He talked softly to rouse her further, stories about kids from his classroom. The boy who fell asleep and snored . . . the girl who threatened to sue the school because Xan confiscated her cell phone for the period . . . the boy named Colt who was always sneaking in a doughnut for first period, and how Xan had finally snapped that Colt had better not bring in one more doughnut without a second for poor, hungry Mr. Spencer. The next day, Xan was eating his words. Colt had his doughnut and one for the teacher, too.
That story got a smile out of Selena, and she pushed her hair off her forehead. Other than turning her head a little and swallowing the meal, it was the first independent movement she had made. He went back in time to his own junior high school days, his lab partner in eighth grade who never seemed to shower, and who would pull out a few strands of his long, oily hair, twist them together, and floss his teeth right there in class. That one got Selena good. Her face crumpled into a grimace. “Really?”
“Really,” Xan said. “It was sick. And the smell of him . . . I just breathed through my mouth until the bell rang. The girl who sat in front of us thought I was the one who smelled, and I was so embarrassed. Once she put an air freshener for a car on our table as a hint. I didn’t have any classes with that guy in high school, but I’d pass him in the hallways and he still smelled.”
“Anyone else weird?”
She had come back, and Xan was glad to see it. “There was a girl a year behind me in high school. Tall, thin, a long face like a horse, twitchy. I don’t remember her name. She would go up to a guy in the hallway and shout in his face: WILL YOU GO OUT WITH ME?” He whisper-shrieked it and Selena convulsed in a quiet laugh. “No one ever went out with her. She freaked the boys out.”
“Did she . . . do that to you?”
“No. She did that mostly to the football players. Oh, and there were the Tubber twins.” He had forgotten all about them until now. “Cindy and Mindy Tubber, my year. They hated each other, had different friends, took different classes, played different sports, everything. Even their friends hated each other, and the twins would egg them on to fight. Every year, Cindy and Mindy would have a fit about having to be right next to each other in the yearbook. And in junior year, there was a typo so it read Mindy Tubber and Mindy Tubber beside their pictures. After graduation, they went to the same college. Why? I have no idea.”
“We . . . we had Piss Pants Chuck,” Selena said. “It wasn’t an accident. He pissed himself on purpose. In class even. Weirdest kid . . . in the whole elementary school. He got put in the resource room . . . by fifth grade, and then his family moved away.”
Xan glanced out the gap in the windshield. Now there were two zombies roaming around by Graham. Selena was looking better and he was itching to go. It was cool in the car now, but it wasn’t going to stay that way. By noon, they would be uncomfortable, and by mid-afternoon, broiling. They couldn’t weather this day waiting for a better opportunity while trapped in a metal box.
He climbed around the car to count the zombie population from each window. No one was on Selena’s side, which was hardly surprising since there was only two or three feet separating them from the steep side of the hill. No one was in the back, although he couldn’t see too far. No one was in the other lane or in the trees on his side. It was just the one direction they needed to go that had them, and the two had reduced to one.
“We need to make our next move,” Xan said. “I can see houses off the road ahead of us, but there’s a zombie in the way. He isn’t wandering off, and we can’t stay in here much longer. The day is going to heat up. The cars parked in front of us are giving a little cover.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“We need to get out of the car and duck down so he doesn’t see us. Crawl toward the back of the car, as much as you can, and I’ll come get you.” She nodded wearily and he said, “I know you’re tired. Just hold on to my back and we’ll get to those houses.”
“And after that?”
“Then we’re going to climb this hill street by street when no zombies are around. We’ll take breaks as you need to, okay? But here in the car is not an option.”
She was fatigued and reluctant, and thank God in heaven, still willing to do this with him. He leaned over her and opened her door. Then he opened his own and dropped down to the pavement with the backpack and rifle. There was no scratching coming around the hill, except for him as he crawled to the back of the car. Rounding the trunk, he scratched to the passenger side and found Selena by the back tire. She held out her arms for the backpack. Then he turned and she climbed on.
He went at a crouch to the cluster of cars. Once he was around them, the guardrail ended and he could cut into the trees. They would hide him from the zombie if he slid from trunk to trunk, and Xan wanted to get very close to those houses before he shot the rifle.
They made it past the cars and guardrail without a problem. The patch of trees led into a rocky gully, and he raised his rifle at movement. It was a crawler, a thoroughly chewed-up crawler at the bottom of the gully, and one that couldn’t even crawl too well because he was missing an arm. It wasn’t a new injury. The skin tucked in neatly below his shoulder from a long-ago surgery. His legs were black from infection.
He bared his teeth at them and started up the gully with excruciating slowness. The weight of his hand on a rock was too much. It pried out from its groove in the wall and tumbled into the gully, taking the crawler with it.
Xan walked away fast. Then the dance began, dart to a tree, wait, dart to another tree, and wait again. The smell of a decaying body assaulted them. All that showed of it were legs around a trunk. He avoided using that tree for cover. Closer and closer they got to those houses, which weren’t just two standing alone but two at the edge of a long block of houses that ran on only one side of the road. The other side belonged to trees.
“Four o’clock,” Selena whispered directly into his ear. He looked over to Westmore. Two zombies were roaming aimlessly around the road, not yet a threat. The threat was this zombie they were coming upon. At the third house in the line, his T-shirt was scraping on the wooden fence as he walked along it. Xan looked back for the crawler. It hadn’t mounted the gully yet.
The rifle was cold in his hands as he got them to the last line of trees before the street. The house closest to Gardner was a mess. The windows were smashed all along the ground floor, and the curtains had been pulled out to the overgrown lawn. He inspected the second home. Interesting. It was whole on the first floor, but a window on the second floor was open. A ladder extended from it to an open window on the second floor of the first home. He looked at the third home and saw the same thing, a ladder connecting it to the second home.
Zombies hadn’t done that. A human being had. Someone trapped here after the contagion had rigged a way to reach other homes without having to do it by traveling on the ground. It also provided a handy escape route should zombies break inside one of the homes.
No one could be hiding out here now. There couldn’t have been enough food and water in the homes along this block to keep someone alive for two long years. From how destroyed the first house was, it was a safe bet that zombies had chased the person off.
Xan wanted that third house with the tall wooden fence. It wasn’t a moat, but it was a further line of defense. Then a face appeared in the window on the second story, just for a split second, and he didn’t want that house anymore. Someone was inside, and it wasn’t a human someone.
The second house then. The zombie scraping along the fence had lurched away from it and gone into the road. The soles of his shoes flapped as he walked. His chin was clean and that bothered Xan more than blood. It had been a long time since this one had eaten. His arms were as twig-like as Selena’s. Xan lifted the rifle, Selena dropping her arm from that side so he could move more easily.
Shoot the zombie. Run to the house. Get inside. Lay low.
He aimed for the head and pulled the trigger. And missed.
The boom ripped apart the quiet. Xan charged out of the trees and took aim as the zombie rushed for them, his speed impaired by his thrashed shoes. Aiming for the torso instead, Xan fired and hit him. Of course he had to aim for the torso. He wasn’t experienced in guns, his target was moving, and the torso was the largest target and the one he’d have the best luck in striking.
He flashed across the street as the zombie fell. Selena whispered, “They’re coming. They’re coming!” She meant the ones on Westmore. Xan jumped onto the sidewalk and ran up the walkway to the porch of the second house. He took the five steps in two giant leaps and was at the door. It was going to be locked, of course it would be locked, someone had hidden here and that person wouldn’t have left it otherwise.
Locked. He kicked it like a cop in a television show. Unimpressed, the door stayed put. Then Selena screamed and something was hissing. A zombie had unfolded from a corner of the porch, invisible in a heap of fabric, and Selena was blasting it in the face with her water gun. The crap that Xan had mixed into the gun stank. The streams hit it in the chest and face, and its advance halted so that it could claw at its eyes.
He kicked the door again. Footsteps were coming.
No time. He ran to the far end of the porch, braced himself with an arm on the wide railing, and heaved them over to the driveway. The weight on his back unbalanced him upon landing and he almost tipped over onto Selena. Righting himself, he ran down the driveway. Closed window, closed window, closed window, all too high . . . he ran into the backyard and up the steps to a second door. He kicked it.
Nothing.
Kicked it again.
Nothing.
He had Selena climb off. She shrank against the railing as he kicked it a third time. The door broke open to a laundry room.
He got them in and tried to lock the door, but his kick had busted it. Selena sank to the linoleum in the doorway between the laundry room and kitchen as he heaved over the washing machine to block the door. The cord pulled out of the wall and landed in the dirty square that had been beneath the washer. It wasn’t as good as a lock, but it was heavy.
“Mr. Spencer? We can close this, too,” Selena whispered. There was a sliding door that separated the two rooms. It was tucked all the way into the wall. She inched into the kitchen as he fought to get hold of the latch. Then he had it between his fingers. He dragged over the door and turned the lock. It was a nothing sort of lock, the kind that would defeat only the smallest children.
He had wasted a bullet aiming for the zombie’s head. He castigated himself and then castigated himself again for standing there when a window was over the sink. The pale blue curtain only covered the bottom half of it.
They sat together on the floor and panted. How far away was the car? Three hundred feet? Xan couldn’t think like that. Three hundred feet closer to Newgreen was better than nothing.
Every time either of them shifted, the floor squeaked. The house was old, the colors and styles a little older than Xan. The kitchen was yellow and magenta, and a shag carpet picked up past the kitchen. It was an ugly shade of dark green.
The more he thought about the pathetic lock on the door, the washer blocking the other, the more he wanted to get somewhere else in the house. Upstairs. If the zombies broke in, the two of them had to already be locked into a bathroom or bedroom.
The floor squeaked when he got to his knees. He flattened onto his stomach and Army-crawled into the living room. It didn’t squeak so much with the shag carpet and he got up onto his knees again.
The person who had hidden in this home hadn’t used the kitchen. But he or she had put sheets over the living room windows. They were tacked down in each corner. Otherwise the place looked normal, just old. A boxy television instead of a flatscreen, stacks of videotapes by a VCR, there was a CD player on an end table and a garish golden couch with a pattern of dandelions. A grand piano took up half the room, and there was so much music piled in the bench that it couldn’t lay flat.
The staircase was by the entryway. The steps were also carpeted. The zombie that Selena had splattered was still on the porch, scuffling about and bumping into the door. Just bumping, not hammering. The door had a small, stained glass window in its upper third. Even that was covered, although the person hadn’t worried about it as much. The living room windows were layered in heavy fabric; this one had a thin white sheet tacked over it. Leaning in a corner was a baseball bat.
Xan glanced back into the living room. Another baseball bat was by the piano. Selena was sliding over the carpet in small, tired movements. She still had the backpack on. “I can hear them out there in the driveway, Mr. Spencer. They’re going to the back.” Her voice was so tiny that he almost couldn’t hear it.
Xan took the backpack from her and put it over his own shoulders. “We’ll be safer upstairs.” Like a little kid, he put his butt on the first step. It gave a muffled squeak. Then he swung up onto the second step. Selena sat down on the first.
It took them some time to maneuver up the staircase. He would move up, lean over, get her under the armpits, and pull her up. Then repeat and repeat and repeat. It was not a quiet process, yet they were at the center of the house, not right by the outer walls. At the top, he dragged her around the corner.
Three bedrooms. One bathroom in the hall; one attached to the master bedroom. A family of five had lived here, judging from the framed pictures on the walls between the rooms. The two rooms belonging to the kids had notices up on bulletin boards for Delanto High and Delanto Junior High. The open window with the ladder to the third house was in the master bedroom.
A window to the backyard was open in the bedroom that had belonged to the sons. The screen was gone. The window had two panels that opened to the side rather than up and down, and the glass had been pushed over all the way. A sheet was tacked over the whole of it, and a cable was attached to a heavy bar along the ceiling. It ran out the top of the window, the sheet bunched down to let it pass through.
Instead of being tacked only at the corners, several extra tacks secured the sheet there. Wind puffed the fabric in at its center, and then sucked it out. The sheet was moldy. Rain had soaked it at some point, and run down the inside wall to make that moldy, too.
Through the open window in the master bedroom came the sound of scratching feet. Xan didn’t go over to look. That face in the third house . . . he slunk over on his belly and closed the door to that room. Then he went to the bathroom. There was no lock on the door. When he came back out, he blinked at the empty spot where Selena had just been.
She was in the boys’ bedroom, scooting to a bed. He lifted her onto it, got their things, and closed the door. After blocking it with a desk chair propped under the knob, he crawled over to the window and pried out the tacks in the lower right corner.
Ladders connected these three houses to each other, and the person had also installed a zip line that ran from this bedroom to a platform in the backyard tree. Another cable ran from the trunk and over the fence into the leafy backyard of the house behind this one.
There wasn’t any sound from the backyard, so Xan stuck his head out. He could just make out another zip line extending away from the third house. The man or woman had made a web of these homes. Xan got up and tugged at the cable. It was securely fastened and looked like a real zip line cable, not a make-do solution for desperate times. The rest of it was definitely make-do. No riding harness, no helmet, just a strange metal pulley docked on the cable. However the person had left, it wasn’t by this window.
Xan and Selena would be, once the coast was clear. This would get them one block further. He got back down and took out his binoculars to try to see some feature of the house beyond the fence. The trees in both yards made it difficult. It appeared to end in a deck, and the only other thing he could make out was a barbecue.
A zombie came around the side of the house. Xan withdrew. It didn’t see him, looking straight ahead instead of up. He pushed the tacks back in and crawled over to Selena. Then he spo
ke in a whisper. “We have a zip line to get to the next yard.”
She had the hedgehog under her hand, her index finger rumpling the blue fur. “Will it hold?”
Xan nodded. He would rather risk the zip line than find a way through the yards. She closed her eyes and rested while he reviewed the map. The street beyond the house with the deck was Willow. Past that was Walnut, and then came Baker, Ellison, and Pleasant. That would get Xan and Selena more than halfway up the hill. At the crest was Wicker Place. The only road on the far side of the hill was Rockwin. And Rockwin would weave around in its descent but eventually run alongside the freeway that went to Newgreen. Not all of the way, it terminated in a little circle, but most.
They could get there. They could do this. It wasn’t that far. They practically had an unassailable means to get to Willow dropped into their laps.
“Is she pretty? Is your girlfriend pretty?” Selena breathed.
“Colette is very pretty,” Xan whispered. Her eyes had slipped from his face to the ceiling. Though she was speaking to him, he had the sense that she was also somewhere else. Ebbing away.
But not totally yet. “Where did you meet?” she asked.
“At the school where we worked.”
Selena returned to herself, a corner of her lips going up in amusement. “Did she come up to you in the hallway and yell in your face: WILL YOU GO OUT WITH ME?”
He smiled. “No, it wasn’t quite like that.”
There was a banging sound from below. The zombie was trying to press open the back door and the washer was clanging. “It’s okay,” he whispered to her fright. The creature would have to get around the washer, get through the locked door to the kitchen, roam all the way up the stairs and only to meet the chair tucked under the doorknob. If it actually got to that point, Xan and Selena would have the zip line.
Was the nurse from the bait truck hiding out somewhere like they were? He doubted it. She had had the right idea, but not enough time to put it in motion. No, she was as dead as the crazy old man who had taken a seat at the bus stop, and the hopping, shackled thief who’d fallen chasing after the truck. And on the remote chance she had survived her drop point in Viet-nom, she wouldn’t be creeping in fits and starts back to Newgreen. She was a criminal. In her shoes, he would be headed for another settlement. And knowing in his heart that he would never make it.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 38
