had stored for the lawnmower and dumped them into the tank. Then went back into the house. He was about to go tell Marie he was going to go and pick-up Amy when he noticed the backdoor in the kitchen. Paul walked over and cracked the door. As he went to the bottom of the stairs, he did the same thing with the front door. He would also leave open the garage door and the one leading into the mud room. With any luck –

  “I’m going to get Amy!” He yelled up the stairs. “You don’t have to worry just swallow down a few of your pills and enjoy your show.”

  Marie didn’t respond.

  “Bitch.”

  Paul got in his car and was out the garage and pulling out onto Maple Street.

  His eyes watched the rearview mirror as he saw one of them stuttering along the street. With any luck, he smiled.

  15

  The hobo walked along the street with his raggedy old coat zipped up to his chin. He wore an old ball cap that at one time represented some kind of sports team, long faded away. His greasy, matted hair stuck out in messy strands beneath that ball cap and draped past his shoulders. There was a fine scruff along his face. The hair thin and blonde like a teenager’s before puberty really kicks in. His nose twitched. His glasses slid down his nose and he pushed them back up. He was constantly having to readjust the. The twitching of his nose was something like a rat sniffing at the air. He always did it. When and why it started, he was not aware. Nor was he aware of the offending smell that wore him like a warm winter’s blanket.

  The hobo walked with the dead. For some reason they were completely unaware of him. Even when he bumped into them or pushed his way through a horde their eyes never turned in his direction.

  On his back was an old rucksack. It may have always belonged to him or had once belonged to someone else. There were splatters of dark droplets sprayed across the fabric that had faded over the years to almost invisibility, unless one looked hard enough. Sometimes the hobo, who was forever aware of the blood stains, would daze at them for hours lost in the past. Dangling from his left hand was a well sharpened Bowie knife still fresh with blood.

  Behind him, in the middle of the road, were a man and a woman being mauled by a horde of undead. Their fingers pried and tore at the bodies. Flesh peeling away like the rind of an orange, bones snapping like dry tree branches. A jaw was snapped clear off and pushed aside as two of the horde dug their fingers into the soft flesh and up into the skull. One of them gripped and pulled until the brain was free and frenzy began. Like a group of hungry sharks, the horde erupted into a fury, scratching and biting at one another as they each tried to get a piece of the brain.

  While the undead fought each other for the two brains, the fresh bleeding slashes and holes in the abdomen were still pulsing with blood from the knife that had killed the two survivors.

  16

  “How you feeling, Maddie?”

  Bob stood in the entranceway of apartment 4B. In his hand was a glass of water. For now, the water was still on and running. For how long he couldn’t be sure, so the bottles of water would stay in the bottles until they were needed. He ventured a few feet further into the apartment. Maddie was sitting in a chair by the window. From her window, she would be able to see west down Main Street. Not that there was anything left to see.

  “Fine.” Her voice was soft and hushed. She had said very little since Bob had rescued her and taken her to the top floor and secured them in. At the same time, he supposed she could think the opposite, that in fact she was a prisoner of his in this tower like an age-old princess in a fairy tale.

  “Have you eaten anything?”

  “No.”

  “You should try.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Maddie?”

  “Hmm?”

  Maddie continued to stare out the window. She neither moved nor fully acknowledged that Bob was there. He stood for a good few minutes, letting her name settle in the room, waiting for a response. When none came, he walked into the apartment and placed the glass of water down on the windowsill in front of her. Even when he brushed against her she was still as calm water.

  “This is it on ice. It will all be melted soon.” Two cubes of ice jingled in the glass of water, chasing each other around in circles. Bob went to leave, stopped, looked back at Maddie as if to say something and thought better of it. He closed the apartment door till there was only a crack of light bleeding through.

  Bob walked back up to the roof and plopped down in his new favorite lawn chair. The sky was quiet. The last time he remembered the sky being that quiet was the evening of September 11th when all the air traffic had been grounded. With the sun ready to hang up its hat for the day and call it a night, Bob could see the first hint of the evening star. The military helicopters that had earlier in the
day been flying around were now nowhere to be seen.

  “Shouldn’t be much longer,” he said to himself and settled back in his chair with his bottle of vodka. Bob leaned over and pressed PLAY on the radio. He had turned off the emergency broadcast chatter hours ago, knowing the stations were never going to come back on, and let the voice of Bob Seger play through the old speakers.

  Down below, the dead were chomping at the air and each other when one of them got too close. They didn’t appear to be that savvy for each other unless there was some prey. Then the bastards went all crazy until they caught a person and then it was one hell of a free for all. A mass feeding frenzy. Bob had only watched one time and that hadn’t been on purpose. From the roof top he had seen a man about to get cornered off by the dead and screamed out to him. He yelled to the man to run, to head into one of the buildings. He never made it. Bob witnessed the power of the dead as they descended on the man as one uniform pack. First, Bob lost his stomach all over the roof, and then he had spent a good fifteen minutes crying like a little boy. The dead ruled the earth now. The age of man had come to an end. And if there was one thing, he could damn well be sure was that mankind wouldn’t be snuffed out like a candle but go out with a bang. The sky was quiet because it was holding its breath, waiting for the moment a bomber opens her belly and drops a payload to scorch the earth.

  Bob raised his bottle and toasted the sky.

  “Not too bad of a way to go out huh, Bob?” he said to the radio and closed his eyes. “Not too bad indeed.”

  16

  “What do we do?”

  Sarah was asking about the green guide sign that they had just passed. In bold white on the guide sign was Boston 46 miles. Beneath Boston someone had spray painted a message in blood red paint. The sign read:

  BOSTON

  Dead!

  TURN BACK

  “Everywhere is dead,” Kat told Sarah. “I think we have a better chance of finding help in a major city than driving around tiny New Hampshire towns.”

  Kat could see how unsure Sarah was about the decision, the way she was cradling baby Bowen as much as a security blanket for herself as she was to him. Not more than forty-five minutes ago they had barely escaped the strip mall parking lot. Kat had run from car to car, pulling on doors, searching wheel wells for spare keys with no luck. Things had turned worse when she accidently set off the car alarm of a BMW and the dead all turned their yellow eyes on her. She frantically looked around, trying to find an exit, a car she hadn’t yet tried. The dead were coming, dragging themselves towards her. Kat ran. She was on the other side of the parking lot when she saw that the dead were not chasing her. They were all gathered around the BMW, rocking it back and forth as they tried to bite it and scratch it to death.

  There was a pizza delivery car that had its window cracked enough for Kat to slide her hand inside and pop the door lock. Inside was a spare key under the floor mat in the front seat. Kat jumped in and pressed the clutch to the floor – she hadn’t driven a stick since she was fifteen and her father had taught her – and only stalled the car two times before her mind remembered how to drive a manual transmission. Kat tore through the parking lot, blasting past the BMW and the horde of dead. Sarah came rushing out of the women’s gym with baby Bowen wrapped in a gym towel and a duffel bag of supplies over her shoulder. She was in the car before Kat had even fully stopped and they were tearing out of the parking lot. Kat laid on the horn as they passed the dead, they raised their heads to look at the speeding car, and Kat flipped them off.

  Now they were leaving interstate 495 and pulling onto I-93 South. Traffic was thicker here. Kat had had to maneuver around vehicles as she drove from Route 3 to I-495, but the congestion had not been this overwhelming. There were abandoned cars stretching from the shoulder to the breakdown lane and some slammed directly into the guardrail. At some points she had to drive into the median and over onto the north bound lanes. Her speed never crept over twenty miles an hour. Kat could see Sarah nervously studying the heavy traffic of static cars. There were bodies here too. No dead were walking around. That was something. This was the first time that Kat had seen dead bodies that were not reanimated.

  Had the virus not spread this far?

  BOSTON

  Dead!

  TURN BACK

  Could the warning only mean that everyone was dead? If so, Kat couldn’t help but think that there could be help. Where they had come from the dead were all alive. And hungry. Here, it seemed that the dead were truly dead.

  “What’s it mean?” Sarah asked as if reading Kat’s thoughts.

  “Maybe it hasn’t spread,” Kat answered.

  “But they’re all dead.”

  “I know.”

  Both of them were attentive to the graveyard of bodies. So much so that they were passing over the Tobin Bridge and beyond the exit for Storrow Drive. The last exit before the mouth of the Callahan Tunnel.

  Kat slammed the brakes. The car lurched to a halt.

  “What?” Sarah screamed.

  “What do we do?” Kat asked. No longer feeling as sure of herself as she had before.

  BOSTON

  Dead

  TURN BACK

  She could see the crimson paint sprayed beneath the city’s name. No longer did it look like paint but exactly what it was meant to look like…blood. Maybe it was never paint to begin with. There was now an abundance of fresh blood lying around. A person only needed to look at their feet to see the mass of dead bodies.

  “Turn back,” Sarah said and was already turned in her seat looking out the rear window.

  Baby Bowen began to cry. Kat looked over at him and felt the same sense of fear. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck were raised and she had a chill down her spine.

  “Okay, okay,” she said and threw the transmission in REVERSE.

  Crash!

  “Look out!”

  “I know!” Kat yelled. She had clipped the bumper of a car behind her, pushed in the clutch and jammed the gearshift into FIRST. She pulled away. Clutch. REVERSE. The car began to move backward as Kat tried to guide it through the labyrinth they had just come through. What had been a difficult drive before was exhaustingly painful now. Every turn of the wheel either brought them into another parked car or off course of the path. It was as if every turn, every twist of the wheel was driving into a parallel parking spot multiplied by infinity.

  “Watch out!”

  “I know.” Kat could feel the warmth of tears blurring her vision as they ran down her cheeks. “No, no, no.” She turned the wheel. Clutch, shift, gas. Hit the side door of a car, bumped the back panel of another car, each decision was getting her stuck deeper into the fray of traffic. Sarah had not seen what Kat already had. The movement behind them, lost adrift in the ocean of vehicles.

  The dead were awake.

  17

  “Oh my god!”

  Kat didn’t need to look back to know what Sarah had seen. She had seen it herself and already knew that the way they had come was no longer a viable option for escape. Just behind them, so fucking close, was the exit for Storrow Drive. Kat let the car idle in reverse for longer than she should of, studying the obstacle course in her rearview until she pushed the shifter into FIRST gear and began to move.

  Even before she turned on her headlights, inside the mouth of the Callahan, she could see the bits of movement. They were like ants, crawling around the cars, feeling about in the darkness.

  “What are you doing, Kat?” Sarah exclaimed.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Kat said steadily as she drove on.

  “Go back.”

  “I tried.”

  “Try harder.”

  “Sarah – ”

  “Don’t fucking do this to me. Please, Kat, please, please, please don’t go in there.”

  The headlights were already spreading the darkness as the pizza delivery car swerved its way through the traffic and slipped inside the Callahan Tunnel. It was too late to turn back. Kat kn
ew Sarah understood this. She had to. There just wasn’t another option.

  “Sarah, listen to me. Listen to my voice. You need to calm down.”

  “I can’t. I can’t,” she gasped, “I can’t breathe.”

  “Yes, you can. You need to take deep breaths. Sarah, you have the baby. We have to do this for the baby.”

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “Stop it!” Kat yelled. “Do your fucking job! We made it on the streets for a night and you kept that baby safe. Don’t you dare fall apart on me now. Do you hear me?”

  Sarah was breathing deeply and rocking back and forth cradling a crying baby Bowen in her arms. Her warm tears were seeping from her eyes and falling onto his soft baby skin. Sarah didn’t wipe them away, if she even saw they were there, but pushed her face against his.

  Kat was steering the car, maneuvering around the dead vehicles. Every few feet she would clip the dead, some were just pushed out of the way, others fell over the hood, and a few went under the tires with a wet shkrunch that made her stomach turn. For the most part the dead were ignoring them. The sound of the car was piquing their interest. The dead were moving toward the noise but once realizing – if that was truly what they were doing – it was not a person to make a meal of, they lost interest.

  “They’re ignoring us.”

  “I think so. Kinda,” Kat said. She wouldn’t have said ignoring but they weren’t attacking. There were so many of them scattered among the cars and they were beginning to form together into one massive collective. “We’re going to make it. Sarah, we’re fine.”

  “There! There! There!” Sarah yelled as she jumped up enthusiastically in the seat. She pointing to the exit for Government Center. There was light at the end of the tunnel. Literally. The two women could see the sunlight piercing the dark cavern of the tunnel, peering around the corner of the exit.