Gem’s directions were easy and perfect. When I drove up I parked and cut the engine. Gem was at my window in seconds.
“Sweet ride, babe. You were faster than I thought,” she said, touching the bracket on the door panel.
“Hemp’s quick. Gem, I can’t even tell you how good he is. Check it out.” I leaned back so she could see the submachine gun mounted on the opposite door.
“Wow,” she said. “Nice. Now let’s go.”
“Grab me another K7 real fast. I promised Hemp I’d do this first. It’ll attach in less than a minute and you said I’m early.”
She nodded and retrieved the gun. I rested it on the bracket, dropped the U-bolt down on top and slid the lower bracket on to it. Once the wing nuts were tight I tested the pivot and mount. It was perfect for either my left or right hand, depending on what the situation called for.
“Ready?” she asked.
I wasn’t. I’d have rather stayed right there with my double machine gun-protected Hummer, but I nodded anyway. “Let’s go get that little girl,” I said.
With spare mags for the Uzi and the other MP5 I’d gotten out of the truck – mainly because I’d grown to like that gun quite a bit – we tested the wind for directional change as any golfer would. We tossed grass in the air.
We would approach the house from downwind just to be safe, and lucky for us that meant from the front of the house where the captives were being held.
For a moment I almost ran to check on Jamie on the trailer, but then immediately remembered that Gem had wisely unhooked the trailer from the hitch ball and left it in the parking lot back at the CDC. I’d seen it in my rear view mirror as I pulled out, and it appeared to be intact and secure.
Gem and I crouched down and stayed under cover. By the time we were devising a plan, we realized that many of the people in that house were still alive. Some were feigning sleep or death, we couldn’t be sure. The old ‘close your eyes and they can’t see you’ trick. The only problem with that was the zombies could clearly smell fresh meat, so your little jig would be up sooner than later.
“They’re stocking them up, Flex. Like a fucking food bank. I’ve only seen the front rooms. I have no idea who, what, how many – none of it – from the beginning of the hallway to the back of the house.”
I knew that we could take a good number out at low risk with our high-powered weapons, but when the mag emptied, there was that damned pesky delay where you had to eject and reload. That was an opportunity for them, and the more there were, the more likely you could be taken by surprise. And more than once it had seemed these things knew when you were more vulnerable. Or perhaps when you were less threatening.
“Okay, my plan sucks, but I don’t have a better one right now. I say we start out at the house next door, see if any of these things are over there. That way we’re not surprised if this turns out to be a house filled with zombies. If not, we go back to the storage house, do our best to stay downwind, and we kill any motherfucker that gets in our way.”
“You’re calling them zombies, Flexy.”
“I know, and it’s the only word that works. Now listen. We make sure we’ve killed every one of them in the near vicinity, then we start getting the live uninfecteds out of there. Starting with Taylor.”
“What do you mean you don’t have a better plan?” Gem asked. “That sounds like a kickass plan to me.”
We executed it. To our relief, the house next door was empty. If any zombies were here, they had departed.
From the experience at the pharmacy, I had learned what I believed to be something these things had in common: They would not necessarily leave a meal to bite into another meal. In other words, as long as the meat they were currently chomping on was tasty and fresh, you could probably walk right by them and they would simply continue to feed. But if that blood ran dry, they would instantly look for the closest fresh meat.
And you didn’t want that to be you.
The double-door entry stood wide open, revealing the double-stacked bodies just inside.
“I can’t tell how far it goes back. Maybe it’s just two or three deep,” whispered Gem.
“We’ll start at the front. I’ll try to get Taylor first, and we’ll start pulling them out.”
Gem nodded. “Maybe we can snap them out of it enough to run. Then we’ll start shooting the shit out of the place, and run when we’re out of ammo.”
“That’s worse than my plan,” I said. “Ever heard of stealth?”
I was surprised at no encounters. Gem had counted eight or nine earlier, but now they were nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t wait any longer. I crouched and ran low into the doorway. I saw the woman on top of Taylor was breathing rapidly, but her eyes were squeezed closed. I touched her shoulder and she tensed and screamed.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” I whispered. “Now relax and let me move you.”
I felt the woman’s body relax more, but not completely. I crouched down, threw her over my shoulder. Then, under the burden of her weight, I leaned down and tapped the little girl on the arm.
“Is your name Taylor?” I asked.
With her eyes squeezed shut, she nodded.
“Okay, baby girl. You’ll be out of here in a minute. We’re going to take you to your mother.”
I stood up again and headed for the door. I carried the woman fifteen feet away from the house, lowered her to the ground and said, “Keep moving. You’re downwind, but there could be more out there. Hide, but keep an eye on us in case we need help.”
We needed a better plan than this.
I turned and saw Gem pulling Cynthia’s daughter out. She had slung the gun over her shoulder and now held the girl in her arms and carried her to where I had just dropped the other woman, who had followed instructions. I could no longer see her from my vantage point.
I had no idea if her scent could be detected by the zombies, but the wind was blowing from the direction of the house, so things still looked good for our little operation at this point.
Kneeling beside the girl Gem said, “Now you see that truck, where I’m pointing over there? You run as fast as you can to that truck and you get inside, okay? The one with windows, not the other one. I’m going to take you to your mama once we’re done here. Tuck down on the floor, throw that blanket over you, and don’t move, okay?”
As the girl nodded and took off running unsteadily toward the Suburban, I admired the child’s uncanny resilience in the face of things that would drive many adults to lunacy. You know, stuff like zombies taking over the streets.
And she was the second brave child I’d encountered since this thing started. It gave me hope.
Ready to go back inside, I scanned the yard in front of the house and saw some movement around the back left corner. Almost imperceptible. And only for a split-second. It was, I believed, a hand. It swung into view and disappeared again.
Gem made her way to my side after watching that the girl made it to the truck. Neither of us knew what happened to the first woman, but we’d told her to find cover and hide and she apparently had. Good advice taken for a change.
“Have you got a plan yet, or are we sticking to mine?” Gem asked.
“Just going with yours. Have any revisions?”
“As a matter of fact, I think I do, Flex-man. We’ve got lots of gasoline and not far to drive back to the CDC. Once we get all the live ones out of that death house, I want to torch that sucker.”
I nodded. “Good, but we can’t just have our refugees run to the four winds, we have to have a centralized place they can go to get away from these things. Somewhere air tight where they can’t be detected through scent.”
Gem was quiet a minute. I was thinking, too. Then at the same time, we both said: “7-Eleven!”
“They usually have a walk-in cooler, right?” Gem asked.
“Yep, and we passed one about ¼ mile up the road on the way here. Problem solved.�
� I stroked her hair. “Like minds,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We hurried to the Hummer and its cache of gasoline. Quickly, we unstrapped two of the Jerry cans and hauled them with us back to the house. I kept my eye on that left corner but saw nothing more. I still wasn’t satisfied.
For now we put the cans to the left side of the front entry. As we brought our guns around to kill position again, I touched Gem on the shoulder. “Baby, you realize we’re probably not going to be able to get them all to safety. Some of them look pretty frail.”
“I know, but as many as we can get,” she said. “And the others . . . the ones who can’t make it. Flex, we can’t let them die at the hands of these things.”
I knew she was right, but I did not want to execute innocent people. We were in a fucked up position. We both wanted to take them all.
We went back in, our plan to focus on the ones who could hear and respond. It seemed until we touched them that they were in some sort of trance, dazed, or perhaps just too frightened to move – for fear of being dragged away or killed on the spot. Who am I kidding. Eaten on the spot. I couldn’t blame them.
“You keep clearing them out,” I told Gem. “I saw something around the side of the house a few minutes ago. Just fire your weapon if you need me.”
I moved slowly along the side of the house, looking in the windows as I moved along the wall. All the other rooms had been empty of people aside from the two front rooms stacked with people.
But now, peering low through the window of the back bedroom, I saw something my mind wouldn’t comprehend. I did not want to be seeing it at all.
The nine zombies that Gem had originally seen were all here, apparently, and they were feeding. Each was face-deep in a human carcass, except for one. It was no carcass. This human being was alive, and as I stood at the window, the victim’s face turned in my direction, his eyes pleaded, his teeth clenched – his brain intact, for now.
The creature was tearing at the fleshy part of the man’s left calf, ripping long tendrils of arteries and chunks of fat out at each pull of the jaw. Like a nature video of lions or hyenas feeding, only horrifically different.
I dropped down onto the ground, my heart pounding, my breath stutter-stepping in and out of my lungs. Fuck. I couldn’t shoot or I’d get all their attention.
I crouched and ran back to the front of the house. Gem had gotten another six people out, and some of the men who had been atop the pile were now helping her get the others rousted from their terrified slumber. Another fifteen people were stirring. The rooms were not large, and there were perhaps twenty or so people remaining.
Eleven would not be moving. They were already dead. Heart attacks, strokes, whatever. Their fear was over.
“Damn, Gem. Good. Unbelievable.”
She was exhausted. “What did you find?”
“I found the nine you saw earlier. The back room is the feeding room, clearly.”
“Feeding room? What the fuck?”
“I don’t know. All I know is all nine are there, and they’re eating. One guy is still alive, but I couldn’t put him out of his misery. Let’s get the rest of the ones that are going to make it out of here.”
We worked for another fifteen minutes. None of the creatures in the back of the house were apparently willing to leave their meals to investigate.
“Did you leave Hemp a radio?” Gem asked.
“I couldn’t. You have the other package in the Suburban.”
“Shit! Okay. I just don’t want him coming here now. I hope he trusts us to take care of ourselves.”
I nodded. “Nothing we can do, but yeah. I hope so, too. He’s got enough to occupy him there. And he’s armed, so I think he’ll be okay just in case there are some abnormals we didn’t find. That garage was a mess.”
The crowd of near-victims we’d freed were making their way toward the convenience store at a speed I would have liked to triple down on, and they’d picked up the first woman we pulled out. Before they took off, I’d gone to the Suburban, checked on Taylor and pulled two AK-47s we’d acquisitioned from the Tallahassee evidence locker and given them to two of the more qualified survivors. One was a woman, Marion, in her mid-forties, and the other was a young man in his early thirties, Bobby. Both were ex-military. They brought up the front and rear. I knew with hustle, they could be at the 7-Eleven in ten minutes, but hustle was in short supply within the group of refugees.
Then we heard it. The low moan.
It sounded like a low, deep hum. I looked at Gem.
“What is it?” she asked. We both stared out into the now bright day.
And then we saw them. They were coming from both sides of the neighboring houses. Pouring from around the corners, some turning toward the departing group, and some toward us.
“There are too many of them,” Gem said. “If they get to that group they’ll slaughter them!”
I watched helplessly. We were now upwind from the zombies and the group of people heading out. One or two of the group had now noticed the creatures behind them and had screamed. Those screams now turned into a cacophony of screams as the entire group started to run with all they had. Several of them fell, and were being trampled by the others in a desperate attempt not to be taken back to that house under any circumstances.
“Gem!” I shouted. “Here!” I pulled out my pocket knife. I flipped the blade open and ran a long cut down my forearm. Then another. The blood flowed immediately. I then switched hands and cut my other arm in the same way. “Now you, Gem. Hurry.”
Gem took the knife, pulled up her sheer long sleeves and ran two long, quick cuts, deeper than I would have done it, down both arms. “We’ll draw them to us with the smell of fresh blood,” she said. “Good idea.”
And it didn’t take long. With the warm blood running from our arms in rivulets, dropping onto the worn porch’s wood slats, the wind carried the scent to the creatures, and now they had all turned toward us.
The hum intensified. Low moans of hunger and the anticipation of ecstasy.
“You wanted to torch it,” I said. “Let’s draw them in.”
The creatures were moving faster as a single unit now, their motions erratic and unsteady, but unwavering. There must have been at least a hundred of them. Men, women, children. All now the same. No political differences, no religious differences. No races. Finally, Rodney King’s ancient comment “Why can’t we all just get along?” had come true. They all agreed on one thing.
Human flesh was tasty and they wanted it. No argument.
CHAPTER NINE
Dead Hunger: The Flex Sheridan Chronicle Page 28