by Rich Baker
“Thanks, Lucky.”
They follow the curve around the field, so they end up going north, and when they come to a roundabout, Lucky goes the wrong way, making a left into the neighborhood, and backs the car into the driveway of the house which has become the source of Nicky’s trauma. They get out, again pushing the doors shut, not slamming them, and head to the porch.
Nicky grabs the knob and pushes, but the door doesn’t budge. He looks at Lucky.
“We kicked this in, right? It should just swing open.”
“Hit it. Maybe the wood swelled it shut.”
Nicky puts his shoulder into it, making a loud thump. The door doesn’t budge. He hits it again. It moves a little, but not much.
“Stop, Nick. Let’s get around to the side.”
They hustle to the right side of the house out of sight of the front windows.
“If someone was inside, they would have heard that. Now I’m wondering what the hell is going on here, too, Nick. That door didn’t barricade itself. These people should be dead.”
They start heading to the side gate when they see a figure moving through the gaps in the fence boards. The figure stops, pauses, and then turns and hustles away from the fence.
“Hey, you, stop!” Nicky shouts.
“Two people coming!” they hear the man call out from around the corner in the back yard.
“Nicky, there’s more than one. We need to get them in a crossfire. You go around the other side and climb the fence. I’ll get them talking and keep their attention focused here. Once we know that it’s on, we can hit them from both sides. You got it?”
Nicky looks shaken, but he nods and sprints away. Lucky turns his attention back to the people in the yard. He lifts the lever on the gate and eases it open, slips through and puts a big rock in front of it, blocking it open, in case he needs to make a hasty retreat.
“Hey, look,” he calls out. “We’re not looking for trouble, you know? We’re just trying to find food and stuff, to survive.”
There’s a long pause; then a man calls out “We have no food here. Nothing to offer you. You should just move on.”
“How do you know? Maybe we could trade, you know? There ain’t many of us humans left. Don’t you think we should stick together?”
Another long pause, with several voices whispering. Lucky edges his way toward the corner of the house, but he can’t make out what the people are saying.
“Hey, guy?” Lucky says. “We can hear you whispering. Look, let’s just talk, okay? My name’s Lucky. What’s yours?”
“You should just leave,” the man says. “We know who you are and we know what you did here. Just go. While you can.”
Oh, you’re starting to piss me off, Lucky thinks. You have no idea what we did or what I’m capable of doing. But you’re going to find out. When he speaks again, his voice has a hard edge to it.
“So that’s how it is, huh? You talk pretty tough. Have YOU killed anyone? It’s not as easy as you think, you know?”
“You didn’t seem to have any problems murdering my friends. Is there a reason you’re still here?”
“I’m interested in who you are. You seem to know a lot about me and my friend. Do you know who we work for?” Lucky is stalling now, giving Nicky time to get into place.
“Don’t know, don’t care. Just go away.”
Lucky hears Nicky’s familiar voice now.
“You!” Nicky says. “How…”
Lucky assumes they’ve all turned to look at Nicky, surprised by someone appearing behind them. They’re stupid sheep he thinks to himself. He steps around the corner, his finger working the trigger on his AK-47, at first just firing blind as he comes around the corner, taking care not to go too far to his left, so he won’t hit Nicky at the opposite corner of the house. Once he gets his bearings, he takes aim on the closest person to him.
The man closest to Lucky falls, several new holes in his body spurting blood. He focuses on another target, wondering why Nicky isn’t shooting when he sees her. Amanda.
How the fuck is she still alive? I should have just killed her that night instead of leaving her for the zombies.
These thoughts flash through his head in an instant, but it’s an instant too long. He sees the flash from her pistol and feels the heat of the bullet in his chest. And another. And another. He hears more gunfire as he loses his balance and sees only the sky.
Nicky fires blindly, not aiming, just spraying bullets. Though he doesn’t hear any shots, he sees Lucky get hit several times, bloody stains spreading on his shirt. He sees Amanda aiming a pistol at Lucky, so he directs the barrel of his rifle at her and pulls the trigger twice before someone is shooting at him. Bullets hit the house next to him, and one grazes his ear. He backs away, around the corner of the house, still pulling the trigger. He backs into the fence and climbs it as fast as he can. As he drops off to the street side of the fence, another bullet hits him in the lower back. He lands on the ground hard, feeling his forearm snap underneath the weight of his body. He screams, rolls over and uses his left leg to push his battered body toward the house. He knows he needs to get to his feet and get moving or he’s going to die.
He makes it to the car and gets in the driver’s seat. Now he’s not sure what to do. He’s pretty sure Lucky is dead, but he knows that Max Montero will question him about it if he doesn’t see the body. Movement in the side mirror catches his eye, and he turns and sees Lucky step past the corner of the garage. He’s alive! He presses ‘start’ and gets ready to take off. Coming back here was a really bad idea. I should have moved on like Lucky said. He is going to be so pissed.
He sees Lucky’s head pitch forward; blood spatter cascading in the air. Lucky’s body goes stiff and falls forward, his face making hard contact with the sidewalk. Then that woman, Amanda, steps into view.
She walks up to Lucky’s body and kicks him, rolling him onto his back. She aims the pistol at his face.
Nicky sees Lucky say something, but can’t hear it. Amanda says something back to him, and she pulls the trigger and Nicky gasps as a chunk of Lucky’s face disappears in a spurt of blood. She keeps pulling the trigger until the slide locks back. One finger on Lucky’s left hand twitches, fluttering too quickly, then goes still. She looks up and makes eye contact with Nicky. He sees her drop the empty magazine, but her bloodied right arm hangs limp, so she’s having a hard time getting a fresh mag loaded. She turns and shouts something he can’t hear, and he decides it’s time to go.
He stomps on the gas pedal, spinning the wheel to the right and points the car out of the neighborhood. The rear window shatters and bullets hit the dashboard, the passenger seat, and the windshield, but somehow miss him.
At the end of the street, he turns left, going the wrong way in the roundabout, but it’s not like anyone is going to give him a ticket. He sees a woman on a motorcycle stopped short of the roundabout and a man with a rifle running into the yard of the house at the end of the street. And there are a lot of zombies coming through the field and up the main road. He makes it another block, turns left, and leaves that scene in the rear view.
It starts sprinkling as he weaves around zombies. He struggles using his unbroken arm, trying to keep the car on the road, avoiding zombies and finding the wipers but manages to get them turned on. He cuts into a park, using the bike path to go around the traffic snarls of downtown. When he gets to the edge of the park, he hangs a right, wincing in pain, and reaches for the garage door controller. He turns into the alley before Main Street and presses the button to open the door to the parking area under Pawn King.
He turns the wheel, but not enough, and the driver’s side front fender hits the side of the garage opening. He curses, puts it in reverse, corrects the angle, and pulls all the way in. He presses the button, sending the door down.
He opens the car door and starts to get out when he sees the shadow from the door going the opposite direction. He turns and notices that when he hit the entrance, he bent the trac
k, and the door will not go all the way down. When it hit that part of the track, it reversed itself, like it’s supposed to do when it meets resistance. He presses the button again, watching the door go as far as it can, and right after it reverses direction he hits the button one more time, halting the door where it is. It leaves a twenty-inch opening at the bottom, more than enough for several zombies to crawl through the opening.
Nicky gets out of the car and stands up, howling when the wound in his back sends a surge of electricity to his brain. He clutches the AK with his good hand, turns, and fires at the first zombie. Its head opens up, spilling foul black brain matter all over the garage floor.
The explosive noise of the unsuppressed rifle sends the rest of the zombies into a frenzy, with more of them slamming into the door and crawling under it. Nicky fires again, and again, his one-armed aim less than effective, hitting only a couple of the undead, and only one more in the head. The body is enough to block the progress of the others for a moment, and that’s all Nicky needs to get inside the building. He locks the door and drops the two by twelve board into the slots Frankie mounted on the wall on either side of the door.
“Frankie!!” Nicky calls out as the first undead fists start pounding on the door. He runs down the hall toward the office. “Frankie! I need help!”
He rushes into the office and finds it empty. He continues to the stock room and finds it empty as well. Holding his broken right arm tight to his chest, he slings the AK over his left shoulder and uses his left hand to open the door to the basement. He hears the generators running, and he flips the light on.
“Oh, shit!” he recoils at the sight of Frankie Four Fingers laying at the bottom of the steps, his head folded onto his shoulder at an unnatural angle.
“Oh, fuck me!” Nicky says aloud. He rushes back down the hallway, past the pounding hands that rattle the door to the garage, to the stairs that lead up to the apartments.
“Laurie! Laurie!! I need help!” he calls out. Again, there’s no response. He passes the room where he and Lucky have been bedding down and goes to Laurie’s room at the end of the hall.
“Laurie, are you in here?”
The coppery smell of death hits his nostrils. He knows there’s something bad waiting for him, but he searches her room anyway, and finds her body in the tub, stabbed several times, her throat cut for good measure.
“Oh, Lucky, what have you done? You’ve killed me!” he wails to the empty room. He walks out of the bedroom, sure that he’s going to die in this pawn shop. He sees the CB radio on Laurie’s desk and decides to call for help.
He flicks the power on and presses the button at the base of the mic.
“Montero’s? Max? Anyone? I need help. This is Little Nicky, and I’m shot, and my arm is broke, and I’m holed up in the Pawn King. Zombies are in the garage trying to get in, and Lucky is dead, and I think I’m bleeding to death. If you can hear this, please come help me.”
He waits a minute and gets nothing but crackles of static in response. He repeats the message a half dozen times, without a response. On the last one, he’s sobbing more than speaking, the pain starting to take over. He gets up from the chair, surprised at how much blood has soaked into the cloth cushion where his back rested against it.
He staggers down the hall, into his room. It is his alone now that Lucky is gone. He shuts the door and locks it. He puts a roll of toilet paper on the bed and lays down on it, letting it put pressure on the wound on his back. The pain is immense, but he bears it and lets his weight settle on the bed. After a minute or so, he shuts his eyes and starts drifting off.
This is it, he thinks. I’m going to sleep, and I’ll never wake up. I hope I’m gone before the dead break in.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been out, but when he opens his eyes, it’s daylight again, bright enough that his eyes hurt. He’s unsure what woke him, but he thinks it was a noise. Something crashes into his door, trying to break in. He starts to get up, forgetting about his wounds, and when he sits up the pain in his back turns his vision gray. Everything seems far away. He thinks he hears the door break open, shadowy figures rush in, and he blacks out as rough hands begin grabbing him.
Ten
DJ works the suppressed .22 rifle, pivoting and shooting, two or three shots each side, while Danielle siphons gas from the Ford into the Ranger’s tank.
The tank overflows, so Danielle pulls the hose from the tanks, spilling gasoline on the ground. She screws the cap back on the Ranger.
“Let’s go,” she says.
DJ settles into the driver’s seat and hands her the rifle.
“I like that gun,” he says. “For zombies, I think it’s easier than the AR. Ammo is probably easier to find too.”
She directs him back to the Puckett’s hideout, remembering where she went yesterday. When they near the subdivision, DJ hits the brakes.
“What are you doing?” Danielle asks.
“I thought I heard gunfire.”
“So?”
“So, I don’t believe in coincidences. You run from these people, they have some lady who was just attacked in her home staying with them now, and the day you return there’s gunfire in the same neighborhood? I’d like to see what I’m getting into here.”
Danielle raises her hands in a gesture that says, “do what you’ve gotta do” and sits back in the passenger seat.
The sidewalk that runs parallel to Ninth Avenue has a path that diverts through an opening in the fence, and DJ takes the Ranger through that opening, emerging onto a deserted cul-de-sac. No zombies, no people. He hears more gunfire, louder now, and he accelerates until they come to a bend in the road. He hugs the inside arc, and on the other side of the curve, opposite from where they’re sitting, they see a bloody man limp his way to the driver’s side of a small white car. Another man is walking from the backyard of the same house. His shirt is bloody, and he moves with the gait of someone who is injured. Another figure, a woman, emerges from the gate. She’s also covered in blood and moving like she’s in a lot of pain.
“What the fuck is going on here?” he asks. “Do you know these people?”
“No, I don’t,” she replies.
The woman raises a pistol and fires it into the back of the man’s head, sending him to the ground.
“Holy shit!” DJ exclaims.
His mouth drops open as he watches her kick the man onto his back, stand over him, and empty the gun into his face. She looks up and sees the man in the white car, and tries to reload her gun, but one of her arms is not cooperating.
“Oh my God!” Danielle says.
“What is it?”
“Give me the binoculars,” she says, holding out her hand. He passes them over to her.
She peers through them and recognizes the woman.
“It’s Amanda, the new chick,” she says. “And that guy walking up behind her is Robert Sims. I don’t know these other two.”
The white car pulls out of the driveway and disappears down the street. The man she identified as Robert Sims loads the pistol for Amanda and hands it back to her. Two more people come from the backyard, dragging a limp form between them.
“Holy shit, that’s Ben Puckett and Annie Sims. Who’s that they’re dragging? Oh, my God, I think that’s Keith! He’s covered in blood! Has he been shot?”
She’s engrossed in what she’s seeing through the binoculars and doesn’t notice that DJ is watching all of this through the scope of his rifle.
Robert Sims bends down and rifles through Lucky’s pockets, finding some papers, and a wallet. He puts it all in his bag and stands up.
DJ pulls the trigger on his AR-15, but his aim is off, and he hits Amanda, who falls against Robert and knocks him into the garage door. He fires several more times, hitting the garage door and Amanda a couple more times. One shot must have hit Robert because he collapses under Amanda, who falls on top of him, inadvertently making herself a human shield.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Daniell
e demands, her eyes wide with shock as she realizes for the first time that DJ has the rifle trained on her former friends.
“Getting payback. Don’t act like you didn’t know this was coming.”
“Yeah, but Amanda didn’t do anything! Jesus! Why the fuck are you shooting her?”
“She got in the way.”
DJs flat tone scares Danielle. She realizes she may have made a big mistake bringing this guy here, but it’s too late to do anything now.
The rest of the group scrambles for cover, looking around for the shooter when the girl Danielle said was Annie points in their direction. DJ settles the crosshairs on her chest and squeezes the trigger.
Something hits DJ hard in the chest before he gets the shot off. He looks down at the red stain spreading from a small hole in his shirt over his left pectoral muscle. He realizes too late that he’s been shot, just as a second round hits him a couple of inches below and to the right of the first one.
He looks at Danielle, his eyes glazing over, and falls against her, letting his rifle drop from his grip.
She looks up from DJ and sees someone running toward them. He shouts at the others as he runs past them, but she can’t make out what he said.
Stephenie has joined the group, and she points at Danielle. Ben shouts “That giant fucking bitch!”
I heard that plain enough, she thinks.
She sits frozen as the stranger runs to the APV, his rifle trained on Danielle.
“Keep your hands up. You move, and I’ll put you down!”
She raises her hands while he grabs DJ and pulls him from the driver’s seat and tosses him in the cargo area behind the cab. He grabs DJ’s AR-15 with the improvised suppressor, drops the magazine and ejects the chambered round, then takes the suppressed .22 that Danielle has left sitting next to her, unloads it, and tosses both rifles in the back of the Ranger with DJ.
