by Urban, Tony
“Look like you need someone to put you out of your misery, mate,” Saw said as he stepped forward raising his sledgehammer overhead. The zombie reached for him and Saw responded by beating its skull in.
They didn’t encounter any more zombies as they traveled down the halls. After a few turns and detours they came to a door with a sign reading. “RX - Authorized personnel only.”
Saw glanced at Yukie. “Uh oh, love. Looks like they’re trying to keep the likes of us out.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t.”
He tried the door. It was locked. A blow with the sledge did little to change that situation. Saw tried again. And again. And again. After a dozen or so hits the handle and lock tumbled free. Saw struggled to catch his breath and sweat had soaked through his shirt. That was more of a workout than he’d expected. He pushed the door open and extended his hand. “After you.”
Yukie stepped into the room and he followed behind. “What are we looking for again?”
“Start with anything ending in ‘cilin,” Saw said as he scanned the almost endless rows of shelves. “Or ‘mycin.'”
Their search proved quite productive and yielded two plastic bags full of antibiotics of various varieties. Saw was pleased with the haul and popped a handful of the pills into his mouth, then dry swallowed them. He tilted a bottle toward Yukie. “Your turn.”
“How do you know I need them? I don’t have any symptoms?”
“Well, I sure as shit didn’t catch this sitting on the loo.”
Yukie took a few pills and swallowed them with a grimace. Saw noticed that she’d pilfered a bottle of pills from the narcotics section, but he decided to let that slide for the time being.
“Time to move on, don’t you think?”
She nodded and they headed toward the doorway. Saw got there first and what he found in the hallway hit him like a punch in the gut. “Bugger me.”
Yukie pushed in beside him and together they looked out upon a hallway filled with zombies. They rolled in from both sides, dozens of them. Yukie barked out a short, piercing scream which seemed to fire up the monsters even more. They moved in faster, their hungry groans echoing off the walls and ceiling. The stench of their death was almost overwhelming in the small space.
“Where’d they all come from?”
“Must’ve heard me breaking down the door. Christ, we should have checked this place out first.”
Yukie tried to pull him back into the room. He resisted. “Come on.”
“I beat the fookin knob off. They’ll push the door straight open.”
“We can block it.”
“With what? A bunch of shelves? That wouldn’t buy us two minutes.”
“Then what?”
Yukie clutched his arm, her fingernails digging into his skin. He felt it pop and warm blood trickled down his flesh. Saw realized they only had one chance. They needed a distraction. He pointed to their right. “There are less that way. See?”
Yukie looked. There were less, but the numbers were still overwhelming. Saw knew he had a full magazine in his pistol. Eighteen rounds plus one in the chamber. He didn’t know for certain what Yukie’s gun held but imagined it was in the same vicinity. That gave them less than 40 bullets for at least that many zombies.
“We have to shoot our way out,” he said.
“It’s too many.” Yukie chewed on her lip but she was already pulling her pistol from its holster.
“All’s we need’s a clear path, love. Shoot up the middle and we make a mad dash the hell out of here.”
Her big, brown eyes met his. He saw worry in them. Fear. He lifted his hand and took her chin between his thumb and index finger, then gave her a quick kiss. “We’ll be just fine. We’ve got out of stickier spots than this.” That was a lie but in the moment, it sounded good and she didn’t correct him. Saw didn’t wait. He stepped into the hall and started blasting.
Solomon Baldwin was a lot of things, but a marksman was not one of them. Most of his shots hit, but landed in the zombies’ chests, arms, stomachs. He got in a few headshots but by the time he’d fired fifteen rounds he hadn’t dropped more than three.
Yukie, on the flip side of the coin, was damned near a pro. She only missed two headshots and a narrow but almost clear escape route had started to form.
Saw shot again and the head of a zombie nurse in Hello Kitty scrubs blew into pieces. Yukie took out an orderly who had his long, gray hair pulled up in a man bun. Saw’s next shot went wide, sending bits of white tile flying as it ricocheted off the wall. He shot again and sent a bullet into the chin of a Japanese woman in a doctor’s coat. Her jaw split in half but she kept coming. Yukie finished her off.
“I’m out,” Yukie said, holding the pistol up as if to show him it was empty.
Saw was almost certain he had one round left but there were still two dozen or more zombies bearing down on them and that slim path to freedom was shrinking by the second.
“Run!” He said and she did. She dashed up the channel their shooting had created. But Saw knew it wasn’t enough. The horde was closing in. He’d never make it through. One look behind him revealed even more zombies following.
He wasn’t getting out of this one alive. That was plain as day and the thought infuriated him. He’d been built for a scenario like this. The world in chaos. No arbitrary rules to follow. This was his destiny. A world where only the strongest would survive. It couldn’t end like this. Chomped to death in a hospital hallway all because some slag had given him a dose. Solomon Baldwin’s fate wasn’t to end up as zombie chow.
Yukie glanced back to check his progress. She was five or so yards ahead of him now.
“Keep going!”
She did. He followed. Yukie was a better shooter, but Saw was a far quicker runner. He’d closed the gap to a few feet when he put his last bullet to use.
He shot Yukie in the back of her chunky thigh. He’d been aiming for her knee, but this did the trick just as well. She collapsed on the floor, skidding across the tile and into the oncoming zombies.
As they began to tear her apart, Saw caught her staring at him, her eyes wide and confused. He thought about apologizing, but he’d been quite fond of her and didn’t want his last words to her to be lies. He wasn’t sorry. He’d done what was necessary.
Yukie’s agonized shrieks filled the halls and drew even more zombies toward her, making it easy for Saw to maneuver past the few remainders. He used the sledge to crush the head of an elderly man in a hospital gown, hitting him so hard the man’s scrawny neck opened and his skull almost came clear off. After that he had smooth sailing. He’d even managed to keep all the antibiotics. All things considered, it wasn’t a bad afternoon. Not bad at all.
Chapter 35
It had been almost two months since they left Grady’s church. Along the way they’d picked up a few new arrivals. Jimmy Hetzer was the first. They were somewhere in East Tennessee raiding a gun shop for arms and ammunition when Aben heard a roaring sound coming from a back room. He motioned for Saw to have his back as he approached the closed door from behind which the noise emanated.
Aben held the maul in his lone hand and used it to smash apart the doorknob rather than waste time turning it. Then he kicked the door open, ready to bludgeon whatever or whoever lay behind it. Before that could happen, he found a fellow who looked almost as bad off as the homeless men and women Aben had slept beside in alleyways and gutters in the days before the plague.
Jimmy Hetzer was pushing sixty with male pattern baldness that looked even worse because his remaining hair was long and gray and hung in unwashed clumps to his shoulders. He was a few weeks into growing a sparse beard that made his face look even dirtier than it probably was. His head was tilted back and his mouth hung agape revealing pink gums with no teeth in them. And he snored like a motherfucker.
A three fourths empty bottle of scotch stood on the desk in front of him and a few empties littered the floor. It wasn’t hard for Aben to understand why the old man
hadn’t reacted to the office being broken into.
Jimmy’s feet were propped up on the desk. Aben returned the maul to his belt and grabbed hold of Jimmy’s foot, an act he immediately regretted because his sock felt so stiff and hard that it could have stood up all by itself. He shook the foot back and forth and after the third shake Jimmy woke up.
“Holy jumped up Jesus!” He said and he would have tumbled backward out of his chair if Aben wasn’t still holding onto his foot.
“Calm down, buddy.” Jimmy breathed so hard and fast Aben thought the man might have a coronary. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”
Jimmy collected himself, as much as was possible. The first thing he did was take another hit off the bottle. The second was reach for his false teeth that were sitting on the desk and teeming with flies. He swatted them away and shoved the hunks of plastic into his mouth. Aben thought they looked too big for his face and made him look like an old man version of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Who the hell are you?” Jimmy asked.
Turned out that Jimmy had been living in the store in between trips to the local liquor shop. He’d been on a mostly liquid diet since the plague and, when Saw offered him a can of spaghetti, the man didn’t bother with a fork or spoon and had it all gobbled down in under a minute.
“Got another one?”
Aben was surprised when Saw asked him if he wanted to join them. He didn’t see much value in an old drunk, but then again, five months ago the high point of his day was finding a half-eaten eclair in a dumpster so he supposed he had no right to judge.
Lonnie Draper found them outside of Cambridge, Ohio. They’d stopped at a fuel depot to top off the tanks of Saw’s dump truck and fill two 55-gallon drums he’d added to the back for reserves. Jimmy had been put in charge of starting the siphon and, in the process, ended up spilling almost a gallon onto his faded Metallica t-shirt. Aben worried the man would catch them all on fire unless that was taken care of, so while Jimmy filled the tanks, he went into the shop.
He found an XXL uniform shirt with a name tag reading ‘Pedro’ hanging in a locker and thought it would do. As he was on his way back outside, he discovered a man aiming a bolt action rifle at his three companions who all stood with their hands in the air.
“I said I don’t want your food, I want your truck,” the man said in a calm, detached voice.
Aben thought he looked about thirty and in good shape. He had a crew cut and a sleeve of tribal tattoos on his left arm. He had a heavy bottom lip that sagged down to reveal brown, tobacco stained teeth.
Although he knew his aim was shit, especially at a distance of twenty or so yards, Aben hoped he could bluff his way through the situation so he pulled out his pistol and aimed it in Lonnie’s general direction.
“The truck’s the one thing you can’t have, mate. How would you expect us to get where we’re going without it?” Saw said.
“And where are you going?”
“Haven’t decided yet. Expect I’ll know when I get there.”
“Yeah, well I don’t give a shit. I want that truck.”
Aben could see in Saw’s face that he was close to doing something rash - something stupid. It’s now or never.
“Hey there, pal,” Aben said. Lonnie’s head snapped in his direction. The rifle barrel wavered as he tried to decide whether to keep it aimed at the three men in front of him or the man with the gun beside him. “How about you put down that rifle and we have a conversation.”
Aben could tell the man was scared. Four against one were bad odds, even when you had a gun. “You do that and I promise none of us are going to hurt you.”
Lonnie’s head swiveled back and forth so many times that Aben thought it might break loose and fall off. Instead, he tilted the rifle to the ground.
Lonnie Draper had been a member of the Ohio national guard and was on emergency call up in Cincinnati when everything went down. He didn’t provide many details, and that was fine. There was only so much talk of death a person could absorb before it became as tedious as listening to the weather during a stretch of sunshine and no chance of rain.
Saw’s dump truck was getting cramped so Aben and Lonnie scouted the town until they came across a Cherokee with a key above the visor. Aben let Lonnie drive.
They didn’t find anyone else alive over the course of several weeks and Aben began to wonder how devastating the plague had been, about whether mankind could be on the verge of extinction. It seemed impossible, but then again, almost everything he’d experienced the last few months would have seemed impossible in his life beforehand. He was surprised to realize he hoped his most dire thoughts were untrue. He hadn’t had much need for people for the last twenty or so years, but thinking that he might be one of last the few hundred, or even thousand, people alive was too damned depressing to consider.
In Western Pennsylvania, as they trekked up and down the mountains, Saw stopped his dump truck in front of a five-foot-high wooden sign reading, ‘Higgins Haven Scout Camp & Recreational Area.’
“What do you say, boys?” Saw asked them.
It didn’t seem like anything special to Aben and the other men didn’t tender an opinion, but Saw assured them it would be a good place to hunker down and prepare. He didn’t say what he was preparing for, not then anyway.
“It’s good and remote so there won’t be many zombies in the immediate vicinity. And I don’t imagine it would have much appeal to any groups or individuals passing through looking for places to raid. Lotsa cabins so we can have as much privacy as we each desire. Seems like a peach of a place to me.”
And it was settled.
All they had to do was kill a dozen or so scouts and another four troop leaders that had turned into zombies. After that, Higgins Haven became their new home.
Chapter 36
“Give it, Prince!”
The dog dropped the tennis ball and Aben caught it before it hit the snow. Prince jumped up lunging for the ball but Aben pulled it back just in time. When the dog landed, his feet crunched through the icy glaze that covered the recently fallen snow.
Prince gave an excited bark and Aben lobbed the ball extra hard down the hill where it rolled and ricocheted through a maze of trees. The dog sprinted after it, just the hint of a limp on the leg that had been injured when Aben found it - or when it found him - months earlier.
He didn’t like to think about those first weeks. About men like Bolivar and Dash who had been lost along the way. Even now, amongst this new group of survivors, of fighters, he missed them.
Aben thought it seemed to be taking longer than normal for the dog to return and wondered if the ball had gotten lost somewhere down the hill. He couldn’t see Prince from this vantage point and moved closer to the trees. With every step, his feet fell through eight inches of hard snow. It didn’t take long before he was out of breath.
“Prince! Come back, boy!”
He waited, watched. Thirty more seconds passed with no sign of the dog.
“Damn it.”
Aben trudged through the snow, taking extra caution as he moved downhill. The dog’s footprints were easy to follow but going was slow and knowing that he’d eventually have to climb back up the hill made the trek even more annoying.
By the time he reached the bottom, he was breathing heavily and sucking in mouthfuls of the icy air made his lungs feel like they were full of glass. He saw the tracks leading through a copse of pine trees and followed.
It was a scraping sound that caught his attention. The noise came fast, frantic, frenzied. Instinctively, Aben’s hand dropped to the maul which was holstered in his belt like a gun. He didn’t pull it free, the feel of it was enough to calm him. Somewhat.
Aben continued forward, along the dog’s trail. The sound grew louder with every step. He realized it wasn’t scraping. It was scratching.
When he broke free of the trees, Aben saw Prince. He only realized he’d been holding his breath when it came out in a sudden rush. The dog stood atop a fro
zen pond, clawing and digging at the ice with its front paws. Aben grinned at the sight.
“I send you after a ball and you come up with a couple fish?”
Fish sounded pretty damned good. Aben hadn’t eaten fresh meat since a turkey sandwich more than half a year earlier and he missed it. He moved to the edge of the pond and surveyed it but he couldn’t see anything through the thick, opaque ice. As hungry as he was, he had no pole or net and couldn’t see any sense pursuing the matter.
“How about you come back here and we’ll look for the ball?”
The dog ignored him as he kept scratching.
Aben’s curiosity was piqued and he rested one booted foot atop the ice. He stepped down, putting a quarter of his body weight on it, then half, then all of it. It held. Aben moved onto the pond, the ice suspending him above the water below. He scooted across, careful not to slip on the slick surface. Within half a minute he’d reached Prince.
The dog continued to pay him no heed and when Aben rested his hand on Prince’s back the dog jumped back like it had received an electric shock. Aben couldn’t stifle a laugh and that seemed to snap the dog out of its obsession, at least momentarily. It pushed its muzzle against Aben’s bearded neck and gave him am eager lick.
“That’s my boy. I was starting to think you didn’t like me anymore.”
The dog licked him again then turned its face back to the ice. He’d cleared away the snow and its toenails had carved a half inch trench into the glassy surface. Prince stared at it and whined.
Aben eased down onto his knees and he could feel the cold stabbing through his pants. He leaned forward, onto his elbows and hoped none of the others were watching because he imagined that he looked quite the spectacle.
