He heard the scratching again, much more loudly than before. Then the wood of the sill gave way, dropping him down and a splinter slicing into his finger. Blood instantly oozed out of the puncture.
“Hide in the house and don’t make a sound,” he ordered.
“Mr. Spencer-”
“Don’t cut yourself on that glass and hide,” he demanded, and closed the window. Getting the rifle, he looked around the yard. Then he ran for the shed, praying that no one was taking a nap behind the toys and pools.
There was a tiny, empty space made just for him. He threw himself down to it and jammed his finger into his mouth to suck the blood away. In the dirt and cobwebs, he waited. Wind blew and he sucked his finger harder.
Scratching. He could only see a sliver of the driveway, and that was where the house left off and the fence started. The scratching grew and grew as he watched. There was no sound from within the house. He should have told Selena just to stay put on the counter, and maybe she was. Unless the zombie was seven feet tall and figured out the latch on the gate, he wasn’t going to be able to look in that window and see her there.
Xan was afraid that she would hug her blue hedgehog for comfort and make it squeak. But she was fourteen, not four. A girl her age was old enough to keep quiet.
A zombie appeared. It wasn’t the woman in the bathrobe or that circling man. This was a teenaged boy in tattered jean shorts and a shirt that was more holes than fabric. His oily and snarled bangs had grown over his face. Then he passed out of view as he walked along the fence.
Xan’s blood tasted metallic. He swallowed it and barely blinked. A second zombie came around the side of the house, a shaggy, sexless creature that hit the fence and made it clang. Then he could only hear them, scratch scratch clang scratch clang.
He wanted to look at his finger, see if it had stopped bleeding. He didn’t dare.
Clang. Scratch. THUNK. Silence.
THUNK. One of them was walking into the garage door, or both of them were. He had more than enough bullets to handle these two, but the noise . . .
They weren’t like the zombies he had known from television, who moaned and groaned as they lurched around. Olyvyr Gravine hadn’t gotten that detail right. The zombies he had created rarely uttered a sound. That had been in Frank Toll’s reading, too. At most they growled over food. Well, that’s interesting! Anything was considered a challenge when it came to food, and all challenges were considered the same: a zombie, an insect, or the wind.
The wind. He swallowed on his blood and pursed his lips around his finger to make a tighter seal.
He couldn’t look away from the sliver. He had to know how many came in so he could know how many went out. Only then would it be safe to get up and find a better way into the house. He stared at the driveway as the scratches, clangs, and thunks went on unabated. They knew something was out here to make that crash. Now they were waiting for it to appear, or a scent to give them a lead.
He wasn’t going to give them that scent. His finger stayed in his mouth even though he wasn’t swallowing on blood any longer. His blood was on a piece of that rotted wood under the window, but he wasn’t. So they would be confused.
The sexless one reappeared in the sliver and scratched away. The clothes were jeans and a shapeless T-shirt; hair concealed its face and there were no obvious signatures like large breasts to identify it. The second zombie was still banging against the garage door. Then it banged against the fence.
Be still, be still, he begged Selena. He was being so still that an ant crawled over his arm.
The scratching of the first departing zombie faded away. The only sound in the world was the clanging of the fence. Then it stopped, and within Xan’s weak memories, he found an explanation. The scent of blood was in the air but the zombie could not get to it; he was hungry, so hungry, and that smell was luring him on but no human was there at the end of the rainbow . . . Nor was there an animal to dive for, there was nothing but the smell . . . The zombie had no words, no thoughts, just twin sensations of starvation and bafflement.
The clanging resumed, but it was moving. The teenaged zombie came into the sliver and walked into the wall of the house. Xan stayed put until the kid disappeared. And then the only thing he did was pull out his finger. The skin was wrinkled. The splinter hadn’t gone in deeply. If there was plastic wrap in the kitchen, he was going to cover the puncture with it.
The footsteps were going away. Once they were gone, Xan counted to sixty and got up. His eyes were on the small, ridiculously high bathroom window. If he dumped out a bucket of the toys and stood on it, it would give him a better boost. He could dump it on the thick grass to muffle the sound.
There would still be some sound. They were kids’ toys, after all. The zombies would come right back. They could be in the front yard, or standing still at the end of the driveway. And he had to get in there with the rifle.
There was motion in the living room. Selena had come to the sliding glass door. She beckoned to him frantically. Then her hands came together at the handle and she tugged. Xan stepped between the bucket and kiddie pools. He ran over the yard and concrete, up the single step. She let go of the handle, the door open only inches, and he took hold of the outside handle. It was a heavy door, and sitting in the track were leaves and grit.
He pulled it open a little farther, squeezed inside, and slid it shut. Pinching the latch, he pulled it over and tugged at the handle. It was a good lock and a heavy door; his only complaint was that it was made out of glass.
Filmy white curtains were bunched up at the end. He yanked them over. Anyone in the driveway by the garage could see into this room, and these curtains weren’t much of a shield.
Selena was down on the floor. At first he thought that she was too weak to stand, and then he saw what she had seen. The living room was open to the kitchen, which had a curtain over the window, and the kitchen was open to a room at the front of the house. That room had several windows in a straight line, and none had curtains. He was visible to the street.
He dropped beside her on the carpet and they breathed together of the musty air. It was scented with perfume. “Great job,” he whispered. “Did you cut your feet?”
“No.” She was very out of breath. “I . . . I was careful. I . . . I told myself . . . just three steps around . . . the glass and . . . then I can get down in the hall . . . hallway. And I did. The glass . . . didn’t go that far. I crawled . . . from there.”
“Did you see the zombies?”
“Yeah. I was peeking . . . from between the sofa and the . . . armchair. I waited until they were both gone . . . before I crawled to the door.”
They had gotten to a home. They had actually made it. He looked around at the living room. A playpen was filled with toys, and some kid had decorated the walls and sofa with markers. There were signs of childproofing everywhere: sockets blocked with plastic pieces, special latches on the drawers of the entertainment center, the edges of the coffee table covered in rubber bumpers. Dozens of pictures were on the wall, showing a portly, middle-aged woman with a variety of very young children and babies. This had been an in-home daycare. The table in the kitchen had three high chairs clustered around it.
He got up as far as his knees, which kept him well below the windows in the front room. “What did you see in the rest of the house?”
“There’s that bathroom . . . and two bedrooms. They’ve got curtains, better ones than in this half of the house.”
“Ready for another crawl?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Okay.” Bunched up at the foot of the sofa was a blanket. Xan brought it over with a pillow and covered her up from head to foot. Then she was just an innocuous lump on the floor with a rifle beside her. “Rest. I’ll check everything over.”
There wasn’t likely to be a gun in a daycare. But there might be some food and water, and definitely clothing. He shuffled along on his knees to the kitchen to start there. The counter was clean, dishes i
n the strainer still waiting to be put away. A little toy car was under the lower cabinets, the same color as the wood and barely visible but for its wheels. The front room without curtains was a tiny play area for the kids, an alphabet rug strewn with toys and stuffed animals. He didn’t go in there.
Ooze had spread down from the freezer to the linoleum and spiders had taken up residence all along the ceiling. Skirting the ooze, he put a hand to the latch on the pantry door. Then he dropped it and put his head to the dusty floor to look through the crack. He trusted that there wasn’t a zombie hanging out in the pantry. But he had to make sure anyway. Then he undid the latch and opened up the door.
The woman who had lived here had been overdue to shop, but there were crackers and juice boxes. Jugs of olive oil and canola oil were on a shelf, flour and packets of yeast beside them, but he dismissed all of that. The crackers and juice were going into the backpack, which he assumed was still in the bathroom.
Along a shelf far over his head were four cubbies labeled K., P. H., P. C., and T. The one with T had a note that warned allergic to eggs, and the one for K. read only here on Mondays. Those were for the kids. Since the pantry couldn’t be seen from any window, Xan stood up. Two of the cubbies had pudding; one had a child-sized bottle of water. Uncapping it, he drank. Then he got back to his knees and moved out of the kitchen.
In the entryway was a big, cheerful children’s calendar. At the time of the contagion, the woman had ferried her charges to the library for Reading Time. She must have taken a second car. He hadn’t seen any car seats within the one sitting in the driveway. They hadn’t made it back here.
In the hallway was a coat closet, which had jackets far too small and far too big for either of them. Xan wanted a jacket that fit or none at all. He had to have the full use of his arms. Past the coat closet was a bedroom. It was crowded with a changing table, cribs, and a child’s bed. Tiny clothes were packed into an organizer within the closet. There were no toys in the room, only a shelf of books and mobiles over the cribs. An attached bathroom had a tub and a child’s seat affixed to the toilet.
He wasn’t going to find a gun in there. Sliding between the cribs, he peered through the curtains to the street. There were the two zombies that had come down the driveway, and a third that hadn’t. Xan inspected his finger. A tiny dot of blood had come to his skin. He sucked it off and went into the bathroom to open up the medicine cabinet. There were two boxes of bandages. He put a waterproof one over his puncture.
Then he went on down the hallway to a closed door and opened it up. Another closet, but this one was filled with shelves holding photo albums, yearbooks, art supplies, and bookkeeping materials. Nothing Xan needed. He closed the door.
In the back bathroom, the backpack was sitting in a sea of glass. The smell from the smashed perfume bottles was incredible. He swiped a towel from the rack, got the backpack and closed the door, and bunched up the towel in the crack. A sign on the door warned that the bathroom was for adults only.
Then he went into the master bedroom. Most of the curtains were already drawn, and he took care of the rest. No gun was under the mattress, in the closet, or in the dresser drawers, but he got a pair of thick socks for Selena and lifted up the sweatpants to judge them. They were too big, much too big, in large and extra-large and even a size larger than that. He almost put them back before Colette stepped to mind. If she had been out here without pants, she wouldn’t care if the pair she came across were too big. Xan took the large pair and also the smallest of the T-shirts. He should have picked a T-shirt out for himself, but he couldn’t make himself leave the burp shirt. There wasn’t blood on it, and the shirt was home to him. Getting rid of the shirt would feel like getting rid of Lucca.
In the living room, Selena was still. He lifted an edge of the blanket. She wasn’t quite asleep or awake, and didn’t respond when he set down the clothes. One of her teddy bear T-shirt socks had come off somewhere. He replaced it with a proper sock and leaned against the sofa with stale crackers and a box of apple juice. Maps. There hadn’t been a single map in the home.
Rose and Acton Parkway. He had to know where that was in relation to Newgreen and find the shortest route to get there. Sucking in the last of his juice, he spied on the car from the front room. Keys were high on a pegboard in the kitchen, so that wasn’t a problem, but he couldn’t get in the car without being visible to someone going by in the road. There was only one zombie hanging around now, the kid who couldn’t see much of anything through his hair. Every time that Xan thought he’d gone, the boy wandered past again.
He took a break from watching when Selena woke up. As his inner Colette had informed him, the girl didn’t care about the clothes being too large. She struggled into them and tucked the puffy legs of the sweatpants into the socks. Then she put Jackal’s jacket back on and ate a container of chocolate pudding with a pink kid’s spoon he took from the strainer.
“We need a map,” Xan said. “I’m going to look in the car in the driveway and see if I can find one. If there isn’t one and the street is clear, I’ll try a few more cars.”
She didn’t want him to do that, but she just nodded. “Will you help me get on the sofa first? The floor is making me ache.”
He got her settled on the side of the sofa that couldn’t be seen from any window. “Do you want a book while I’m gone?”
“I’ll be too freaked out to read. You go. I’ll just sit here under the blanket until you come back.”
He emptied out the backpack on the coffee table, got the keys and rifle, and shuffled back to the front room to look out the window. Three houses down and across the street, the zombie was wandering around a lawn. It was weird how he just kept hanging around when everyone else had floated away. If the brain damage weren’t so bad, Xan would suspect the kid had once lived on this road.
The kid went around the side of a house. There was going to be no better time than this one. Xan let himself out the sliding glass door. He couldn’t lock it from the outside. But with Selena hidden by the curtain and blanket, there was no reason for a zombie to have any interest in getting inside. And Xan wasn’t going far.
He opened the gate and slunk down the driveway at a crouch. No one was under the car. Then he sank to his knees once at the hood, placing it between him and the house that the kid had walked around. On Xan’s other side was a wooden fence with wide gaps between the slats. Someone coming down Rose from Acton, or appearing in the next yard from the open house, would see him.
Fast. Xan scooted along the driver’s side and slid the key into the lock. He opened the door and inched inside like a worm. The woman had been a tidy person. Everything was dusty, but there was no trash on the floor or belongings piled in the back. Reaching for the glove compartment, Xan pried it open.
Maps. Maps. He gathered them greedily and shoved them into the backpack. There were too many to sort through and the one on top was for Seattle. He didn’t need that, but he could discard it in the house. He zipped up the backpack and heard that telltale scratching. The zombie kid was back.
Xan looked through the window. Yes, he was over there on the lawn. Sliding out of the car, Xan closed the door just enough to get around it. When he checked through the windows again, he saw that the kid was facing away.
He ran for the cover that the house would provide. Closed the gate and raced for the house. Selena pulled off the blanket as he rolled open the door, her fear changing to relief when it was only Xan. He locked it and sat down beside the sofa, so excited to have maps that his fingers trembled on the zipper. Going to search other cars wasn’t feasible with a zombie so close.
Seattle. San Francisco. Portland. San Diego. Madison. No good. Just as his heart was falling, he came across one for the area. It was old and a little bleached out, but legible. He almost yelled to have it, and it was lucky he didn’t yell because the zombie was back in the home daycare’s driveway. He had good hearing, that kid. They sat in silence as the boy scratched around, appearing throu
gh the curtain to the back as a dark shape at the fence. Clang. Clang. Clang.
For twenty minutes or more, the kid clanged and scratched and paced the length of the driveway. At last he went away and Xan laid out the map. Newgreen wasn’t on it, of course, but the city that it had once been was. They were straight north of it in the city of Delanto. There was no other city it could be. Valley Oak was farther north. He hadn’t been in the bait truck long enough to get there.
He hunted for Acton Parkway next. Valley Oak was a tiny place all clustered together; Delanto was huge and severed down the middle by the freeway. The bait truck had pulled off on the eastern side and traveled on city streets to the western. And there was Acton Parkway, one of several main thoroughfares. The complex of essence oils had its match here in streets named after flowers. Daisy, Petunia, Iris, Lilac, and there was Rose. They were in the heart of this city.
He gave himself time to learn the area. Haste was going to get them killed. None of the cars on this road had been hybrids; he might be more likely to find those in an area that had once catered to residents of a higher socioeconomic class. If there weren’t any, he’d be hoofing it. There was a long way to go through this city, and then it was mostly open space to Newgreen.
He memorized roads and then gave his eyes a rest. Selena was asleep, a smear of pudding on her chin and the hedgehog on her chest. She had lost ground since yesterday, a little less energy, a little less talkativeness. Cancer racked some people with pain in the last stages, but she wasn’t complaining. Her disease was killing her silently.
He thought of the birthdays he had had that she wouldn’t, his father ordering gifts online to place around the cake for his fifteenth and sixteenth, the brand new computer for his seventeenth, the big gift certificate to a clothing store for his eighteenth. Then the heart attack took his dad away, and Xan had celebrated with friends after that. In time Colette was the one ordering a cake, and Katie was making cards and picking out socks or ties at the store for gifts. Xan had known how accidents could happen, like the one that killed his mother, but it hadn’t occurred to him with any seriousness that he could wake up to a diagnosis of cancer or something else wanting to whisk him off into death. His father’s heart attacks hadn’t made an impression of that sort since Xan was young and healthy.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 35
