She sat staring at the wall with nothing at all to do, feeling time pass by at a crawl. She tried to keep count in her head to decide how long an hour or two would be, but eventually she stopped and laid her head down on one of the pillows. She lay on her side, facing the door and window, waiting to see or hear something.
A couple hours passed and she began to feel sleepy. When she felt like it had been long enough, she slid her legs over the edge of the bed and picked up the crutches, then made her way to the window. Sarah carefully hooked a finger under one of the curtains and pulled it away as she pressed her eye to the edge of it, peering out into the dark parking lot.
The rain still came down pretty hard and diminished all visibility, though it seemed like the intensity of it had started to lessen. Raindrops splashed on a short metal overhang above, causing an uneven yet almost melodic sound as it ran off and splattered against the concrete on the other side of the window in thick streams.
Sarah could barely make out the first line of trees on the other side of the road beyond the parking lot. She squinted her eyes, trying to focus them as she scanned along the trees. Her eyes went back and forth, almost wanting to see something.
Then they stopped.
Between two trees near a stop sign, she saw the shape. Her eyes worked over it, tracing the edges and trying to use her brain to process what it was. It was that familiar shape that was tall and slender, with curves in all the right spots to make up a pair of shoulders with a head sitting on top of them.
Her eyes strained harder and harder, feeling like if she blinked even once, the shape would disappear. But it was so dark out and so hard to see, and the shape was terribly vague. She didn't know if she was really seeing it or just projecting it. Finally, the strain became too much, giving her a headache at the base of her forehead right above her nose, and she squeezed her eyes shut then blinked them a few times, trying to ease the pain. When her eyes came back to the shape, it was gone. She searched back and forth, but she could no longer find it, and she couldn't be sure it was there in the first place.
She removed her finger from the curtain and let it fall, making her way back into the room. Dale was completely silent next door, and that both comforted her and concerned her, but she knew that everything was okay. Sarah sat on the bed and drank some water from the jug and tried to eat a little jerky, but she found that she wasn't very hungry.
Feeling exhausted from the walk, she laid herself down on the bed then rolled over, blowing out the candle. Total darkness fell over the room and she lay on her back, the towels still wrapped around her as she pulled the covers up to her neck.
She listened to the rain outside come down in a pleasing way as she closed her eyes and tried to fall asleep. It was hard to do so, because she knew something was going to happen in the night and she would awake in a panic, but eventually sleep came anyway.
Sometime later—she didn't know how long—she woke up. But it was caused just by her natural internal processes rather than any sudden noise coming from a door or window. Her eyes fluttered open and it took her a moment to realize what was happening.
The room was still dark and there was no sound from Dale in the next room over, and still the only sound at all came from the rain outside.
But almost from an instinct—maybe from a miracle—she woke just in time to hear footsteps suddenly splashing in the rain.
They were distant at first, but they came closer. She thought they were something else at first, but the closer they got, the more unmistakable they became. They made their way across the parking lot right up to her door.
Sarah's eyes shot wide open as adrenaline pumped through her body. She was completely awake and she clutched her covers in fear, waiting for the door handle to turn. She raised her arm above her head and tried to bang on the wall, but she was deathly afraid to make her knocks loud enough for the person outside to hear.
Her limp knocks were almost too soft for even her to hear over the rain, and her arm seized up in paralyzing terror.
But the doorknob never turned.
She held her breath, her eyes trained on the door, waiting for the killer to burst through as she lamely tapped on the wall. She pictured the door flying inward and seeing his silhouette standing in the doorway as the rain poured down behind him, the only visible part of him his mad smile and those deranged eyes leering at her. She saw him lurch for her, but what he would do next, she couldn't even imagine. Sarah began to shake and her bed rattled on its frame as she waited for her fate. But it never came.
Finally, after a long moment of confusion, second-guessing whether she heard anything at all, she heard the footsteps again and a barely-noticeable darkening sweeping by the underside of the curtains on the window, heading for the room next door.
Sarah's heart seized up when she realized what was happening. There was silence for a long time, then it was broken.
Commotion came through the wall from the next room over and she heard brief sounds that were muffled and hard to hear. She heard yelling one moment, then the sound of someone knocking into furniture the next, then there was coughing like someone was being choked.
Sarah yanked the covers off of her and grabbed the crutches. She shoved herself up onto her good foot and pulled open the door. She left her coat inside and hobbled out in the rain for Dale's room.
The door was shut and she wondered how the killer got inside, never hearing it open in the first place.
The yelling and struggling inside continued, and Sarah tried to open the door, but it was locked. She banged on it and yelled out Dale's name as the rain came down and soaked her all over again.
The door unexpectedly opened and she fell inside, crashing face-first on the floor. A dark figure stood above her and grabbed her under the armpits and dragged her inside, shutting the door behind her.
Sarah rolled around on the floor, struggling against him, but then a voice came through the darkness and made her stop.
"Sarah, what's wrong? Is he here?"
He helped her up and propped the crutches under her again as she peered through the darkness to find Dale's round face staring at her.
"Are you okay?" she asked, completely shocked.
"Me? I'm fine. Are you okay?"
"I heard noises..." she said.
"Oh," he said, and laughed. "I'm fine. I didn't mean to scare you."
And while she was still confused, she suddenly smelled something burning and started to piece together what had happened.
"I was going to save it for later," Dale said, "but I decided to have my last smoke while I waited. Started to get pretty tired and must've fallen asleep with it still hanging out of my mouth. I guess it fell on the bedspread and it caught on fire. I must've looked like an idiot over here trying to stomp it out."
Sarah nearly gasped for air, suddenly realizing that she had still been holding her breath. Her heart rate started to slow and she calmed down. "I thought he was here," she said. "I thought you were..."
"No," Dale said. "I didn't hear a peep from you all night and I was starting to get worried that you were, well... you know."
She shook her head. "I was fine."
Dale went to the window and peeked through the curtain. "I think it's only a few hours until sunrise." He walked back toward Sarah and suddenly kicked a dresser with an old tube TV sitting on top in anger. "Son of a bitch didn't even show."
"I heard him," Sarah said suddenly. "I heard footsteps in the rain. I think that's what woke me. Then they went over to your door and that's when I heard all the noise in here."
Dale's eyes widened and he went back to the window, peeking out. Sarah half-expected him to throw open the door and disappear into the night, ready for a fight with the killer, but he simply walked back to the bed and sat down, keeping his eyes on the window. "He knew it was a trap," Dale said.
"He was just toying with us," Sarah agreed. "I don't think he's going to try to get to us tonight."
"You're right," Dale said. "He
's going to come when we least expect it. We need a better idea."
"You got one?" she asked.
"I think so. We need to go somewhere a little more permanent where we can set up and wait for him." Dale yawned. "But for now we should get a little more sleep before we get to it in the morning. I think it's best for you to stay here."
"Okay," she said.
Dale helped her into one of the double beds, then he got into the other one and they both got a few more hours of sleep before daybreak. He kept his rifle close by, but the killer didn't return.
10
…Often Go Awry
The smell inside the hardware store was atrocious. The rankness filled their nostrils like stale air from a necrotic tomb and turned their stomachs. Sarah turned her head away, pressing a hand to her mouth, and Dale tried to weather it out, but the stench quickly got to him and made his eyes water.
"Let's get what we need and get out of here," he said, pinching his nose shut.
Sarah nodded, holding her arm over her nose and mouth as she awkwardly hobbled through the entranceway of the hardware store favoring one crutch. "What are we getting exactly?" she asked in a muffled voice.
"Just enough supplies for a few traps," Dale replied. "They don't need to do him in, just wound him. Something he won't see coming..." His eyes scanned the shelves, moving along the first aisle farther into the store.
Sarah strayed near the entrance and cautiously peeked down the next aisle. "Oh God," she said.
"What is it?" Dale called nervously from the other aisle.
"I found out what's causing the smell," she said.
As she stood at one end of the second aisle, Dale came into view a few seconds later at the other end, and their eyes met at the gruesome sight piled in the middle.
A loose stack of half a dozen zombies lay on the floor, brutally hacked to death. All of them had been permanently killed, with some limbs chopped off, but mostly just head injuries. There was a shovel lying on the floor next to the pile with the blade covered in very dark, very old blood. A crowbar was lodged into one of the zombies' forehead, and an ice pick was stabbed up through the jaw of another one. Huge pools of blood had dried on the tiled floor around them, and dark splatters coated the shelves and the dusty tools and items hanging from them.
Sarah stood mesmerized by the scene. She wanted to turn away, but for some reason the brutality of what she was seeing entranced her. Not even consciously aware that she was doing it, she took a step forward on her crutches.
"Don't get near them," Dale warned. "You never know if they're really dead or not."
Sarah stopped herself, realizing what she was doing. She came back to reality and nodded at Dale.
"Just stay close," he said. "I won't be too long."
"Okay," Sarah said. She turned and sauntered over to the third aisle while she waited, keeping her eyes up on the shelves and looking around for something they could use against the killer.
Dale hadn't told her exactly what he had in mind, but ever since he found Jimmy's body the previous morning, he had been different from when she first met him; his mind was always focused on something else, always distracted from what she said to him or what was going on directly around him. He was a man on a mission, and she didn't want to get in the way of that. She was just happy to have woken up in the morning still breathing and safe, at least for the moment.
She heard him clanking around old tools and muttering to himself under his breath. As she passed the next aisle, she saw him at the other end with a couple of green garbage bags that he was folding into each other. After that, she heard him start to put things in the bag, sometimes disagreeing with himself and pulling them back out and replacing them on the shelf.
Sarah moved down toward the end of the store, glancing from aisle to aisle as she went. She put her crutches on the floor ahead of her and shifted her weight to swing her leg forward when one of the crutches slipped on something wet. Her balance gave out and she fell to the side, the crutches and her good leg doing a mad dance to stay upright. Her shoulder fell into a shelf on her left and caused a racket, but she managed to grab hold of it and keep herself standing.
"Are you okay?!" Dale asked frantically from across the store.
"I'm fine!" she yelled, short of breath. "I just slipped."
Dale muttered an okay under his breath and went back to browsing.
The back of one of her shoulders was suddenly sore, and she knew she must have pulled it in her commotion. She bent down and picked up one of the crutches that she dropped and made sure her balance was stable. She looked down at the floor, wondering what had made her slip, and she saw that there was a puddle of water on the tile. The puddle was moving and splashing, and her eyes traced up and saw a leak in the ceiling above her caused by the heavy rain that had bled into the morning.
There was also a trail of old blood running along the floor. One end of it disappeared around the corner into the next aisle ahead, and she peeked down it to find another pile of zombies, long dead. The other end of the trail went down the side of the store in front of her and disappeared off into a dark loading bay.
All of the zombies in the store had been killed with crude methods, and there was none among them that had been killed by bullets. They just had their heads brutally hacked, stabbed or crushed. It was a mysterious scene as to who did all of it, and one that she unfortunately didn't think she would get the answer to. The apocalypse made a lot of people do a lot of strange things. It made people who had perhaps once been sane turn crazy. She thought of everyone she had run into since the very start of it all, and she thought of the killer.
That same mad smile floated through her memory, and she still couldn't comprehend it. He didn't seem human, like he shared nothing in common with a normal person other than the outside shell. But inside, it was all different. It was like there was nothing there at all except for an inexplicable drive to destroy her. She didn't know why. She didn't even know if there was a why.
The more she thought about the killer, the more anxious she became. When she caught herself starting to shake, she forced her mind off the subject, staring at random items on the shelf next to her and running her fingers along their surfaces, as if feeling the texture of each one would distract her brain until she calmed down again.
The stench in the store was still just as bad as it had been when they entered, and she suddenly wished more than ever that Dale would hurry up and finish what he was doing.
"Are you almost done?" she called across the store.
"Yeah," he said distractedly before making more noise in the distance.
Sarah carried on toward the loading bay at the back, scared, but curious all the same. It was dark back there, and it was hard to see anything, but there had been no noises at all in the store, and if anything was still alive in there with them, it would have come out to greet them by now.
Still though, she wasn't stupid, and she didn't want to go completely wandering off out of Dale's sight and into the darkness considering that she had a maniac following her.
A set of double doors sat in the wall at the end leading into the loading bay. The doors hung half-open, and Sarah cautiously poked her head through. The blood trail got thicker by the doors and ran through her feet into the darkness. It took a little bit for her eyes to adjust to the blackness inside what seemed to be a fairly big room. The smell got worse when she stuck her head past the doors, and she held her arm over her face again.
As her eyes adjusted, strange shapes started to come into view, most notably a large pile of something in the middle of the room. When she saw what it was she immediately started to withdraw her head and step back from the loading bay.
A huge pile of dead zombies lay inside. A few offensive tools were still lodged into some of their skulls, and every other one either had their head caved in or some other unseen life-ending injury. They all lay completely motionlessly, all of them summarily executed and dumped. Why this had happened, she couldn'
t even begin to guess, but something didn't sit right with her, and it wasn't just the churning feeling in her stomach from the acrid smell.
Sarah turned around and headed back for the entrance of the store. She decided she would wait for Dale there, maybe even standing outside in the rain that was now just lightly sprinkling. On her way there, she glanced down one of the aisles that she hadn't seen before and spotted something that made her stop.
A single zombie lay crumpled up three-quarters of the way up the aisle. It should have been just a lump of dead flesh to her, but there was something about it that caught her attention. She couldn't say what it was at first, but she felt an inexorable pull toward it.
She looked from the zombie to the entrance of the store and considered what she was going to do. Dale was still rummaging around not too far off at the other end of the store, and her curiosity got the better of her.
Sarah slowly moved forward on her crutches along the aisle, keeping her eyes on the slumped shape. When she got closer, realization dawned on her as to why the zombie had been calling to her. Something deep and primal within her came to the surface, a feeling that she hadn't experienced in many months. It was motherly.
She saw the shape of the zombie get bigger in her view with each swing of her leg forward. She saw the short brown hair coming out the back of its head. She saw the size of the zombie and the approximate age. It looked to be a boy, about eight years old, and there was something very familiar about him.
Zombie Apocalypse Series Books 1-3 (Zombie Apocalypse Series Box Set) Page 55
