Rise (Book 2): Age of the Dead

by Gareth Wood

  “Come on!” he shouted, and held his arm out to me. I ran for it, and grabbed his arm. He pulled me in, and Darren tossed the oars into the raft. I grabbed Darren and heaved him in, and then Amanda ran out into the water, the undead right behind her. She fell, and dropped her shotgun, soaking herself to the skin in the cold water. I raised my Browning and shot a zombie that was clutching at her, and as it fell away I grabbed her collar and pulled her over the side of the raft. Darren and Sanji pushed us off with the oars, and the current dragged us away from the clutching arms of the undead. More of them were coming down the slope, pushing those nearest us into the water. Some fell, and some just stood, watching us move away. I pulled Amanda all the way into the raft, and then fell back in relief.

  “Jesus Christ, that was too close!” Darren said, his voice ragged with fatigue.

  I looked at Amanda, where she lay shivering on the floor of the raft. She looked up at me, her face pale. “Th-th-thank you…” she whispered through chattering teeth. I took off my vest and sweater, and helped her get her wet clothing off as Sanji and Darren paddled us to the far side of the river. She pulled my dry sweater on over her head, and I wrung the water out of her clothing over the side of the raft. She pulled her damp pants back on, and then her socks and boots. If we got back to the trucks there would be clean dry clothing for her, but this would have to do for now. In bare skin or really wet clothing she’d get hypothermia quickly, and that was a death sentence out here. The damp clothing wasn’t much better, but it was the best we could do at the moment.

  We came ashore about two hundred meters downstream from where we started. The area was refreshingly clear of the undead. We had one shotgun with about a dozen shells, one C7 with an almost full clip, an empty C7, and three Brownings with full clips, one with three rounds left. We had no food, very little water, and no shelter for the coming night. One of our party was in wet clothing, and it was October in the Rockies. And to top it all off, the flesh eating dead were nearby in their hundreds, just waiting for our warm bodies. We had to make it to the trucks very soon, or we wouldn’t make it at all.

  * * *

  It was near sundown when we climbed the path upwards to the Trans-Canada Highway. We had been carefully moving westward towards the town, keeping an eye on the crowd of walking corpses across the river. They had spread out a bit and followed along as we walked along the shore, but hadn’t entered the water. No one was sure why the undead stayed out of the water, since the ones who fell in seemed to do just fine until they climbed out.

  The path upwards was a trash littered trail up through the grass on the side of the hill. The highway was above us, and it was a better choice than struggling along the muddy river bank. Fifteen minutes of hard climbing warmed us up and found us on the same road we had driven down to get to Golden just the day before.

  I sat down on the barrier at the edge of the road as the others climbed up behind me, and looked westward over the town and valley. The sun was just setting over the mountain peaks on the far side, and the sky was a brilliant purple, with thin wisps of clouds high up. There were no lights on in the town or the valley around us, and there were no sounds other than our heavy breathing, and a slight rustling of leaves in the mild breeze. The light was failing fast, and I couldn’t make out details in the darkness below us, or see where the trucks were. Walking around in the dark down there was going to get us killed, so we would have to wait until morning to try for the vehicles. In the meantime Amanda had warmed up on the climb, and was less likely to get hypothermia. We would have to get into shelter for the night, and soon. I could feel the air cooling now that the sun was set.

  Darren walked up beside me. “What now?”

  I looked around. Behind us, maybe three hundred feet back up the highway, there was a gas station and restaurant. There were half a dozen abandoned cars and trucks outside it, and the doors looked intact. It could possibly serve as an emergency shelter for the night, and in any case, there was nothing else nearby that would do.

  “We head there,” I said, pointing at the station. “Maybe we can secure it for the night.”

  It grew steadily darker as we approached, and dim twilight enveloped us by the time we reached the structure. Close up now, we could see that the glass was intact in all the windows, and the front and back doors were shut. We stepped cautiously forward, and Sanji and I leaned up against the windows to look inside. Nothing moved, and the place looked like it was in order. The tables were all intact, and the chairs were all stacked up in a corner, quite neatly. Darren tried the front door, which opened with a rusty shriek when he pulled the handle. I waved at Darren and Sanji, and they went inside, handguns at the ready. Amanda and I waited tensely outside, watching the road and listening for sounds of approaching zombies. Two minutes later, Sanji came to the door and stuck his head out.

  “All clear,” he said with a grin, “and there’s food!”

  Food! I was suddenly aware that I was starving. We entered the building, and closed the door. It shrieked again as I closed it, and I turned the deadbolt behind me. I was in the lobby between the gas station half and the restaurant half. Ahead of me were washrooms and an old cigarette machine, still intact. I turned left and followed Amanda into the restaurant, directly into the darkness of the kitchen. It was pitch black inside, and I waited for the door to swing shut, and then Darren lit a match. He held it to a candle, and by this feeble light we took in our surroundings. Neatly organised and clean, the kitchen was untainted by anything undead. The place looked like someone had taken time to shut it down properly. On a counter at the back were a pile of cans of beef stew, several large knives, four two-liter bottles of water, and a battery powered lantern. Sanji picked up this last item and switched it on. Nothing happened. He shook it, but it still refused to light, so he put it down and looked at the food and water. Everything was covered in a layer of dust, and two of the eight cans of food had swelled. We moved those aside, and I picked up one of the cans that was left. Its expiry date was six months past. Not too bad. It might still be edible. The water bottles we ignored. Water left alone that long will still go bad, and these were old pop bottles. We had no idea if the water in them was sterilized or not, and we still had a few mouthfuls of water each in our own bottles.

  Using a knife, I opened one can of stew. Sanji looked around for utensils, and turned up some dusty but clean spoons. I sniffed at the stew. It smelled alright, so I took a spoon and lifted a small amount to my mouth, ready to spit it out if it was off. It tasted fine, and my stomach rumbled painfully. I passed the can to Amanda, and she poured it into a pot while we opened and tested other cans. Only one of them was off, and we put it aside with the swollen cans. We then sat in silence, making occasional impatient moans as the food we poured into the pot heated over a small fire we built in one of the sinks using the wood from a pile of pine logs we had found. Once it was thoroughly heated, we each took a spoon and ate, savoring each bite. When we were done I put the pot on the counter. We let the fire burn to help heat the place, since it was getting colder.

  Sanji went out front again to look outside, but it was too dark to tell if anything was out there. We all retreated to the kitchen and the warmth of the small fire, even though the room was growing smoky. There was no way to really secure the kitchen doors, so we moved some chairs in front of them and stacked pans and dishes on top. Darren rummaged through the manager’s office, returning with a dark fleece-lined jacket with ‘Calgary Stampede’ embroidered on the back in red threads. He handed it to Amanda, who shrugged into it gratefully. He went back and came out again with some cardboard sheets, which he lay on the ground near the sink.

  “Now what?” Amanda asked.

  I looked at her, and sat on one of the chairs. I felt pleasantly full, and tired beyond all reason. “Now we rest, and in the morning we go get our trucks back, and we get the fuck out of here.” My voice sounded tired even to me.

  “Amen to that,” Darren said from where he was leaning again
st a wall.

  “Yes,” Sanji agreed. He looked tired as well. They all did.

  “Get some rest, all of you. I’ll take first watch.” I stood and chose a chair closer to the door. The other three lay close together on the cold floor, using the cardboard as insulation from the tiles, Amanda in the middle. For the next three hours I sat in the chair, or stood and moved around to keep warm. I fed little bits of wood into the fire to keep it going, and I spent time listening for any sounds outside. That was mostly futile, since the wind picked up about an hour into my shift, and all I could hear was the howling. Finally, near 11 p.m. I woke Darren for his watch, and lay down on the cardboard sheets next to Amanda. I zipped my sweater up as far as it would go, pulled my sleeves over my hands, and closed my eyes.

  Sanji woke me at dawn. I had a headache, I was cold, and as soon as I stood up I had to use the restroom badly. My insides churned, and I could tell that last night’s dinner may have indeed been a little off after all. Sanji saw my expression, and the way I clutched my guts, and handed me a roll of toilet paper. I ran to the restroom, leaving Darren and Amanda on the cardboard. It was dark and unpleasant in there, but I felt much better once I was done. When I exited the dim restroom, I was blinded by the light of the sun reflecting off the fresh white snow that lay over everything outside the front doors. Cars, road, and gas pumps were all covered in at least two inches of fluffy white powder.

  “What the fuck else can go wrong?” I muttered, staring out at the snow. My breath in the air was like smoke. It was at least five degrees below freezing in the hall where I stood, so I moved back into the kitchen. Darren ran past me, and I passed him the paper. His expression was all too familiar. Amanda was sitting up, looking bleary, and Sanji was checking the guns.

  I raised an eyebrow at Amanda, and then looked in the direction Darren had gone.

  “Last night,” she said, “on my shift. I found the toilet paper in the women’s washroom. I think the stew might have been a little off.”

  “Yeah. Just a little.”

  She stood up, removed her water bottle from her coat, and took a drink. Sanji handed her back her weapon, and she rechecked it. I took mine and checked it over as well. By the time Darren came back we were all ready to go. The fire was out, and we had cleaned up as much as we could. I couldn’t fathom why, but it seemed a little odd to leave the place in a mess.

  “I think the stew was off,” Darren said, taking his guns back. He stowed the remains of the paper roll in his jacket. “And it snowed last night.”

  * * *

  We talked for nearly half an hour while looking over a map we had found in the office.

  “We need to draw them off the bridge, and down either Tenth or Ninth Avenue,” Sanji said, tracing the map with his finger. “I think it should be Ninth…more escape routes here,” he pointed, “and here, in case anything goes wrong.”

  Darren looked up. “What about undead in those areas already?”

  I shrugged. “Most of them will have been drawn down to the bridge already. We’ll go in twos, and lead them away towards Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street.” I put my finger on the map where the two roads met. It was about six or seven hundred meters from the bridge, and there were several routes to get there. I traced out one path, and then another.

  “Spend twenty minutes leading as many of them away as you can, and then we meet up here,” I pointed to a location a few houses from the bridge, “then get onto the bridge, grab our vehicles, and get out of this town.”

  * * *

  An hour later I was running down an alley with Amanda, while about two hundred and fifty zombies slowly chased us. It was comical and terrifying at the same time. We had to constantly be on the lookout for lone undead wandering around, and avoid them, as well as keeping ahead of the swarm following us, but not too far ahead. They had to be able to keep us in sight, so a few hundred meters was the best we could do. We hadn’t had to shoot any stragglers so far, for which I was glad. We had two Brownings and Eric’s C7 between us, none of which had anything like a full clip.

  We stopped at the intersection of 7th and 9th, and I checked my watch. It was time.

  “That’s far enough,” I told Amanda, “Let’s get back.”

  We turned right and ran full out down the street and dodged into another alley leading south before the following swarm left the alley behind us. We dodged between abandoned cars, piles of debris, and once a legless zombie lying on the snow covered ground. It reached feebly at us when we passed, but we both ignored it.

  Our distraction appeared to have worked. We saw only a few of the walking dead on our way back to the bridge. It looked like the vast majority of them had followed us through the streets and alleys. We arrived back at the rendezvous ahead of Darren and Sanji, and chose a hiding spot between a rusted red truck and a splintered wooden fence. We crouched down and caught our breath, muscles sore from running.

  The sun was out, and the new snow was slowly melting. I guessed it was just above freezing.

  “You warm enough?” I whispered to Amanda.

  “After that run? Yeah, I’m good,” she replied. Her clothes had dried as we slept last night, and exercise was keeping us warm now.

  “Look!” She pointed up the road. Darren and Sanji were jogging towards us. I stood and waved, and Amanda and I moved to meet them.

  “Any problems?”

  “None. Worked like a charm,” Darren told us.

  “Let’s get going then. The sooner we’re out of this fucked up town, the better.”

  The bridge was only a few houses away, and our distraction efforts had cleared most of the undead from the streets around us. Most, but by no means all of them. There were nine on the bridge deck itself, clustered in a small group near our vehicles. They all looked up as we ran onto the bridge, and began moving towards us. We ran halfway to them, and anticipating something like this, we spread into a line and waited for them to come to us. When they were close enough we opened fire, wasting as few bullets as possible. Four fell in the first volley, and we shifted to the remaining creatures. We took those down, and started to move past them when I looked down and froze in my tracks. The zombie lying before me with its head blown open had blood on its face. Fresh blood, not the blackened dried blood left over from whatever death this man had faced long ago, but blood not more than a few day old.

  Fresh blood. It was probably Eric’s blood.

  I felt my stomach lurch, and turned away just in time to vomit into the snow, and fell to my knees.

  “Brian, what-“

  I looked up and saw Darren nearby, looking past me at the corpse with the blood on its face. He looked pale and his eyes widened as he realized what he was seeing. I grabbed some snow and put it into my mouth so I would have something to spit with.

  “Fucker!” Blam! Blam!

  I turned to see Darren firing his Browning point blank into the face of the dead zombie.

  Blam! “You fucker!”

  “Darren!” He turned to me, his finger tight on the trigger. There was a savage grimace on his face, rage and grief all mixed up together. I knew exactly how he felt. “We have to go now!” I nodded behind me at the thin stream of undead slowly returning to the bridge, drawn by the gunfire.

  Sanji and Amanda were already at the vehicles, and we ran to catch up. The one thought that ran through my mind was that Eric’s killer was dead. One of us had killed it. I felt immense satisfaction at that. It didn’t matter which one of us did it, just so long as that particular zombie was destroyed.

  As I reached the vehicles Amanda was starting the F-250. I reached into the truck bed and grabbed my C7, left lying there unattended in the snow until this moment. It was icy cold, but the barrel was free of debris. I climbed into the passenger side, and Darren got into the Highlander with Sanji. Amanda threw the vehicle into gear and we raced forwards. I looked ahead and saw what the rush was all about. About fifteen undead had made it to the bridge, and were slowly closing on us. It would only be a m
atter of time until more arrived, and then we’d be trapped again. We had to go now.

  We roared forwards, closing on the shambling corpses. The Highlander moved into position behind us, and I looked to the front again just as we struck the first zombie. It bounced away with a solid impact, and struck another one, both of them toppling into the guard rail at the side. Amanda wove between them when she could, but we still ended up striking three more before we were clear. We drove back the way we had come into town, back up the overpass, and towards the Trans-Canada Highway. We passed small groups and lone zombies, and from the overpass we could see the large group of several hundred a few blocks away. They were milling about, and some were again in vain pursuit.

  We accelerated up the slope heading southeast once we reached the highway again, and in a few minutes we passed the restaurant we had spent last night in. I turned and climbed into the back seat, and after a few moments of looking through storage boxes I climbed back into the front. I took Amanda’s Browning and reloaded it with a fresh clip, did the same with mine, reloaded Eric’s C7 and put it on the back seat, and only then handed Amanda a bottle of water and a homemade granola bar.