Medora: A Zombie Novel

by Welker, Wick

  With a flash of hope leaping up inside of him, Keith picked up his baseball bat and walked briskly over to the kitchen. He saw two metal refrigerators, one standing upright with one door ajar and the other was the double-door refrigerator that he and the janitor had knocked over only an hour before to block the doors to a loading bay. He opened the other closed door on the refrigerator that was still upright only to find it packed with white boxes. He then looked at the refrigerator that was tipped over onto its face; its doors facing the ground with the smooth metal back facing upward. Keith bent down on his knees and knocked on the back of the smooth surface. Nothing stirred inside. Looking back at the group, he pounded on the back of the refrigerator again and suddenly a muffled, long sustained scream came out of it.

  “Oh, my gosh,” someone said from the group, “someone is still in there!”`

  Keith yelled at the refrigerator, “Hey, we hear you. We’re going to try to get you out, okay? Can you hear me?”

  There was a pause and then an indiscernible muffled response.

  “Okay, how can we get this fridge back up on its feet? This thing weighs a ton.”

  “Well, wait, what if whoever is in there is infected?” The red-haired teacher shouted out.

  “I don’t know. I don’t really hear much of the sick people screaming like that. They just usually make weird gurgling sounds, I’m pretty sure I can hear a woman talking in there.”

  Mrs. Rottermund spoke up, “Yeah, I think it’s a real person in there. I mean Harold stuck this girl in one of those refrigerators and she’s fine. I don’t see a bite on her and she seems perfectly healthy to me.”

  Marianne spoke up, “I swear I was never bit by one of the sick people and that lady in there helped save me from two of teachers that were trying to eat me in the library. We have to help her, because she is so nice.”

  “Okay, let’s see…” Keith and another teacher looked around and found a dolly placed in the corner of the kitchen, wheeled it over and stuck the metal plate of it under the front of the refrigerator. “I think if we can lift it up just enough to get a bunch of our fingers under it, we can lift the whole thing up. We’re going to need all of us lifting.”

  The group of teachers surrounded the refrigerator as they could hear the woman speaking loudly from within the metal surface. Keith slid the dolly underneath, lifting the edge up enough for everyone to put their hands underneath. They began to lift, but Mrs. Rottermund slipped and fell, causing the refrigerator to slam down hard onto the already cracked kitchen tiles.

  “Oh no, I’m so sorry,” she said, getting up off the floor.

  As soon as they were in place ready to lift again there was a sudden loud banging sound on the loading bay doors that the refrigerator was blocking. The entire group turned and stared at the double doors. Another loud smack at the doors caused them to rattle back and forth. They waited in silence, hoping that it would stop but it only intensified with a louder and more forceful push in a rhythmic pulse every few seconds.

  “We’ve got to do this fast,” Keith said.

  With new urgency and quickness in their movements, the group huddled once more around the refrigerator. Keith put in the dolly, lifted the end of it up and the group managed to slip all of their hands underneath the edge.

  “Okay,” Keith yelled out, “One… two… three!”

  With arched backs and exhausted arms, they slowly raised the large metal refrigerator to its feet and let go, making the bottom slam down. Keith saw a broken broomstick shoved in the door handle of the refrigerator and quickly slid it out. The loading bay doors were now active with sounds of bodies repeatedly slamming into them causing a loud rattling sound again and again in the kitchen.

  “We’ve got to get the hell out of here,” a man yelled who then turned and ran out of the kitchen.

  Keith opened the refrigerator door and a woman spilled out into him, knocking him to the ground. He looked down at her and saw the badly bruised and bloody face of his wife.

  “Ellen!”

  She looked up at him weakly and silently smiled at him. Her hair was matted with dried brown blood and one swollen eye. Her clothing and arms were charred black and her right shoulder was bundled together with a sports bra that had stiffened and dried with blood.

  “Ellen! I can’t believe… how did you…?” Then he thought about the janitor and all the things he wanted to do to him.

  Ellen, weakened, looked up at him, touched his chin, and continued smiling.

  The loading bay doors stopped rattling for a few moments and were now constantly pushing inward, squealing with the sound of twisting metal coming from the hinges. Keith backed up on the smooth tile and started to get to his feet when the double doors simultaneously slammed inward into the cafeteria with dozens of bodies bursting in after.

  “Run!” Someone yelled, with the entire group stumbling out of the kitchen area and into the cafeteria. Keith got to his feet with his wife leaning in on him, grabbed the bat from his backpack and swung it outward at the face of an infected man that was slowly crawling towards him, chomping at the air. The bat struck him in the side of the face with his bottom jaw breaking free from his mouth.

  “Okay, Hon, we got to run now,” Keith said to Ellen as they made their way into the cafeteria from the kitchen, the rest of the group far ahead of them now. They shuffled quickly, Ellen moving slowly but fast enough to stay ahead of the horde that was now amassing behind. They could hear sounds of groaning and sloshing as each of the infected was struggling to crawl over one another to feed. Keith looked over his shoulder at the doorway of the kitchen as a few of them now got through into the cafeteria and were walking towards them.

  “Run into the hallway.” He gently pushed Ellen towards the hall and stood with his bat ready to stop the approaching horde. One infected woman slowly stepped towards him and he waited until she was in range of his bat and then swung, hitting her in the neck. The neck collapsed with the impact of the bat, making her entire head lean sideways off her shoulders until the remaining attached muscles and blood vessels stretched and let it go, dropping her decapitated head to the tile. Her body collapsed and writhed in erratic, jerking motions. Keith breathed heavily, put one leg on another’s chest that was falling into him and kicked him off, making him spiral backwards into the crowd behind.

  Feeling the suffocating body heat of the horde encircling him, he turned and sprinted out of the cafeteria after Ellen, who had made it down the hallway, but had stopped to wait for him. He turned around to shut the double wooden doors to the cafeteria, but quickly realized that they had destroyed the handles of the doors when they had broken the door. Giving up, he grabbed Ellen by the shoulders and they ran down the hallway after the others, hearing the rattling of every classroom door with the infected that had crept their way into the rooms.

  They made their way to the teacher’s lounge, which had been deserted, leaving only a blaring radio with scrambled voices. They looked back down the darkened hallway that they came from and could hear the slow but unrelenting movements of the horde from the cafeteria. They were coming slowly with the inevitable force of a storm. Keith knew where everyone had gone and knew it was now their only option.

  “Okay, Hon,” he looked down at Ellen who was leaning in his arms with her eyes closed, “I think we’ve got to go to the roof.”

  “Keith…” she said slowly, “I know where Jayne is.”

  “What? Where is she?”

  “Close by… close.” Ellen’s eyelids drifted downwards, her body overcome with dehydration and pain.

  “Okay, we’ll get her. Let’s go.” Keith picked up Ellen and carried her in his arms as he advanced further down the opposite hallway of the horde, running now. Fortunately, none of the sick had managed to get through any of the boarded up classroom doors.

  He ran further down the hallway, slipping past bodies and furniture, making his way to a utility room that led to the metal staircase towards the roof. Feeling fatigue from carrying El
len, his legs struggled with each step up the ladder, but he managed to get to the top, turned the metal doorknob and tried to open the door. However, he felt resistance from the other side.

  “Hey!” he yelled, “It’s me! We’re okay, open the door!”

  There was a pause with some sounds of shuffling and suddenly the door opened outward into the dim open light of dusk. Keith carried Ellen out onto the rooftop and laid her down, helping the others close the door behind him.

  “They’re back there. The whole bunch of them, and they’re coming up,” Keith said to the group of teachers who stared back at him with blank and frightened expressions.

  “We got other problems up here too,” a brown haired man with a thick moustache said back at Keith, pointing to a corner of the roof.

  Keith saw Harold in his one-piece custodian jumpsuit sitting on the gravel with his back against the corner of the roof. He held his arms propped up on his bent legs with his hands wrapped around a gun, pointed vaguely at them while whistling.

  “What the hell is he doing?”

  “We just found him sitting up here with that gun out.”

  “Has anyone talked to him?”

  “Yeah, well, Nancy just bitched him out pretty badly about putting those girls in the fridges. He just sat there and didn’t say anything. Hey wait, do you know that blonde woman?”

  “Yes, she’s my wife.” Keith bent down to Ellen and rubbed her back. She breathed heavily with her eyes closed.

  “She is? Wow, I’m so sorry for what that bastard did to her.” The man turned to the rest of the group to tell them.

  Keith slowly walked up to the janitor and stood about twenty feet away, staring at him. He looked down around the school and saw a sea of the sick swarming around the school grounds and flooding the playground.

  “What do you want?” Harold asked him.

  Keith continued staring silently at the man, not knowing what exactly he would do next. His first idea was to give up on the situation. To just give up on everything and go gather his badly beaten wife, find a corner and wait for the horde to come. Yet, looking down at the face of the man who beat his wife with a shovel and shoved her body in a refrigerator to die was somehow reinvigorating him. He could feel his pulse pumping in his neck, the sound of blood pounding with each heartbeat in his ears. He looked down at Harold’s gun and realized where he had gotten it.

  “That’s my gun.”

  Harold looked at the gun and scoffed, “What? What’re you talking about?”

  “You stole it from my wife.”

  “Hey, hey, look I had to do that. She was bit; she’s infected. There’s nothing you can do for her now. I had to do what I had to do.”

  “I want my gun back.”

  Harold moved the gun down by his side. “Uh, no sir. This is my gun now.”

  Keith continued looking at him, not sure, if he was trying to intimidate the janitor or just stalling to figure out what to do next. He was angry with himself for letting a slow rage build inside his chest. He had already let a man die today in the subway tunnels and now he was forced into another situation where he might have to deliberately take a man’s life. He didn’t know if it was revenge that he was feeling or a survival instinct growing in him to get his gun back. His mind was running with the violent thoughts of the day; the woman he had just decapitated with a baseball bat or the hordes of bodies falling off a skyscraper. All the carnage was mixing and he was afraid for himself because if he were to kill the janitor this minute, it would make no difference to him. The outbreak had made him complacent about who lived or who died. He wasn’t even sure if he cared about living at that moment.

  He felt someone brush his back. Turning around, he saw his wife looking up into his eyes. She stared at him, her eyes vibrant and calming. He wondered how she could be so shocking and beautiful after being beaten and burned half to death.

  “Keith, just let it go. He’s just scared like all of us. I’m so happy to see you, I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too.” He leaned down and kissed her.

  “Hey, hey, is that the same woman?” Harold got to his feet with his gun still at his side and look at Ellen. “I told you she got bit, so she can turn into one of those infected any minute. What’re you doing?”

  Ellen looked at him, “What difference does it make now? We’ve got a hundred of them coming up through those stairs right now and a thousand more surrounding the school.”

  The three of them looked back at the door entrance of the roof where the rest of the teachers were huddled around, trying to stop the crowd of the sick from breaching the roof.

  Harold walked up to the teachers and yelled, “Oh, shit. What did you people do? How did they all get into the school? You fucked us! We’re dead! We’re completely surrounded.” He stumbled around the gravel of the roof, repeatedly shrugging his shoulders for dramatic effect. “This school was the only thing we had and you assholes just let them waltz right in here.”

  “Hey, why don’t you come over and help us hold the door, you son of a bitch,” a teacher yelled back.

  Ellen spoke softly to Keith, “I know where Jayne is. Miss Stutsen wrote on her chalkboard that she took her and some other kids to her house a few hours ago. It’s just a few blocks away. If we can just…” She looked past Keith to the neighborhoods that seemed to be a hair’s length away to her. “She’s just right out there. I know the exact street.”

  They stood looking out over the horde of the infected that milled around the school, waddling around like animals, constantly bumping off each other. They were marooned on the island of the once living. The sounds of helicopters thumped in the distance.

  “Is there any way we can get flares to maybe get one of the helicopters to see us?” Ellen asked while looking upward towards the sky.

  “No, we didn’t find anything like that in any of the storage. Maybe one will come by and see us…” Keith was cut off by a tremendous burst of air and sound that overtook them, pushing them both to the ground and dampening all other sounds. He opened his eyes and quickly felt his arms and legs, wondering if he was still intact. He looked over at Ellen who was covering her head with her arms. “What was that?” He yelled.

  He got to his feet and saw a large cloud of fire and smoke that was billowing up into the sky a few blocks away from the school. Ellen stood up and saw the brilliant orange cloud as it grew into the dark sky. Overhead, two firefighter jets streamed, roared loudly and flew out of sight.

  “I was afraid this might happen.” Keith put his arm around Ellen. “They’re bombing us.”

  Chapter seventeen

  They only had to follow the continuing trail of metal, rounded pieces of fuselage and luggage. All of the debris scattered led the Humvee west as they passed sign after sign indicating their approach to Strykersville, a painfully small town in northern state. Dave expected massive traffic jams as all of New York City tried to make an exodus from the infection but the roads were virtually empty. Too many people died too quickly, he thought, not enough time to pack your family and get the hell out of town. He wondered how many people had died today, probably more at one time than any single battle of any war he could think of. Are millions dead? He was trying to guess how many people were in the Manhattan area at any given time and then stopped.

  He looked over at Layton, his short, bright red-hair peeking underneath his helmet as he peered out the window with the muzzle of his gun sticking out. Anderson was at the wheel with Ortega riding next to him who was constantly in communication with some clandestine authority whispering commands and giving updates through his earpiece. Ortega had hardly spoken a word to the crew of Medora One since they crossed the bridge with the scorched plane tail beneath. He was in a constant chatter with upper command.

  Dave had managed to muster some sort of respect from the crew who now allowed him to sit in the very back of the Humvee, rather than the roof, sitting along side the massive tank of fuel for the flamethrower. He had consider
ed many times just being dropped off on the side of the road but in light of everything that had happened to him today, including hanging off the side of a skyscraper as the living dead tried to eat him alive, he figured that being part of a classified specialized military unit may as well also happen today too. Besides, he thought, he didn’t really have anything to go back to besides his sad one bedroom apartment and his fifty-five inch TV. It wasn’t suicidal staying with the team, he reasoned, more like complacency over his own stupid life.

  The Humvee passed the last sign to Strykersville, showing 1.5 miles to the exit also indicating a gas station at the off-ramp. Pulling off the exit, they took a right and saw the gas station around the corner, which had recently suffered some sort of explosion. The roof above the pumps had been blown up and outward, with its support poles leaning over with the entire roof rolled back from the impact of the explosion. There was an overturned blackened SUV sitting on its side next to where the gas pumps once were. A gas pump lay in the middle of the road as the Humvee drove up and stopped.

  “Alright,” Ortega spoke to the unit, “I’m going to take this gas station as a sign. We’re going to assume that this entire town has been compromised by the infection presumably from the airplane crash which satellite confirms is just about one mile north of our current position. Shoot to kill any person that is infected but do not pull the trigger until you confirm that the person is indeed infected. Basically, if they’re talking to you, they’re not infected. Anyone bitten who is not yet showing symptoms will be detained. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” the group responded in unison.

  “I want Layton and Clarence to go clear that gas station.” The Humvee stopped and the two jumped out with gas masks in place and rifles drawn out. They ran into the gas station while sweeping the area with their rifles back and forth. Moments later, a few pumps of gunfire were heard and the two emerged, running back towards the Humvee.

  Clarence got in the back seat. “All clear, there were three in there, all compromised.”