Halverson could see the creatures roaming around beneath the restaurant in search of more prey. Meanwhile, several of the creatures continued to stuff their faces with the warm flesh of their recent kills as they knelt over the corpses.
He could see one creature with a cadaver’s bloody intestines dangling out its mouth as it sank its sallow, cracked teeth into the tender tissue.
At the moment the zombies were more interested in finishing off the remains of their recent kills than in seeking new quarries. But, Halverson knew, that would change as more and more creatures infested the area and the supply of fresh meat to satiate them ran out. These creatures would demand new blood.
Halverson eyeballed the fresh corpses littering the ground under the restaurant, his spirits sinking. Their bones picked clean, the bodies looked like remains in a ghost town. He wondered how many passengers had been lost. He dreaded to think about it.
He did an about-face and checked out the parking lot he had entered. He picked up on the remaining passengers at the opposite end of the lot. A ten-foot-high chain-link fence with rusted barbed wire on top of it that canted inward enclosed the lot. He sighed. The problem was there weren’t any cars in the lot.
He hustled over to the cluster of survivors.
“We’re about as safe here as a hottie virgin in a whorehouse,” said Ray.
Tom laughed, despite himself.
“Are you speaking from experience, Ray?” cracked Halverson.
“What’s a whorehouse?” said Ray, all innocence.
“What are we gonna do?” Tom asked Rogers. “Just wait for those things to come around the bend?”
Halverson noticed that Rogers was standing apart from the others looking like he was in a brown study.
Rogers didn’t answer.
Halverson wondered if it was because he had not heard Tom, so absorbed was he in his thoughts.
Disconcerted, Tom asked again, “What are we gonna do, Burt?”
Rogers whirled on him. “How the fuck should I know?”
Taken aback, Tom retreated from Rogers, his feelings hurt, Halverson could see.
“No need to bite his head off,” said Halverson.
Halverson wondered if Rogers was starting to lose it. Halverson could not blame Rogers if he was. Rogers’s cracking up was about the last thing they needed at this point. They needed a cool head to lead them.
“Do I look like a god?” snapped Rogers.
Rogers raised his MP7. He looked to Halverson like he was pointing it at Tom.
In a reflex reaction, Halverson raised his MP7 in Rogers’s direction.
Halverson could not believe it when Rogers actually fired. Halverson started. He was on the verge of firing back at Rogers. Halverson’s forefinger was touching his MP7’s trigger.
Rogers blasted a ghoul that was staggering through the wall’s entrance into the parking lot.
Halverson realized what was happening after he spun around to see the ghoul dropping to the asphalt twenty-odd feet behind him. Relieved, Halverson lowered his MP7.
“I’m sick of these stinking zombies!” cried Rogers. Gnashing his teeth, he emptied his magazine into the flattened ghoul he had just wasted. “You kill ’em and you kill ’em and you kill ’em and it makes no difference. Hundreds more take their place.”
“It looks like our fearless leader is cracking up,” said Lemans. “Now we see who really should be in charge.”
Rogers stalked over to Lemans and got into Lemans’s face. “You know what? You look just like one of those creatures. You know what I mean?”
Lemans stood there and looked Rogers straight in the eye. “What are you trying to say?”
Rogers switched his MP7 to his left hand. He balled his right hand into a fist, cocked it, and drove it into Lemans’s face.
Lemans groaned and reeled back. He clutched his bleeding upper lip.
“I’m saying it’s getting real easy to kill those things,” said Rogers. “I’ve killed so many of them already, I don’t have to think twice to pull this trigger and whack another one. And they look just like human beings. Do you understand what I’m saying now?”
Nobody said anything. An uneasy silence hung in the air.
Usually most of the passengers sided with Rogers, but this time, Halverson noticed, it looked like he had gone beyond the pale and none of them seemed to be backing him up. Halverson himself was having trouble reading Rogers. Had Rogers flipped or was he just blowing off steam under the pressure of the circumstances?
It could well be that Rogers had not wigged out, decided Halverson. Indeed, Halverson knew what Rogers was going through. Halverson, too, was becoming inured to killing after clipping so many ghouls. These ghouls were getting easier and easier to blow away. The problem with that was that even though they were ghouls they looked just like people.
Constantly killing these creatures was short-circuiting the wiring in Halverson’s brain sending him subliminal messages that it was now perfectly acceptable and even laudable to commit murder.
Grimacing, crouched over, Lemans wiped blood from his face with the back of his hand.
“That sounds like a threat,” he told Rogers. “You’re nothing more than a two-bit thug, just like I thought.”
“Don’t push it,” Halverson told Lemans under his breath.
Rogers suddenly seemed bored with everything. He let his arms hang limp from his sides. He walked around in a semicircle.
“We need bullets and cars,” he said in a voice so soft Halverson could barely hear him.
“I don’t know where we’re gonna find more bullets,” said Halverson.
“Then we gotta get out of here.”
“Like I’ve been saying all along,” said Lemans.
Rogers ignored him. “We can’t keep fighting these things. We don’t have enough ammo. Our only other option is to retreat. The airport is infested with these things.”
“They could be all over the city for all we know,” said Tom uncertainly, fearing lest Rogers might chew off his head again, it looked like to Halverson.
“We’ll have to take that chance,” said Rogers.
Halverson caught sight of two zombies staggering from the restaurant’s perimeter into the parking lot. The female one licked its wizened lips with a grey desiccated tongue. The creature’s wig of purple hair was tilted askew on its decomposing head. It looked like the wig would fall off any second.
The other creature was wheelchair-bound. The ghoul wheeled itself forward a little bit at a time with ungainly, jerky movements of its decrepit hands. The creature had no legs. The bottoms of its beige trousers were folded over the stumps of what was left of its legs. Its equine face seemed to be grinning, it looked like to Halverson, but on closer inspection he could see it was a wide grimace, not a grin, that cracked the creature’s suppurating, scrofulous face.
Halverson obliterated the heads of both zombies with two deliberate three-bullet bursts from his MP7.
“How do we get out of this parking lot?” asked Tom. He flicked his eyes to his right. “The gate’s locked. The only opening is back to the restaurant.”
Nobody answered.
“Is everybody here now?” asked Rogers, counting heads.
“All that can walk,” said Halverson.
“It looks like twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two out of over two hundred,” said Lemans. “You’re doing a bang-up job.”
“I can’t believe you’re still alive,” Tom told Lemans. “You must lead a charmed life.”
“I didn’t get to the top by being a loser.”
Lemans dug a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wiped more blood off his mouth.
“And you’re implying Burt did?” snapped Tom, coming to Rogers’s defense.
Rogers did not respond to Lemans’s gibe. Rogers was preoccupied studying the nearby locked gate.
At least there weren’t any ghouls milling around outside the chain-link fence, decided Halverson. Not at the moment, anyway.<
br />
“I don’t mean to break up the party,” said Foster, “but here come more of those things.”
Halverson turned to see three creatures shambling into the parking lot.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Rogers stepped toward the chain-link fence’s nearby gate that was locked with a Yale padlock and steel chain. He fired a burst from his MP7 into the padlock.
That usually worked in the movies, Halverson knew. It didn’t look like a very strong lock. Shooting it might work.
But it didn’t. The lock didn’t spring open like it was supposed to according to Hollywood.
Rogers tried again.
Again no dice.
“Any more bright ideas?” said Lemans.
“Everybody, stand back,” said Halverson.
Halverson snagged a grenade from his belt.
The passengers saw what he was up to and backed away from the gate.
Halverson pulled the pin from the grenade. He didn’t know when the grenade was timed to explode. Not wanting to take any chances he held onto it for only a few seconds then lobbed it underhanded to the foot of the gate.
The grenade rolled and wobbled up to the gate.
“Everybody, down,” he said.
Halverson and the passengers lay prostrate on the pavement and covered their ears with their hands.
Halverson watched the grenade impatiently. He was surprised it was taking so long to explode. The three ghouls emerging from the restaurant had attracted company and were slowly but surely making their way toward the prone passengers in the parking lot.
Glancing at the monsters creeping toward them, Halverson felt like a sheep in a fold under attack by a pack of wolves.
He peered at the grenade that lay in front of the gate. A dud? he wondered. He was tempted to toss another one.
He was about to reach for another one when an earsplitting blast rocked the pavement. He felt the asphalt vibrating underneath his belly. The explosion kicked up a cloud of smoke, dust, and debris from the gate. The grey cloud wafted over him and the other passengers.
Halverson’s ears were ringing. His head was pounding.
When the dust cleared, Halverson could see that the gate and a ten-foot expanse of the chain-link fence attached to it had been blown out onto the street beyond the fence.
He could also make out to his left several ghouls shambling closer to the prostrate passengers. The blast had not deterred the ghouls.
It had driven a section of steel pipe from the top of the chain-link fence into a teenage Hispanic zombie girl’s chest which was clad in a stationery store’s red uniform. The pipe extended the better part of a foot from her chest and about six inches out of her spine. The ghoul kept coming, heedless of its impalement.
The male ghoul beside her lurched forward in its boxer shorts. The only remnants of its trousers were a couple of shreds that dangled down the ghoul’s skinny, bony legs. The creature’s sooty silk moiré jacket had a few blast holes in it but, all in all, it was in better shape than the trousers. Instead of a cravat, a length of barbwire dislodged from the fence by the explosion was now festooned around the creature’s neck. The barbs on the wire had gashed the ghoul’s large, bumpy bald head.
Rogers rose from the asphalt. “Let’s beat it. Everybody, out!”
Rosie levered herself up from the pavement with her arms. She commenced brushing her stew’s uniform off.
“Time for that later, Rosie,” said Rogers, watching her. “We have to get out of here.”
“Where to?” asked Tom, straightening up.
“To the parking garage. We need to find cars.”
“What have I been telling you all along?” said Lemans, already standing up.
The passengers scrambled to their feet and scurried over the portion of the chain-link fence that had been leveled by the blast.
In an effort to save ammunition, Halverson took careful aim with his MP7 at the bald ghoul’s face. Between the eyes was a good kill shot. But so was directly beneath the nose. This ghoul had a large beak under its aquiline eyes, providing Halverson with a clear target. The only thing that was making Halverson’s shot difficult was the creature’s lurching. Halverson slowed his breathing to help steady his shot when he fired.
The creature paused and seemed to study Halverson as if trying to figure out what Halverson was doing.
Halverson took that moment to squeeze the trigger and fire a single round that struck the ghoul under the nose and made a tiny entrance wound. The exit wound was larger. The medulla oblongata along with the cerebellum and a large segment of the cerebral hemisphere blew out of the back of the ghoul’s skull in a gooey grey lump the size of a soccer ball.
A knot of ghouls shuffled into the parking lot from the restaurant.
Halverson pelted after the other passengers fleeing for the multilevel parking garage.
Once inside the garage, the passengers gathered to catch their breaths.
Rogers cast around the garage for cars. He made out several in the adjacent garage.
“Over there,” he said. He pointed toward the cars.
He hightailed it to the vehicles. The rest of the passengers followed him.
When they arrived at the cars they tried all the doors to see if any of them were unlocked. They weren’t.
“If we break in, the car alarms will go off and attract the ghouls,” said Tom.
“I don’t think we have to worry about that at this point,” said Rogers. “We’re not trying to hide now. We’re trying to get out of here.”
He stepped up to a new Chevy Camaro, cocked his arm, and rammed his elbow into the driver’s side window. The glass shattered. The car alarm emitted an ear-piercing shriek.
“Does anybody know how to hotwire a car?” he asked.
“You can’t hotwire that one,” said Tom.
“Why not?”
“It’s too new. The new cars have computer microchips in their keys. You can’t hotwire them unless you have the keys with you.”
“If you have the key, why would you bother hotwiring the car?” asked Foster. Puzzled, he shrugged.
“If your key wasn’t working in the ignition for whatever reason.”
“Does that mean you know how to hotwire a car?” Rogers asked Tom.
“If somebody has a screwdriver, I might be able to start an older car,” said Tom.
Rogers fished out of his trouser pocket a Swiss army knife. “My pocketknife has a screwdriver on it.”
“This I gotta see,” said Foster, wincing thanks to the shrieking car alarm. “If I don’t go deaf first.”
Halverson peered through the eddying smog toward the restaurant. “Here come the ghouls.”
Mobs of them were massing together near the broken chain-link fence and shambling in the direction of the car alarm.
“What else is new? SSDD,” muttered Tom.
“What?” asked Mildred.
“Same shit, different day,” explained Foster.
“That’s a very negative philosophy.”
“It’s hard to be positive while hordes of zombies are massacring us,” said Tom.
“Negative thinking won’t help us.”
“Nothing can help us.” Frowning, Tom ran his fingers through his wind-tousled hair.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn.”
“What’s that smell?” said Tanya. She sniffed the air and pulled a face.
“It smells like something rotting,” said Tom. “Sort of like sulfur.”
“It’s those things out there,” said Halverson. “They’re made of putrescent flesh.”
“Putrid is right.”
“If they don’t kill us, their stench will,” said Rogers.
He ejected the clip from his MP7. He inspected the magazine, checked that he had rounds remaining, and slammed it back into the submachine gun’s butt.
“Since we can smell them, they’re obviously closing in on us,” said Halverson.
“Brilliant deduction,” said Lem
ans. “Maybe you should be our leader.”
Halverson ignored Lemans’s dig.
“I can’t wait to breathe some fresh air,” said Tanya.
“First things first,” said Rogers. “We need cars.”
“These cars are too new,” said Tom.
Halverson watched him walk toward the other side of the garage casting around for a car he might be able to hotwire.
Tom approached a tan Ford Taurus that looked to Halverson to be from the late nineties. Tom tried the driver’s side door. It didn’t open. He used the butt of his MP7 to club the window. The glass shattered. He opened the door. He slid into the front seat.
No car alarm, Halverson realized.
“Where’s that screwdriver?” Tom asked.
Pocketknife in hand, Rogers strode up to the Taurus. He handed Tom the knife. Rogers had already extended the screwdriver tool on the trademark red Swiss army knife.
Tom inserted the screwdriver’s edge awkwardly into the car’s ignition. The problem was the screwdriver was too big. He tried to twist it. He could not get it to turn very far. Nothing happened.
“Do you have a smaller screwdriver on this knife?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Rogers plucked the knife from Tom’s hand. Rogers inspected the knife. He pulled out one of the blades with his thumbnail. A screwdriver with a smaller head appeared. He handed the knife back to Tom.
Tom inserted the screwdriver into the ignition. He twisted the screwdriver.
The car started.
He pumped his fist.
Some of the passengers cheered as they rushed up to the car.
“That doesn’t always work,” said Tom. “We got lucky.”
“About time,” said Tanya.
“Where’d you learn that trick?” Rogers asked Tom. “Selling wine?”
Tom shook his head. “The same place I learn everything else. On the Internet.”
Lemans charged up to the Taurus. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get out of here.”
He shoved the people in front of him out of his way and made to get inside the car.
Rogers grabbed the back of Lemans’s jacket collar and yanked him back from the car as Lemans was ducking to enter the vehicle.
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 15
