DEAD_Snapshot_Book 4_Las Vegas NV

by TW Brown

  It was then that Joel heard the sound of singing again. He was almost certain that it’d stopped at some point, but he wouldn’t be able to swear to it.

  He continued along the hall, glancing into the other rooms as he did so. It was the same scene being repeated over and over. Two people hanging or even laid out on the bed with a plastic bag over their head and a section of electrical cord around their throats. The one part that seemed strange were the fact that many of the individuals had been restrained with either their hands tied behind their backs or something along those lines. To Joel, that screamed that not everybody had been willing to meet his or her maker.

  At last, he reached the end of the hallway where it would turn right. The singing was coming from behind a door to his right opposite the rooms that had looked out onto the Signature Towers across the way.

  Steeling himself for any number of possibilities, Joel motioned for everybody to gather around. Once they were in place, Joel took a deep breath and then kicked the door in. Debra moved fast, almost throwing herself into the room.

  Despite his hardened exterior, Joel felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. Then the smell hit him and he doubled over. Not even Debra could hold back from being ill, and everybody was backing out of the room while trying to give themselves space between each other as everybody either bent over with hands on knees or dropped to the ground to vomit.

  Eventually, Joel and the others were able to gain their feet. Through it all, the singing had not stopped. Joel staggered into the room and rubbed the tears from his eyes that had come involuntarily as he’d been sick.

  On their knees against one wall were a dozen children between the ages of perhaps ten and fourteen. They were filthy and their clothing had been reduced to rags weeks ago and now probably only clung to each tiny frame due to the grime. They were singing the song, Amazing Grace.

  Despite their outward appearance, they sang like angels. They all had their heads cocked to the side, obviously curious as to the source of the noise in their room, yet not choosing to stop singing. A few had dark glasses on, but the others showed the typical signs of being blind.

  The few that had cataract film over their eyes almost looked like the undead except for the lack of black tracers. Still, that was not the most disturbing aspect of the room. Chained together and barricaded in what had once been a luxurious bathroom were un unknown number of zombie children.

  The arrival of Joel and his people had stirred up the undead children who were all straining at their bonds to try and get at the new arrivals. Beside the bathroom door was one of the living children. He had a large plastic bucket and was ladling what looked like chunks of raw meat and slinging it in to the zombie children. Some were distracted enough to stop struggling as they grabbed a piece of meat and began to tear and chew at it with gusto.

  “What the hell?” Debra breathed, her arm across her face to try and mitigate the stench.

  “I can’t begin to even guess,” Joel replied.

  “We are trying to bring the lost children of God back from the grips of Satan,” a small voice said.

  Joel turned to see a little girl of perhaps twelve get to her feet. She moved amongst the other children, touching each one on the shoulder as she did. Eventually, the singing stopped.

  “Are you the angels promised to deliver us to our Heavenly Father?” the girl asked as she came to a stop directly in front of Joel. “We were told that God would send his angels to bring us home when it was time.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He stared down at the little girl in confusion. He knew that he’d been correct in declaring his edict of not accepting children into the compound. The ones he’d encountered thus far had not been so up close and personal; they’d always been at a distance which allowed him to look beyond their tears, their fear, or their last shred of hope that the nightmare would be over.

  “Yes,” a soft voice whispered from beside him.

  Joel turned to see Debra step forward. She quickly moved behind the girl, covered her mouth with one hand and drove a blade into her temple as if she were one of the living dead. The girl’s eyes went wide for just a split second, and in that moment, Joel wondered if her sight might’ve returned because she seemed to stare directly at him.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Debra hissed, motioning towards the children that had been part of the chorus.

  Only a couple of the bikers stepped forward. She spun to the group, her face a mask of impenetrable ice showing no emotion at all. “If you can’t handle this, either get the hell out of the room and keep a lookout, or deal with them.” She jerked a thumb towards the zombie children.

  A few heads swiveled back and forth between the living children in the room that continued to stare sightlessly and the undead version that now struggled to get to the living with none of the hesitation they often showed. Joel wondered if it was bloodlust from the recent kill…or perhaps something else.

  Determined not to show any cracks in his exterior, Joel drew a knife and headed to the living and began to dispatch them in the same manner Debra had done. It did seem the quickest, and he saw no need for these poor waifs to suffer further.

  At last, both groups were eliminated. “Clear the floor on the way out,” Joel called as he stepped into the corridor that still reeked of carnage with its bitter bouquet of cordite, shit, and the other smells of death and undeath.

  He was just reaching the stairwell when a massive roar sounded from outside. He hurried back and rushed into the first open door just in time to see a cloud of dust billowing up to obscure the ability to see out to the street. He knew in his gut that another of the Signature Towers had suffered at least a partial collapse.

  Knowing that he wouldn’t be able to see a damned thing from where he was, Joel rushed back out and hurried down the stairs. By the time he reached the second floor, he had to pull his shirt up over his mouth and nose in order to breathe. At the bottom of the stairs, his vision had been totally reduced to less than a foot or two and he stopped suddenly, his body rocking forward when somebody collided with his back.

  “How the fuck are we supposed to go out into that?” Debra snarled in Joel’s ear.

  “Everybody bunch in close. Grab onto the nearest person and do not let go!” Joel barked.

  “Why don’t we just go back upstairs and wait for it to settle?” a voice called out from the haze starting to swirl up the stairwell on the air currents.

  “A noise like that is going to bring every zombie for miles around. If we get stuck in here because nothing else happens to draw them away, we might be finished,” Joel answered.

  “I was just gonna say because we ain’t a bunch of weak-ass bitches,” Debra snorted.

  Joel ignored the comment and gave everybody a moment before moving through the bright rectangle that had to be the door that they’d entered through. From every direction, the moans of the undead could be heard. They needed to get moving, and all he could do was to inch forward.

  The probability was very real that not only had Conrad just perished, but also Will and another handful of his people. If he kept letting their numbers be chipped away due to his own foolishness, he was liable to wake up with a dagger in his back; and he would deserve it. This entire operation had become one cluster-fuck after the next.

  Twice Joel had to shove aside a zombie that just seemed to appear out of nowhere. With the fires burning and all the death (and undeath) surrounding them, it was not like he could tell if one was getting close until it was literally upon him.

  They’d gone a short distance when Joel heard somebody calling his name. Stopping, he tried to focus on the distant-sounding voice. Very slowly he turned his body to try and orient on the source. He called back twice and then shut his mouth after another of the walking dead staggered out to him and lunged. Its cold, dead hands actually swiped down his face sending a shiver down his spine.

  “Joel?” a voice from his left whisper-shouted “You out here, boss?”


  “That’s Will,” Debra breathed, sounding almost relieved.

  Joel paused and waited until he heard the call again. As soon as he did, he turned slightly and called back. “Will? Are you guys okay? Did everybody make it out? Was that your building?”

  He hadn’t intended for all his questions to come out in a rush. It probably sounded desperate, but he couldn’t help but be a touch anxious.

  “Most of us made it,” Will’s voice said from what sounded much closer now. “And yeah, that was our building. Somebody set off a bomb.”

  “That was most likely the Children of the Redeemed,” a familiar voice said.

  Joel felt his entire body vibrate with relief. Conrad Parks emerged from the haze with an arm over Will’s shoulder. It took less than a few heartbeats for Joel’s relief to turn to sadness and a hint of anger. Even with a thorough coating of dust, the dark stains shown clearly. The one that ripped his heart from his chest was on the man’s left forearm.

  It was obviously a bite.

  “Where’s Reggie?” one of the bikers asked, moving forward and trying to see a familiar face on the three other figures limping through the cloud of dust that almost seemed to be thickening.

  Joel glanced over at Will, but he was wearing sunglasses that made it impossible to see the man’s eyes. Had Will taken the man out, or had he simply been a casualty—

  “Right here,” a voice rasped from the haze as one of the obscured figures came close enough that Joel could make him out. It was indeed the leader of the group of bikers. “And, yeah, it was those religious freaks that blew the fucking building. If I’d been allowed to shoot the—”

  “She had a suicide switch, you idiot,” Will snapped cutting the man off. “We would’ve all been blown to hell. As it is, we’re lucky we got out of there alive.”

  “I think there’re a few individuals that would beg to differ,” Reggie muttered just barely loud enough to be heard.

  “Enough!” Joel snapped. He glared in Will’s direction and then the biker. He was about to suggest that they get moving when more shapes started to stumble forth in the haze. One of them was coming up directly behind Will and Conrad He was about to draw his pistol when the figure coughed. As far as he knew…zombies didn’t cough.

  “Only about half of my people made it, Joel,” Conrad said as he freed his arm from where it had been draped over Will’s shoulder. “I’m pretty sure we lost the rest in the stairwell when the building came down.”

  “How many?” Joel asked.

  Part of him wanted to just grab the man and hug him. But his relief was false. Conrad had been bitten. He might not even survive the trip back to the compound.

  The man pulled back from Joel, gripping his arms and looking into his eyes with what initially looked like concern. His own gaze flicked down to the wound and then back up to Joel.

  “This?” he said in a voice almost a whisper. Joel nodded. “Well I don’t know what to tell you. It got aggravated during the fight to get out of the building, but that bite is five days old.”

  Surely Joel hadn’t heard him correctly. Nobody lived past three days after being bitten. Apparently Conrad saw the doubt.

  “We actually have a few people with bites older than mine,” Conrad leaned in and whispered into Joel’s ears.

  A million questions swirled through Joel’s head, but here and now was neither the time nor the place. There were a growing chorus of moans and cries closing in on them. It would have to wait.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Joel announced to the group.

  14

  Company

  The return to the bikes and transport rigs proved to be much easier than getting to the location. For one, all the noise had brought the undead from every direction, but most groups and clusters were easy to avoid. Once they reached the monorail, the journey was actually uneventful.

  Joel wrote a lot of that off to the fact that they were no longer concerned with the living. With just the undead to contend with, it was a simple matter of evasion. As they walked above one particular stretch where the undead below were so thick that he couldn’t make out the road, Joel’s mind drifted back to one of Wanda’s favorite movies. In truth, he hadn’t minded this one as much since it was obviously a bit of a parody. Joel kept hearing a voice informing him that zombies, much like dogs, don’t look up. Whether that was true or not did not seem to matter. The zombies continued to pay them no mind since everybody in his group moved as quietly as possible.

  Malik had to drive the Humvee since Debra had been clipped in the shoulder. The wound wasn’t terrible, but now that the adrenaline had subsided, she admitted to being sore enough to worry about her ability to handle the big vehicle if serious defensive driving were called for.

  By the time they all got loaded up and started back towards the highway, Joel felt that he could almost catch his breath. He realized his own adrenaline had long since ebbed from his system and now he was tired as well as sore in a few places. That had been another thing he’d scoffed at with the zombie movies. People ran and jumped and climbed like they were doing little more than playing on the school playground. That sort of activity took its toll. And, as a few of the members of the group had proved earlier in the day, it wasn’t quite as easy as it looked.

  With the convoy stretched out now, the bikers in a sort of ring around the vehicles Joel had brought from the community, Joel’s mind could finally cycle down a bit along with his body. A shake jolted him back to the present when Debra woke him to let him know that they were approaching the compound’s gates.

  “Did I doze off?” Joel asked groggily.

  “Judging by the snores?” Debra quipped. “I’d say you did more than just doze.”

  Sitting up straight, Joel glanced back to see her sitting beside Conrad and two of his people in the rear of the Humvee. The rest of the survivors had been divvied up between the other transport vehicles.

  “How’s the shoulder?” He nodded to the dressed wound that made it look like she was wearing shoulder pads on one side.

  “Honestly, it just aches a little. The bullet chipped off a bit of meat…nothing serious.”

  “Unless it gets infected,” Malik quipped.

  “Thanks for that, Mister Sunshine,” Debra snarled.

  “Those zombie kids?” Joel asked, changing the subject and recalling the encounter on the trip out.

  “No sign of them.” Malik brought the Humvee to a stop as they rolled up to the gate.

  A pair of armed sentries came out, one going to each side. The dark silhouette of a large machine gun behind a wall of sand bags could be seen on the roof of the first house inside the actual compound perimeter.

  “Glad to see you made it back,” one of the sentries said, sticking his head inside the Humvee. “Saw a lot of smoke on the horizon. We started getting worried.”

  “Yeah, also, the crew in the radio shack asked to see you as soon as you return.” The second man stepped up to the other side and leaned his head inside. “Is the rest of the team bringing up the rear? And what’s with all the motorcycles?”

  “Nope.” Joel met the man’s eyes with his own and saw the younger man flinch. “We took some losses. There are still some people out there that need to be dealt with as we expand and claim the area. As for the bikers, we ran into them along the way and they helped with the mission objective.”

  “Umm…” the first sentry piped up, “we do still need everybody to report to the intake area for inspection.”

  Joel nodded. Now was not the time nor the place to reveal they would be bringing in a few people that may or may not be immune to the zombie infection.

  “Send somebody from the radio center to see me,” Joel said. “Whatever it is that is so important, they can tell me in quarantine.”

  “Quarantine?” Conrad said from the back of the Humvee.

  “Standard protocol for anybody coming in from outside the wire,” Debra said, then shut her mouth with a click of her teeth. The vehicle started
forward before she continued. “Umm, boss?”

  “Yeah, I know.” Joel stared out the window. Perhaps their medical types would understand the situation better.

  Twenty minutes later, everybody had filed into the house which had been converted into an entry exam area. It hadn’t been set up to accommodate so many. That was all the more reason they needed to expand. And, while it would be a risky mission, they needed to claim one of the area hospitals. They did receive one pleasant surprise when it was revealed that one of the bikers was actually a veterinarian. While it would certainly be good to have the services of a human doctor, a vet was almost better.

  Many people believed that vets were failed doctors and had no idea that the situation was actually often the exact opposite. When the EMT that was currently the senior member of the medical staff came into Joel’s room, the look on his face was grim despite the initial good news that he would soon have somebody to share the workload with once the biker/vet cleared quarantine.

  “Did you know we have three people that suffered injuries by the zulus?” the man asked after he shut the door.

  “Wait…three?” Joel knew about Conrad. The young man had mentioned that at least one other of his people had been bitten and not turned. But three?

  “Yes, one of the bikers.” The EMT paused, a look of concern on his face. “I can’t be certain, but it would seem that your friend and the person from his group might either be immune, or else they are exhibiting the signs at the slowest rate I’ve ever heard of…but the other young man…one of the bikers, already has the tracers.”

  “Put him down,” Joel said.

  “So, I will hold the others to the seventy-two-hour quarantine, but you and Miss Allen are both cleared to leave.”

  “I want Will and Malik released as well.” Joel got up and pulled on his coat. Sitting had made the aches and pains even worse. He needed about half a bottle of ibuprofen, but he couldn’t let on right now.

  He wasn’t two steps out the door when a woman with a clipboard fell in beside him. “I have the new totals for you, sir.” Joel gave a grunt and a nod. “As of now, if everybody marked as clear survives and comes out of quarantine, we now have seven hundred and forty-three citizens here and another fifty-six back at the dam.”