Books of the Dead (Book 8): The Living Dead Girl

by Spears, R. J.

  I said, “And I thought I was the only one that could storm out of a room like that.”

  “Joel, really?” Kara asked, lowering her head and raising her eyebrows at the same time.

  I considered myself properly chastised. “Sorry.”

  “What do you really think, Lori?” Kara asked. “Is a cure possible?”

  Lori looked out the window at the slate gray sky, a harbinger of winter soon to come. She turned back to Kara and said, “I don’t know. I think it was a combination of luck, Doctor M’s genius, and the miracle of you bringing Jason here that got us to the vaccine. It seems a stretch to find a cure, but anything is possible.”

  “What you’re saying is that you think there is a snowball’s chance in hell of finding a cure?” I asked.

  Lori didn’t say anything else.

  Naveen, our eternal optimist, said, “I believe in you and Doctor M.” She put out a hand and took Lori’s hand. Lori brightened and smiled back at Naveen.

  “Yeah,” Lori said. “Maybe.”

  Chapter 3

  Bumps in the Night

  “Joel, wake up?” A voice shouted through the door of the room where Kara and I slept. The place used to be an office, but we had pushed the desk out and moved in a hospital bed. With what we had at hand, that was about as homey as we could make it.

  “Wha?” I said, barely awake.

  “I think it’s Alex,” Kara said, sounding a lot more alert than me.

  “Get your ass up,” Alex said as she pounded her fist on the door.

  Before I could move, Kara was up and had the door open. Dim light leaked in, but it was easy to make out Alex’s muscular, compact form. Her hair had grown out from the near buzz cut she had when we first arrived.

  “What’s wrong?” Kara asked.

  I had made it to a sitting position on the side of the bed, but I’m not sure I would classify myself as fully conscious.

  “Someone or something is creeping around on the third floor,” Alex said as she brought her rifle up, ready for battle.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Is it a person or not?”

  “Hey professor, I don’t have x-ray eyes and can’t see through walls,” Alex said. “All I know is there’s a creepy ass noise coming up the stairs.”

  A creepy noise could be anything, but it probably didn’t mean anything good.

  “Let me get my boots on,” I said as I leaned over to grab them.

  “Don’t take forever,” Alex said. “If it's another one of your fan club, I want to be ready for them.”

  The thought that another Kilgore-type creature could be on its way brought me to full wakefulness and sped up my prep process. My boots were on in less than ten seconds, and my rifle was in hand.

  “Let’s go,” I said as I pushed past Kara into the hall.

  “Hey, I’m going too,” she said.

  “We need you to guard Naveen and the lab,” Alex said.

  “Well, Joel can stay behind and guard the lab,” Kara said, her tone sharp.

  “If you’re worried about me being alone with your man, don’t be. He’s not my type.”

  Some would say that Alex ‘played for the other team.’ Suffice it to say, she was not interested in men.

  I turned to Kara and said, “While you have improved, your leg still isn’t a hundred percent. If we have to do any running…”

  “I can do just fine,” she said, leaning in toward my face.

  “I know you can, but if things do go south, you and Richard are our back-up. Doctor M is worthless, and you need to protect Naveen.”

  “Joel, this is so sexist,” Kara said. “Leaving the woman behind to protect the children.”

  “Yeah, Joel,” Alex said, “you’re a sexist asshole. Now, come on.”

  Alex didn’t wait and took off down the hall. Kara and I followed until we got to the lab where Doctor M and Naveen were sleeping. That’s when I turned around and said, “Please stay. If something happens to me, you’re all that Naveen has left.”

  “I don’t think it’s that serious, but you never know,” Alex said.

  Kara blew out a stream of hot breath and said, “Okay, but next time I go. No matter what.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  In retrospect, that decision would come back to haunt me.

  It was my turn to lean in as I went for a quick kiss. She wasn’t having it as she turned her face away from me. I still gave her a quick smooch on the cheek.

  “Get a room, you guys,” Alex said.

  “We had one until you rousted us out of it in the middle of the night,” I said.

  “Is that all you do is talk?” Alex said, one hand on her hip and the other one holding her rifle.

  “Pretty much, but let’s go.”

  With that, we were off, walking down a corridor that was only lit with diffused moonlight. I mean, talk about creepy. Why couldn’t things that go bump in the night go bump in the daytime?

  We made it to the stairwell at the end of the floor that led downward when Alex came to a stop.

  “Is this where you heard the noise?” I asked.

  “Yes. It came up the stairwell. It sounds like a part moan, part sigh.”

  “What are you doing up in the middle of the night listening down stairwells? Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “No, now shut up and listen,” she said as she gave me a light punch on the shoulder, then turned and opened the door to the stairwell.

  The only thing I heard was a whooshing of the door and the movement of airflow in the stairwell. The echo down the stairs gave the airflow a low, rushing quality making me think of a river.

  “You sure you didn’t just hear the deaders down on two?”

  She raised her eyebrows and gave me a hard stare for a moment, “I’m sure the sound wasn’t the deaders. It was different.”

  “What do you propose we do?” I asked.

  “Go down and check it out.”

  “Why didn’t you do that on your own?”

  “Because if there’s scary-creepy shit going on down there, I’m not checking it out on my own,” she said. “Besides, it’s always better to clear a room, or a floor, in this case, with two officers.” She stopped and corrected herself. “With two people. You’re not a cop, but you’ll do.”

  “Thanks for the compliment,” I said, then added. “Are we standing here stalling because we’re afraid to check out some creepy moaning sound?”

  “We sure as shit are,” she said.

  “Ladies before gentlemen,” I said.

  “You’re an asshole,” she said, but she stepped into the stairwell and popped on her flashlight. She would have turned it on earlier, but like the rest of our long-term supplies, all of our boxes of batteries were down at the loading dock. So we were conserving the small quantity we did have.

  A thin layer of dirt covered the stairs, giving our footsteps a gritty quality as we made our way down to where we thought the moans were coming from. The sounds of our footfalls echoed loudly up and down the eight flights of stairs as we passed by the fourth floor.

  When we made it to the landing to the third floor, Alex took the lead again and placed her hand on the doorknob when we heard a low moan. It wasn’t a guttural zombie groan. This was an ominous and sustained moan, almost like a dissonant musical note, rising and falling slightly. It was definitely coming from behind the door.

  She gave me a ‘what the hell’ look, but I just shrugged.

  Then she whispered, “What do you think that is?”

  “Definitely not a deader,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “A deader on three would be a bad thing.”

  When Colonel Kilgore had attacked our building, his helicopter toppled off the roof. When it exploded on the ground outside the first floor, it blew the glass out of some of the windows down there. Before that, those windows had prevented zombie incursion. After that, the place was an open house for the zombies as they flooded inside. Intrepid ones came up to the second floor an
d would have continued upward, but the doors were locked at the third floor.

  If they had somehow made it to the third floor, we were in serious trouble because there was nothing to keep them from moving further upward.

  These thoughts were flowing through my head, and I assumed that they were doing the same for Alex when we heard footsteps inside the door. These weren’t shuffling footsteps, like the stumbling style of the undead. They were steady and purposeful. It also seemed isolated to a single individual. Unless they were carrying someone, but I didn’t want to go there because I suddenly envisioned a zombie piggy-backing three of his friends. My mind works that way sometimes. Don’t judge me.

  Alex’s hand remained on the doorknob, but she did not open the door.

  “What are we doing?” I whispered next to her ear.

  “Going in to check it out,” she said.

  “Well, you have to open the door to do that,” I said.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” she said. “I’m working up the nerve.”

  I quietly said, “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts,” then started humming the theme from Ghostbusters.

  She shot me a stare that silenced me immediately. Then she nodded her head slightly three times and slowly pulled the door open. The sound of the moaning and footsteps stopped.

  I leaned in close to Alex’s ear and whispered, “Now, that’s super creepy.”

  The look she gave me said she wanted to punch me right then and there, but she displayed incredible self-control.

  Stale air wafted in over us, smelling dry and dusty.

  She brought up her rifle to a firing position and entered into a wide hallway, stepping to the left to give me a space to enter. That’s when I put all my kidding aside and stepped in and moved to the right of the door.

  We both stood just inside the door as it slowly closed. She was the smart one and put out a hand to stop it before it slammed shut. No use advertising we were here if this was a human or inhuman threat.

  She looked to me and pointed at a door just a few feet down the hall and nodded her head. Fortunately, I had been trained by the best at clearing rooms and understood that was our first objective.

  My training had come from a couple of men back when we were at the church in the city. One man was named Greg, and he was the leader of our group of survivors. The other man’s name was Mike. Both had been two of the bravest men I had ever met. Sadly, both of the men were dead, but their training lived on in me -- for whatever that was worth.

  Again, I let Alex take the lead as we slowly made our way to the door. She stood outside the door for a moment and just listened. I did, too, but the place was as quiet as a crypt. Ten seconds into waiting, she nodded at me to open the door.

  I gave her a ‘What me?’ look, but she hefted her rifle into the air and then the flashlight letting me know that I was the only one with a free hand. Just my luck.

  It took me about five seconds to work up the courage to open the door, and I decided to do it with gusto. I grabbed the door handle and shoved the door open, then took a step into the room as Alex entered behind me. She splashed the flashlight around what looked to be a large conference room. There was a long oval table in the center of the room surrounded with chairs. A couple of the chairs had been knocked over, but that was basically it.

  She nodded her head toward the door, and we exited the room. I closed the door behind us once we were in the hall.

  She splashed the beam of the flashlight on a door across the hall, and that was next on our agenda. We repeated the process as before and discovered a small suite of offices. Papers lay strewn across the floor, and something had toppled a desk onto its side. Nothing was walking or moaning inside at all.

  Methodically, we moved from room-to-room with me opening the door and both of us entering and checking each room out. We had canvassed this floor out in the past, and nothing had changed. There were three labs spaces, two more sets of offices and what looked like three seminar rooms along with a janitor’s closet and a storage room. What we didn’t find were any signs of a person, living or dead.

  Once we finished clearing the last room at the end of the hallway, Alex said, “Well, that’s as strange as hell. You heard what I heard, right?”

  “Yeah, footsteps and moaning.”

  “So, where the hell is this person or whatever?”

  “You got me,” I said. “What should we do?”

  She scanned the hallway again, looking for something she thought we missed, then shrugged. “Pack it in, I guess. There’s nothing here.” She paused for a moment, and her expression changed. “Before we go, let’s grab some toilet paper from that storage closet.”

  “Yeah, that’s one of life’s essentials, and we are running low,” I said.

  We both went into the storage closet and packed as much toilet paper as we could under our arms. When we stepped back into the hall, Alex stopped in place and let her load of toilet paper fall to the floor as she whipped up her rifle, aiming it down toward the stairwell we had come through.

  “Hold it right there, motherfucker,” she shouted.

  Standing in deep shadows was the dark figure of what I assumed was a man. He splayed his feet outward, and his arms were held out from his side making him look like a gunslinger about to draw down on us, but there was no indication that he had a weapon.

  “You see that?” Alex asked in a quiet voice.

  “Yep,” I said as I dropped my armload of toilet paper and followed Alex’s lead, bringing my rifle up to aim.

  “Who are you?” Alex yelled.

  The figure did not move. We were so far away, and the hallway was so dark and Alex’s flashlight barely reached the shadowy figure. There was no way to tell who it was. I was positive it wasn’t a zombie. They don’t stand around waiting when tasty humans are present. They do not pass go or collect $200; they made a beeline toward the delicious human treats.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  The figure stood as still as a statue.

  “We don’t need any fucking games here,” Alex said. “We both have our weapons pointed at you. You need to get on your knees and interlace your hands behind your head, and you need to do it now. I’m done asking.”

  The man remained still for another ten seconds, then pivoted and disappeared into one of the rooms we had just cleared.

  “Shit,” Alex said. “Spread out and follow me.”

  She started down the hallway, moving slowly and not dropping her aim on the doorway the man had entered. While she took the right side of the hallway, I took the left, and we moved almost synchronously toward the room where the man had disappeared. As we got closer, she slowed down, moving to a slide-step approach method, which I did my best to copy.

  She paused just before we got to the door. She looked at me and with a couple of hand gestures told me to circle around to the other side of the door.

  Even though I was on the other side of the hall, tingles passed through my body as I crossed in front of the door. My vivid imagination played out a scene in which a hail of bullets flew through the door and peppered my body.

  This did not happen, though, and five seconds later, I was on the opposite side of the doorway from her. She locked her eyes on mine and then looked at the door and back to me. I took from that she was ready to enter.

  Unlike our cautious entrance earlier, she threw the door open, stepped in, and yelled, “I want your fucking hands where I can see them.”

  I stepped in behind almost simultaneously to her entrance and watched as she bounced the beam of her flashlight around a three-office suite. A receptionist desk stood front and center. Papers from the long-dead world remained on top of it. At one time, they might have been important, but now they were just artifacts of a world gone by.

  “We know you’re in here, asshole,” Alex yelled, using her cop voice. “You come out with your hands up and make it easy on yourself.”

  I know I would have obeyed her, but the man did not. In fact,
the suite seemed eerily quiet. I got this sense that Alex and I were the only ones there, but that smacked right in the face that we had just seen the shadowy figure of a man enter the room.

  “This is your last chance,” she shouted. “No more, Mr. Nice Guy. We will kick your ass if we have to come in and find you.”

  We stood for another ten seconds before she said, “Fuck,” under her breath.

  Taking every precaution, we checked out the three offices situated off the reception area, and there was no one there. Neither one of us said anything, probably because we were dumbfounded. We both saw the man disappear into this room, but the place was devoid of people. To further confound us was the fact that there were no other doors in or out of the suite other than the one we entered through.

  “What the hell?” Alex said, shaking her head slightly. “You saw him come in here, right?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Then where did he go?”

  “I have no idea,” I responded, feeling a somewhat out-of-body experience. There was a numbness in my arms and legs, but I attributed that to all the adrenaline that had just pumped into my body.

  We stood in silence for a few minutes before a thought crossed my mind after I reviewed the encounter in the hallway and the man’s disappearance. “Did you see him open the door to this room?”

  She looked at me with a sideways glance and one eyebrow raised. “Of course, he opened the door. Geez man, you are losing it.”

  “Who the hell did we see?” I asked.

  She was quiet for a few seconds, but then finally spoke. “I don’t know who or what we saw, but I’m finding a way to lock or bar the doors on our floor.”

  “So, there’s nothing else we can do?”

  “Not unless we want to repel out the window to check to see if this mystery guy is Spider-man or something.”

  “Well, okay,” I said. “I like your idea of locking the doors. This whole incident creeps me the hell out.”

  Chapter 4

  Team Meeting

  We heard nothing else over the next few days, but the more I played out what had happened down on the fourth floor, the more unsettled I became. Someone or something had been down there and disappeared. At least, both Alex and I thought we had seen something, but that’s how the rational mind works.