As Cold As The Dead

by R. M. Smith

  Snow sat axle deep on the Jeep’s wheels.

  Doc’s large body also took in the heat. He sighed putting his hands in front of the air vents. “I don’t want to go out there. This feels nice.”

  I agreed. Warmth had never felt better.

  “But we need to get Wendy,” he said. “We’re going to have to fight these zombies. I really don’t want to make a lot of noise. If we do, we’ll attract more of them. We’re going to have to fight them hand-to-hand.” He shut off the engine and took the keys out of the ignition. He pocketed them. “And remember, I have the keys.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s go.”

  He grabbed his crowbar off the floor next to his seat and shut the door.

  I stepped back out into the deep snow. A bird flew out of a tree overhead. Powdered snow came sifting down like powdered sugar. It covered me. I shook it off even though some had managed to get down between my coats and the bare skin on my neck.

  Three zombies hammered on the delivery door. We waited watching them from behind the Jeep.

  Normally, an average man fit through the delivery door with two or three feet to spare overhead. These zombie’s heads were even with the top of the door jamb. One reached above the door, its hands touching a light fixture over the door. Another worked on the door handle. The third pounded on a sign near the door which read: This door to remain unlocked during business hours. The third turned around. It saw us. It chopped its teeth looking directly at me.

  This zombie was a man wearing a hard hat on his elongated head. Icicles dripped from the rim of the hat. He wore no coat and no gloves. The skin on his arms had gone black from frostbite. It peeled from the bone. He came at us. He started chattering his teeth louder. The other two came after us too. One was a woman wearing a long red dress. It had ripped from hem to hip. She wore shredded panty hose. One leg of the panty hose dragged behind her in the snow when she walked. Her long hair was curly and frazzled on the part of her head that still had hair on it, the rest had been ripped away. Mascara had run down her face and now hung off her chin in frozen colored drips.

  The other zombie originally had worn a leather jacket unbuttoned to his waist. Now it was hiked high up on his chest. He didn’t have a shirt on under it. His stomach was sliced open. A silver chain hung around his neck. He looked to be in his early twenties. One of his arms had been broken in half. Bones stuck out of his skin where the break took place.

  Off in the distance I heard a chatter of teeth in response.

  Doc took out the zombie with the hard hat first with a low underhanded swing of the crowbar like a golf swing. The top of the zombie’s head lopped off. The hardhat went flipping off into a nearby tree.

  I flipped my shotgun around and swung it at the woman zombie. She neatly dodged my swing, jerking her head around, her hair swinging. She chopped at my head when we passed each other. I dodged her teeth swinging around and popped her good in the back of the head. Her head went forward from the impact. She lost her footing on some ice under the snow and went down hard onto her belly. I finished her off with three hard consecutive jabs into the back of her head with the butt of my gun.

  Doc was on the zombie biker-kid already shoving his crowbar deep into one of his yellow eyes. Dark blood gurgled out of the socket. The zombie’s tongue wiggled, sticking straight out of his mouth.

  “Not bad,” Doc said pulling the crowbar out of the zombie’s head. Breathing hard, he stopped and nodded back toward the Jeep. “More incoming.”

  A large group of zombies were running through the snow at us. They were sprinting. It was surreal because they appeared to be running over the top of the snow, their feet kicking and throwing powder up into the air.

  “Hurry and get in,” he yelled. He pulled the door open. I ran in. He quickly stepped in behind me and locked the door behind us.

  “Did you see that?” I asked, my eyes wild my heart beating like crazy in my chest.

  “No. What?”

  “The zombies were running over the top of the snow. They weren’t falling through.”

  “Nah, couldn’t be,” he said doubtful.

  “Did you even seen them?” I asked, grabbing him by the coat shoulder.

  Loud thumping started on the other side of the door.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go find Wendy.”

  She was still in the walk-in. It had actually warmed up nicely from her body temperature. She had taken off one of her coats.

  She asked, “Where’s Ben?”

  “He didn’t make it,” Doc said closing the door behind him.

  “Oh no,” she said. “I’m sorry, Jon.”

  “Yeah,” I said leaning against one of the shelves of food. “Now every Crossman I know are dead.”

  Sadly, I would miss only one of them; well two: Aunt Brenda had been nice to me…and of course, my Rainey.

  Wendy asked, “You found the keys then?”

  Doc said, “Yes we have the Jeep.”

  I added, “It’s almost out of gas though.” I almost said something about Doc’s wife, but didn’t. I didn’t need Wendy to get worked up about it and Doc had said to let it be.

  Wendy said, “There are extra cans of gasoline at the school. We keep them for the school buses. They’re in the garage in the maintenance department.”

  Doc asked, “Well I think this hospital would have the same thing, wouldn’t it? In case of emergencies and whatnot. Jon and I came in through the delivery door. We came here first because we wanted to make sure you were alright.”

  Wendy said, “Thanks.”

  Again I wondered why Doc wouldn’t have wanted to know if his own wife was alright.

  I asked Wendy, “Do they have a maintenance shop here?”

  “I don’t know, I only came to the cafeteria, and sometimes to the intensive care unit when there were no patients.”

  Doc said, “Well there has to be extra fuel for a generator, at least.”

  I asked, “Yeah but is it a gas generator?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” he asked.

  “Well, let’s go check,” I said. “Let’s go back to the delivery door. Maybe there’s something around there.”

  Doc said, “I hate to go on wild goose chases.”

  “I’ll stay here,” Wendy said quietly.

  “Yeah Wendy you do that,” I said. “Pack some food up in some boxes, too. We’ll take those along with us when we’re ready to head out of here. Come on Doc.”

  “Alright,” he said, changing his footing. “It shouldn’t be that hard to find something.”

  It wasn’t. We found a hazmat locker near the delivery entrance. Inside there were three gallon cans of gasoline, cleaning materials, paint remover, paint, brooms, mops and mop buckets.

  “Now we need to fuel the Jeep,” Doc said, hefting two cans of gasoline. “Hopefully this gasoline isn’t old.”

  I said, “The Jeep’s probably swamped with zombies.”

  “We need some kind of diversion.”

  I grabbed the last gas can. “Yeah. Let’s burn those fuckers out there.”

  Doc and I went back upstairs. We walked the hall to the room we stayed in while we recuperated from our blood transfusions. I remembered seeing the garage area below when I had first looked out over the world of white.

  “Let’s climb down there and pour the gas on the zombies,” I said.

  “No, let’s find the rooftop access door.”

  I wish we would have been paying closer attention because the access door was right inside next to the delivery door. An enclosed stairwell lead to the roof of the garage.

  “Go get Wendy,” I told Doc. “You guys be ready to run when the fire dies down.”

  He said, “We’re still going to need to fuel the Jeep.”

  “How much is left in it now?” I asked.

  He said, “It was on E.”

  “Well, hopefully it’s enough to drive far enough away and then refuel.”

  He asked, “Do you wan
t to take that much of a chance?”

  “Do we have that much of a choice?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Let’s do it then. Go get Wendy.”

  “Alright. You got something to light the fire with?”

  “Yea. I have a lighter and some wadded paper in my coat pocket.”

  Doc went back for Wendy. We had found four cans of gasoline. I took two of them and headed up the stairs to the roof of the garage.

  Back out in the cold, careful not to slip, I leaned over the edge of the roof. Most of the zombies had moved on. Some still remained behind pawing at the door. One of the zombies noticed me. It bared its bloody teeth at me clacking them together loudly. The other zombies looked up. They began to growl and hiss, reaching for me.

  I uncapped one gas can and poured it down on them. The fuel dripped onto me, too, onto my feet and across the top the garage on the snow cover. Leaning out further with the second can I made sure none of the gas dripped on me or the garage.

  The zombies didn’t seem to care about the fuel raining down on them, getting in their eyes, running into their open mouths.

  Standing back, I pulled the wadded paper out of my coat. I briefly read what was written on it:

  Corporal Benjamin Crossman you are hereby ordered to appear before Captain of the St. Cloud Army Reserves in relation to the hospitalization of Corporal Daniel S. Barnes.

  I laughed despite myself. “Damn Ben, you weren’t lying when you said you hospitalized that dude.” I lit the edge of the paper. The fire grew. I tossed it away over the edge of the garage.

  Fire burst up below me. The zombies screamed, clacking their teeth, their arms flailing.

  I ran back down the stairwell and met Doc and Wendy waiting for me. Wendy held a box of food.

  After the fire died, we ran past the burned zombies whose teeth were still clacking. At the Jeep, Doc opened the back hatch and set the other two gas cans and the box of food inside. He tied it all off with a strap.

  Wendy got into the back seat of the Jeep. We drove away from the hospital.

  When the coast was clear, Doc hopped out of the Jeep and poured both cans of gasoline into the tank. He dropped the empty cans into the snow.

  Heading west on highway 94, an accident blocked our way westward. A greyhound bus had slid sideways from the eastbound lanes into the westbound lanes, collided head on with oncoming traffic and came to rest sitting sideways on the edge of the bridge. A semi-truck and trailer had also crashed, jack-knifing on the bridge in the eastbound lanes. Both east and west bound lanes crossing the bridge were blocked. Cars had backed up on both sides and now sat empty, covered in snow, the passengers long gone.

  Doc slammed his hands down on the steering wheel. “Son of a bitch! We can’t get through that! All the work we’ve done to get gas for the Jeep has been for nothing!”

  Frustrated, I asked Wendy, “How far is it to another bridge around here?”

  “About ten miles.”

  I asked, “You think we have enough gas to get that far, Doc?”

  He sighed heavily. “I don’t know. I doubt it. There wasn’t very much gas in either one of those cans.”

  Wendy asked, “What about cars on the other side of the bus. You think they’re drivable?”

  “Don’t know,” Doc said. “Can’t see them from here.”

  She asked, “What are we going to do now then?”

  Sighing, Doc said, “The zombies are on their way. We certainly didn’t get a clean get away. We need to move. We need to go and now. Leave the food behind. We won’t be able to carry it.”

  Pushing back out into the freezing cold our breath flew out of our mouths like blown smoke. The wind had kicked up on the bridge.

  “So cold up here,” Wendy moaned.

  Doc led us over to the bus, passing cars buried under the deep drifting blowing snow. Doors stood open on some of the cars. There were no bodies.

  Walking up to the rear of the bus Doc pulled out his crowbar and ran it along the side. The wind howled back. Snowdrifts had climbed up the side of the bus like frozen fingers.

  The front of the bus had smashed through the guard rail and now one tire dropped over the edge. The bus sat cockeyed on the bridge.

  Our path was blocked by tall drifts. Wendy and I shivered while Doc tried to knock through them with his crowbar and fists.

  Chattering of hundreds of teeth broke through the wailing wind.

  I said, “Oh shit. Doc?”

  He said, “I hear it. Almost through.”

  “Hurry.”

  “Help me.”

  I handed Wendy my shotgun. I started pushing through the drift too. It was high and deep, higher than the top of the bus. I was worried that some of the snow may have drifted over the edge of the bridge; and if Doc wasn’t careful he might kick through in the wrong place and fall straight down into the river.

  My foot connected with something hard. It was the side of a car. It had crashed against the side of the bus too.

  “Climb over it,” Doc said, shoveling with his hands.

  “Give me a boost,” I said. “I’ll go on the roof.”

  He lifted me up. We kept pushing through the snow. Finally Doc broke through to the other side.

  A frost-bitten hand punched through the snow and grabbed Doc’s arm. He jerked back. “Shit!”

  “How many are there?” I asked, out of breath.

  “Can’t tell.”

  “Whack them with your crowbar.”

  Wendy said, “You guys, hurry. They’re coming.”

  “They’re on this side too,” Doc said.

  I said, “Wendy, give me my shotgun.”

  She handed it to me.

  “Only a few,” Doc said. “At least, that’s all I can see. Couple cars over there. They’re covered in snow. Wendy, give me your hand.”

  She stepped closer to the buried car.

  I said, “You’re going to have to climb up onto the hood. Here, let me give you a boost.” I slid off the hood and helped her climb up.

  The zombies were closing in.

  Wendy’s foot broke through the windshield of the car. A zombie grabbed her leg from inside.

  “Help. Jon! Something’s got me.”

  I tried to get back up on the car to help her but I kept slipping. It was slick and icy.

  “Jon? Help! It’s got my foot!”

  I could see perfectly into the car. Several zombies sat inside. The one who had grabbed her foot had its mouth wide open. It was going to bite her!

  From above, Doc’s crowbar jabbed down through the roof of the car into the zombie’s head. It stopped in mid bite.

  He pulled Wendy up next to him onto the roof of the car. He leaned down offering me the hooked end of the crowbar. I took it. Grabbing onto the side of the bus, he pulled me up onto the roof of the car with him.

  “Help me take care of these other bastards,” he said. He jumped down onto the road next to the drift.

  “You stay up here,” I told Wendy.

  I jumped down next to Doc.

  He took out three more zombies and I shot two. When they were taken care of, Wendy jumped down next to us.

  The zombies on the other side of the car couldn’t reach us.

  “Two cars,” Doc said. “Nothing else.”

  One was a sports car, the other a 4x4 pickup truck.

  “Four by four,” I said.

  We cleaned the snow off of it. It was an unlocked Dodge Dakota but had no keys in the ignition. The back seat was full of papers and a tackle box.

  Doc yelled, “Son of a bitch!”

  “Sports car?” I asked stupidly. I knew it wouldn’t work. It was too low to the ground.

  We checked anyway. It was locked. A frozen zombie looked at us from inside.

  The wind shook us.

  Doc said, “We need to get off this bridge.”

  Shivering, Wendy asked, “Can we push start the truck?”

  “If it’s a manual transmission,” Doc said. �
�I doubt it is one – good idea though; but I don’t think we’d be able to push it in this snow.”

  She nodded without saying anything. She had her arms folded around her.

  “Damn it,” I yelled, looking around. “I don’t want to walk! We’ll freeze to death.”

  Doc said, “Get in the truck. We can at least get out of the wind.”

  He and I sat in front. Wendy climbed in back. Quickly the windshield fogged over due to our bodies being warmer than the interior of the vehicle.

  “Damn I wish we could start this thing,” Doc said.

  “Yea,” I shivered. I rubbed the inside of the windshield with my glove. Under the frost fogged over glass I noticed a medical sticker in the corner. “This guy was a doctor,” I said, my teeth chattering.

  “What?” Doc asked.

  “Sticker on the windshield. He…”

  “I recognize it,” Doc said. “That was on Whittridge’s ID. I saw that icon on his badge when he threw it at me in the hospital.”

  I asked, “This is his truck?”

  “Yeah...”

  Wendy said quietly, “I remember his wife asking him to give her the meds and saying the truck keys were in the tackle box.”

  “What?” I asked, shivering.

  “Remember,” Wendy said. “Angie. Whittridge’s wife. She said something about it when he tied her arm off in the church.”

  Doc asked, “Is there a tackle box back there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Check it,” I said, my mouth so cold it barely moved.

  Wendy fumbled with the tackle box next to her. Opening it, several different vials of unfrozen liquids lay in separate slots; and in one slot, a set of keys sat alone.

  “Give me the keys,” I said.

  Her hand was shaking so badly it took her three tries to grab them. Finally, she gave the keys to me. I handed them to Doc. Finding the right key he shoved it into the ignition.

  The truck started.

  I closed my eyes.

  Thank God!

  We were swimming for our lives.

  The ocean liner we were on crashed into the dock of L.A. Shipping containers fell into the water. Zombies poured out of the crushed ship and tore into dock workers and civilians on the dock.