“What if they heard the gunfire?” Carla nagged. “Let’s just get in the car and go!”
“I say we stick around and see what happens,” Paul said, trying to remain calm.
Her soccer-mom hairdo bounced when she tilted her head and looked at him like he was speaking in a foreign language. “Excuse me, but I have two young boys to think about here and I’d rather not leave it up to chance and just see what happens!”
Paul groaned and tried to think of a nice way to tell her she was free to leave anytime she wanted, just not in his truck. Mike and Matt breathed out of their mouths and swept their big eyes from their mom to Paul. He noticed Dan looking at him too. They all were.
He glanced back to Matt and Mike. They were so young and Sophia was right, they may not have had any kids before all of this but they sure as heck did now. They were the only semblance of any law now and protecting their own came first. From here on out, they needed as many eyes in the back of their heads as they could get.
“We’ll board up the broken window and leave at dawn.”
She opened her mouth to protest.
“We’ll be fine. We’re not carrying squirt guns here,” he said, tapping his black nylon holster. “Try to get some rest,” he said, not up for any further debate and turning to a large, framed picture of two birds.
Carla’s jaw dropped. “That’s your plan? Board up the window?” she said curtly.
He turned back around, frowning. “Do you really want to drag your two boys out there into the darkness? The cold?” He almost told her to have fun but somehow managed to bite his tongue.
Other than a huff, she didn’t respond.
She reminded Paul of his own mom. When he and Sophia had left their house in Des Moines to rescue her on the way out of town, she had been hysterical too. What mom wouldn’t have been? Then she got sick. So sick, she didn’t even want her leftover French silk pie from “Free Slice Wednesday” at Baker’s Square. Shortly before she couldn’t crochet anymore, she weakly told them the only thing she’d done out of the ordinary lately was to get a flu shot at the pharmacy up the street. Two days later she had closed her eyes and stopped breathing in her bed, the cat still hiding beneath it. Hiding like them.
Paul turned from Sophia back to the rocking chair. It was still now. Must’ve been the oversized repairman’s heavy footsteps that brought it to life, but he didn’t remember hearing any heavy footsteps. In fact, it was as if the guy had floated up onto the front porch like a ghost. Paul took another look at the rocking chair, then lifted the picture of the birds off the wall and carried it into the kitchen.
He didn’t know if some of the prophecies in the Book of Revelations had come to light or if God had just allowed Hell’s gates to open because it was full. All he knew was that the resurrection of the dead was definitely taking place out there. Out there, where the nearly full moon cast dark shadows of the tree’s withered branches upon the pearl white snow. Out there where even the shadows appeared to be reaching for you.
Up until just a couple of days ago, the majority of the things they’d encountered had been children or the elderly, which played perfectly into Paul’s flu-shot theory. When the government and medical communities started dishing out H1N1 warnings like white cake at a wedding reception, the young and the old had been the first in line. They had also been the first to turn, but that was changing. Case in point: the repairman. Paul guessed he was around thirty years old and probably out on a house call to patch up an overworked furnace in the area. Probably busy with a screwdriver and attacked from behind in the farm kid’s house, maybe in this one.
When they arrived here two hours ago, the back door was wide open and no one was home. Two half finished cups of coffee sat next to a glass ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts on the kitchen table. A green shotgun shell was lying on the kitchen floor and Dan had promptly stuffed it into his coat pocket before they secured the rest of the property.
After clearing the house, the six of them went outside before dark and siphoned a lucky tank of gas from an old rusty pick-up parked in the snow covered drive. Paul was smart enough to grab a siphon-kit from a deserted hardware store back in town and smart enough not to take any chances in unfamiliar surroundings. They stayed together. Nobody was going to run into the bushes and take a quick leak by themselves on his watch. Those rookie moves were for teenagers with big framed glasses and feathered hair in cheesy horror movies.
On the run from ZIPs meant a different house every night. Sometimes no one was home and sometimes they were. So far, none of the ones who had been could speak English anymore, which Paul found difficult to even process. He repeatedly tripped over the gradual revelation of just how few people were left on their seemingly endless episode of Haunted House Hunters, where this time around no one cared if the kitchen had granite countertops or not. Outside of shelter, they only cared about food, blankets and sleep.
Paul knelt next to Sophia in the recliner and placed a hand on her leg. “Hey, you know you had to do that right?” he said softly.
She stared straight ahead with unfocused eyes. “He was just a little boy,” she said, sniffling and wiping tears from her cheeks with the back of her glove.
“He used to be, baby, but he was gone before we got here. One of us could’ve been killed or infected if you hadn’t of protected us like that.” He chose his words carefully.
She didn’t respond.
In truth, Paul had no idea if you could be “infected” by a bite or a scratch from one of those things. They hadn’t seen anyone escape with just a bite yet but he had a feeling they would find out soon enough.
Chapter Three
Paul and Dan bent down to pick up the farm kid and bonked their heads together in the process.
“Ouch!” Dan clamored, standing back up and rubbing his forehead.
“You trying to kill me?” Paul asked, massaging his own melon.
“Am I bleeding?” Dan asked, pulling his hand away for Paul to see his forehead.
“Not yet,” Paul groaned.
Carefully, they carried the young boy out the back door, leaving a bloody smudge mark on the kitchen floor behind. Outside, they gently laid him in the snow behind a small shed not far from the rear entrance. They dashed back inside, locked the door and tried to shake off the cold.
“I can’t feel my fingers anymore,” Dan said, removing his gloves and blowing into his cupped hands.
“Do you wanna go turn the Jeep on for awhile?”
Dan briskly rubbed his hands together, then blew on them again. “Naw, I’m alright. I’d hate for any of those freaks to hear the engine.”
Paul nodded and went back into the kitchen where he started mopping a towel around the blood stain with his snow covered boot. Dan grabbed some duck tape and they overheard Carla tell Sophia she was a divorced thirty-six year-old as they began taping a large framed picture of two cardinals, a red male and a brown female perched upon a snow covered wooden fence, over the shattered kitchen window.
Carla said they had watched two neighbors murder her parents before she grabbed the keys to their minivan from a sofa table and got her and the kids out of there.
“That is horrible,” Sophia muttered.
“My parents used to play bridge with them every week too!” she laughed, wiping a tear away. “My ex-husband, Chad, lives in California now and after the phones went dead I had no idea what to do. Hell, even Bill O’Reilly had no idea what to do, which was a first!” she punctuated with another nervous cackle.
Paul and Dan stopped taping and glanced at each other.
Carla’s laughter faded into a lull. Then she resumed her story with a much graver tone.
“By then those things were all over the place,” she whispered. “Thanks to my dad, the van had a full tank. That man never let a vehicle get below half a tank. Said it was irresponsible, but personally, I think he was obsessive-compulsive. Either way, we just drove. Drove out of town and kept driving until we got stuck.”
His biggest fear was getting surrounded by a group of the dead walkers while they were busy sleeping, becoming entombed inside the farmhouse with its dusty standard-definition TV and Hummel figurines. In anticipation of just such a scenario, he parked the Grand Cherokee in a “ready-to-go” position right outside the back door. If more than a handful of the creeping charlies showed up at once, they would blast their way to the rig and take their chances elsewhere.
“Thank you again. From the bottom of my heart, I will never forget your generosity. All of you,” Carla said placing a hand over heart and singing a different tune when Dan and Paul came back into the living room.
“We’re just glad you guys are okay.” Dan smiled.
“So, we’re going to the ocean, huh?” Carla asked, raising her eyebrows at Paul.
He sat down on the arm of Sophia’s chair, noticing how Carla had invited herself along for the ride. Not that they would ever leave them here on their own, but it bugged him just the same.
“Yeah, I figure we’ll keep heading south on I-35, go around the big cities and eventually put our backs to the ocean where we can figure out our next move without freezing our tails off.”
“I cannot wait,” Dan said, with chattering teeth and folding his arms across his chest.
Mike turned to his mom. “Hey mom, are there going to be man-eating sharks in the ocean?”
Carla’s brow folded. “What? No, sweetie, there are not going to be man-eating sharks in the ocean.”
“I don’t wanna get eaten by a shark!” Matt cried, turning on the water works again.
Paul rolled his eyes and wrapped an arm around Sophia.
“You are not going to get eaten by a shark, Peanut! What is the matter with you?”
“Guys, I think all the sharks have moved on to other spots,” Paul told them.
Both boys gawked at him.
“Because of all the oil?” Mike asked.
Paul’s eyes thinned. “Oil?”
“Yeah, the oil in the Gulf.”
“Oh yeah, that’s exactly right. Sharks hate oil.”
“Why?” Matt asked.
“Well,” Paul said, clearing his throat. “It gets in their gills and they can’t see.”
Matt cocked his head at him. “Sharks see out there gills?”
“Huh? No, they see out their eyes but they don’t like the oil.”
“Maybe the oil is gone by now,” Mike said.
Paul cast a sideways look at Sophia. “Okay, any other indispensable questions?”
“Just one,” Carla said, sticking a finger into the air. “Is this beach going to have a tiki bar?” she asked, launching the cackle again.
He tried to smile back, but she made him nervous. She was overweight and Paul doubted she could run very fast. If she learned to mellow out in the rough times, she might be able to handle a small gun without killing any of them. But her mouth and alcohol seemed like a dangerous combination.
Matt and Mike, on the other hand, were way too young to be entrusted with handguns, but down the road they could prove to be valuable assets. Realistically, they could be in hiding and on guard for years. Who knew? All they knew was this was a whole different kind of Survivor, heroes verses villains, and they would need all of the loyal alliances they could get to outwit, outplay and outlast their fetid opponents. In particular, alliances with those who had some form of medical training.
“So what did you do before any of this happened anyway?” Paul asked Carla.
“Me? I was a realtor for Morton Realty. Why?”
He shook his head.
Before getting canned, Paul had been a DJ at a radio station in Minnesota, who couldn’t stitch up a hole in a shirt let alone a bad wound. Dan’s experience at the Apple store in Jordon Creek Mall was no better. He got sick at the sight of a paper-cut. With all of the hospitals turning into literal ghost towns overnight, they would need to befriend a doctor or an EMT and soon.
“Alright, here’s the deal,” Paul said, looking straight at Carla. “You’re going to have to carry your weight around here, and that means keeping your head during the rough patches. All of you,” he said, looking to Matt and Mike. “And believe me, we’re going to hit some rough patches. That much is for sure.”
The three nodded.
He turned back to Carla. “You’re also going to have to learn how to shoot a gun.”
Her eyes lit up. “My dad and my ex were big hunters!” she said. “I know my way around a gun.”
“So do I!” Mike volunteered.
Paul raised his eyebrows. “You do?”
“Yeah, I’ve shot my dad’s guns at the range a ton,” he said proudly. “Plus I’ve played Buck Hunter a million times.
Sophia laughed.
“I shot a real deer one time!” Matt said.
Mike’s face slumped in the moonlight. “No you didn’t!”
“And a bear one time too!”
Everyone laughed except Mike.
“You wish!” he said.
“I did too!” Matt countered.
“Didn’t!”
“Did!”
“Boys!” Carla said, glaring at them.
Silence took the room again as Mike gave Matt the evil eye.
“Didn’t,” Mike whispered.
“I’ll shoot you right now!” Matt shouted.
“Peanut! That is more than enough! You are not shooting anyone.”
Matt folded his arms and turned from his mom and brother while a lull cloaked in monstrous shadows swept across the room.
Paul glanced over to Dan and raised his eyebrows. “Alrighty then.”
“Hey,” Dan whispered. “You sure I’m not bleeding?” he asked, showing his forehead to Paul again.
Paul shook his head and dropped onto some pillows and blankets on the floor. Soon after, sleep was the only other intruder that night.
Chapter Four
Paul was waiting for Sophia to try on some clothes in the dressing room of Forever 21 when a moldering mall cop violently grabbed him from behind and bit down into his neck. Paul’s arms flailed and brought down a rack of mini-skirts. They crashed to the white tiled floor as the former mall cop took him to the ground, landing on him with all his weight. His lungs emptied with a gasp as the rotting thing in a black uniform crept towards his face.
Paul woke up coughing, the air coming in short spurts back into his lungs. Finally, he drew in a long, deep breath and exhaled a dragon-like cloud of amorphous white smoke. He rolled over to find Sophia tightly snuggled up to him under a mountain of blankets that smelled like wet dog. Sweat glistened across his upper lip as daylight finally carved its way through the windows. He exhaled another rolling cloud and scanned the room. In the light, the small rocking chair was a normal little kid’s rocking chair and nothing more. The family photo above the fireplace simply held a captured moment in a family’s happy past. He dropped his head back into the pillow, wondering how it could have come to this. One minute, unemployed in his comfy home, the next, running for his life in some stranger’s.
It was like one of his favorite Romero splatter fests or Resident Evil video games. Last week, movies and video games were just a cheap escape from the mundane rigors of life. Today, they were invaluable training. Training that would be hard to catch up on without electricity. Fortunately, he wasn’t a fan of Romantic Comedies, because knowing how to win someone’s heart wasn’t going get them anywhere now.
He looked at the others still sleeping and snorted. After years of drifting from one meaningless job to another, he suddenly realized he was the one with the edge now. He knew what to expect and what to do. In this madness, he ha
d finally found his calling. Before the spread, he could barely save himself, but things were different now. The rules had changed.
He closed his eyes and saw his mom’s dark eyes pop open again. Slowly, they turned to him in the rocking chair next to her bed. He rubbed his eyes and coughed again. He could still see her knock him backwards in the rocking chair as clear as day. The handgun’s kick that sent a single bullet through the middle of her forehead still haunted his right hand. He flexed it. Initially, he thought that horrid moment would plague him for the rest of his life, however short it may now be, but so many other atrocities had already nearly replaced it.
“Hey,” Sophia whispered. “Are you awake?”
“Mornin’, Sunshine,” he said softly.
“We made it,” she said, shuddering in the cold.
Nothing was taken for granted anymore, especially waking up.
He kissed her forehead and held her tight for the next fifteen minutes.
Chapter Five
The early morning sun invaded the Jeep like in-laws on the holidays. However, it was a welcome invasion. The SUV’s heater worked just fine but the sun seemed like it could wash away all of the horror. The fresh snow was just as bright and pretty as it had been when you could still hit a drive-thru on your way home from work. Paul hoped it would wash away some of the snow on the roads too. The recent snowfall slowed their speed, yet did little to dismay the Jeep’s grippy four-wheel drive. Since the bankers had just become a bailout plan for the walking dead, the Jeep was all his now, free and clear.
Squinting through black sunglasses, he scanned the sparkling landscape ahead of them. Interstate 35 was eerily clear of vehicles. They passed an abandoned car or truck every few miles but nothing was blocking the road. Nothing was on the move either. He shook his head. This was bad. Instead of a mass exodus of vehicles, a rippling calm drifted across the lonely road. He guessed that when people began getting sick they had called into work and stayed home, eventually becoming bedridden with their cars parked in the driveway before finally getting the fever for the flavor of a hip-bone.
COLD FAITH AND ZOMBIES Page 2
