Reba pointed north toward the smoking remains of buildings in a strip mall.
“We can’t let him wander off by himself,” Halverson told Reba.
“He’ll be back,” said Reba.
“How do you know?”
Reba glanced over her shoulder back at the moneybags stashed in the rear of her motor cart. “He won’t leave those behind for long.”
“What if the ghouls ambush him?” said Halverson.
He clambered out of his seat, twisting his bound arms painfully in the process.
“What are you doing?” asked Reba.
“We need to find him and help him.”
“What kind of help can you give him with your hands tied?”
“I’ll go with him,” said Victoria.
“Felix is the one with the guns,” said Reba. “He can take care of himself.”
“But what if he passes out from his infected arm? We need to check up on him.”
Victoria climbed out of her cart and took the pitchfork with her.
“Anyone else coming?” asked Halverson.
Nobody moved.
“I’ll watch the carts,” said Becker.
“Just as well,” muttered Halverson.
As soon as he and Victoria were alone, he would take the first opportunity to cut his bonds with the knife he had cribbed in the supermarket.
“I’ll go,” said Mannering. He grabbed a shovel and trotted up to Halverson. “You’re not gonna be much good to anyone with your arms trussed.”
“Me, too,” said Reba.
She seized the Mossberg Persuader and met up with them.
The gang’s all here, thought Halverson. So much for plan A, he decided. Then again he might still be able to free himself while the others were preoccupied. He would just have to wait and see.
“I’m still guarding the carts,” said Becker. “I’ll honk if I see any of those things coming.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“How are we gonna find him in this darkness?” asked Victoria, as she, Reba, Halverson, and Mannering set out north.
“I don’t know,” said Mannering. “We sure could use those NVGs of Felix’s right about now.”
“Where would the nearest restroom be located?”
“Any of these stores in this strip mall will have restrooms.”
“What if he didn’t go to a restroom?” said Halverson.
“What are you talking about?” said Mannering. “Reba said he did.”
“Maybe he lied.”
“Why would he lie about going to the bathroom?”
They reached the first store in the mall, which happened to be a fire-gutted stationery store.
“Let’s try here,” said Victoria. She walked into the charred rubble of the building. “If the restroom is still intact.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Mannering told Halverson. “Why would Felix lie about going to the head?”
“Why didn’t he just go in the street?” said Halverson. “It’s not like we have to obey social amenities now that the world’s falling apart.”
“Maybe he had to take a dump. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to do that in the street.”
“I agree with Hank,” said Victoria. “Felix probably has some kind of diarrhea after eating that rotten meat.”
“You’re all forgetting one thing,” said Halverson. “Felix has the plague and he’s turning into one of those things.”
“So he lied about finding a restroom and in reality went off to turn into the Wolf Man or whatever on his own,” Mannering scoffed.
“I don’t know how he’s stayed alive as long as he has with that infection eating through his system.”
Mannering shook his head incredulously.
Halverson, Mannering, and Reba followed Victoria into the stationery store. They found the bathroom in the back—what was left of it, anyway. Burnt rafters in the roof had caved in and now canted against the walls and the two stalls.
Otherwise, the stalls both looked in working order, decided Halverson. The metal door on one of the stalls hung ajar. Halverson peeked inside. The stall was empty. The other stall’s door was closed. He kicked the door lightly with his foot.
“Felix?” he said.
No answer.
Mannering crouched and looked under the stall door. He didn’t see any feet. “No sign of him.”
“So, he’s in another restroom,” said Reba.
“This could take all night.”
“Especially if he isn’t even in a restroom in the first place,” said Halverson.
There was no telling where Felix had gone if he went somewhere to turn into a creature, Halverson decided. Halverson had no idea what thoughts were running through Felix’s feverish, plague-infected brain. How could Halverson predict where Felix would go?
For all Halverson knew, Felix may have already turned. If he had, there was only one thought going through Felix’s mind at this moment: Eat! In that case, Felix would be acting now in accordance with that single prime directive running through his reanimated brain.
Halverson needed his satphone. He had no choice but to find Felix whether he was a zombie or not. How do you track a zombie? wondered Halverson.
“Let’s try to get inside Felix’s head,” said Halverson.
“He went to take a leak or a dump,” said Mannering. He shrugged. “Where’s that get us? How many restrooms do we have to check? He may not even be using a restroom.”
“You just don’t get it. Felix has the plague. He’s gonna die.”
“What’s that got to do with taking a leak?”
“You’re hopeless, Hank,” said Victoria.
“I need a drink.” Mannering rubbed his face with his hand.
“Don’t you understand? This isn’t business as usual. Look around you.” Victoria gestured at the incinerated hulk of a building they were standing in.
“You mean, we’re fucked. I already know that, honey. Why do you think I want to get drunk?”
“You’re no good to us drunk.”
“Like we’re gonna get out of this or something.”
Halverson ignored Mannering. “If you knew you were gonna die, what would you do? Where would you go?”
“We all know we’re gonna die,” said Victoria.
“Let me rephrase that. If you knew you were gonna die soon, what would you do?”
Victoria thought about it. “I’d go home, I think. I don’t really know. I’ve never thought about it. I don’t dwell on morbid thoughts.”
“I’d drink a couple six-packs of beer,” said Mannering. “I’d drink myself senseless.”
“That’s your answer to everything, isn’t it?”
“Do you have any idea what it’s like being a cop?”
Victoria said nothing.
“Of course not,” Mannering went on. “I get to deal with all the sickos, rapists, murderers, and whatever every day of the week. You think all these scumbags get caught, don’t you? Well, I have news for you. They don’t. Most of these creeps get away with it. You don’t want to know even half of what I know. It would make you sick.”
“This isn’t a referendum on your job,” said Halverson.
“We all have problems,” said Victoria. “We don’t all get drunk because of it.”
“Yeah,” said Reba. “We don’t all go around wallowing in self-pity.”
“Fuck you,” said Mannering.
Reba flinched. “You’re too sensitive. That’s what it is.”
Mannering sniggered. “Yeah, that’s it all right.” He suddenly raised his voice. “Just wait till you get raped and you want the police to nail the guy. You’ll see. You’ll see that most of those scumbags get away with it.”
“You’re gonna bring those things down on us by yelling,” said Halverson.
Mannering waved his hand in disgust. “Yeah, I ought to be like the rest of you and not even care about all the shit that goes down in this city—what used to be a city anyway.
Then I could rest easy like you guys.”
Halverson changed the subject. He didn’t want to stoke Mannering’s access of rage by prolonging the discussion.
“Does Felix live around here?” asked Halverson.
Mannering went off and brooded by himself in a corner. He sat there, bald head bowed, and ran his hand down over his forehead.
“I don’t know anything about him,” answered Victoria. “I just met him today. I can’t even remember yesterday.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “Everything’s like a blur in my head now. I don’t even know what day it is, anymore.”
“This is getting us nowhere,” Reba put in. “We might as well go back to the carts and wait for him to return.”
“And what if he doesn’t return?”
“Then we’ll have to leave without him.”
“He wouldn’t like that.” Victoria lowered her voice so Mannering was out of earshot. “He wouldn’t like you running off with his money.”
“Then he better get his ass back to the carts.” Reba paused a beat. “Don’t worry about it. He’ll be back. There’s no way he’s gonna leave his money behind.”
Halverson didn’t agree with Reba. He didn’t believe Felix was coming back. Felix’s plague-ravaged brain wasn’t thinking straight. But Halverson wasn’t about to leave without Felix if he could at all help it. Halverson needed his satphone and Felix had it. It was that simple.
“We don’t have any choice,” said Halverson. “We have to find him.”
“You find him,” said Reba. “I have no idea where he went. I only know what he told me.” She turned to leave. “I’m heading back to the carts.”
Mannering rose to his feet. He was going to follow Reba, but on second thought hung back, rubbing his bald pate.
“Maybe Felix crawled into some corner to die,” Victoria told Halverson.
“All we can do is keep searching,” said Halverson.
“If he’s turned into a creature, he wouldn’t hide somewhere. He’d be coming after us to feed on us. Right?”
Halverson frowned in thought. “Those things don’t shy from human contact, that’s for sure. Just the opposite. If he has already turned, he won’t be running away from us. He’ll be foraging for the nearest living human being to eat.”
“Which is probably us.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Halverson pricked up his ears when he heard scuffling behind the broken, disarrayed shelves in the store.
Mannering heard it, too. “What was that?” he said under his breath.
“Maybe it’s Felix,” whispered Victoria.
Halverson, Victoria, and Mannering left the bathroom and headed down the short hallway to the store’s interior to investigate the source of the sound.
Shovel at the ready, Mannering stole down an aisle to canvass the rest of the store. As Mannering was padding down the aisle, a tall guy with tousled white hair and a nicotine-stained white shaving brush mustache halted into view at the other end of the aisle. The guy was wearing jeans and a bloodstained ruby shirt.
The guy screwed up his sixtyish face into a grimace as he set his white-filmed eyes on Mannering.
Wielding his shovel with both hands now, Mannering closed in on the creature.
Halverson wanted to help him, but his hands were tied.
At that moment, a short, wiry male Vietnamese creature with bandy legs lurched into view behind its companion. The Vietnamese creature’s hatchet face scowled as the creature bared its fragmented yellow, bloody teeth. The thing was still chewing a piece of human flesh in its mouth, Halverson could see. Maybe the thing had just made a fresh kill, decided Halverson. Hopefully, the creature’s victim hadn’t been Felix. Blood trickled down the creature’s chin.
“Sons of bitches,” growled Mannering and went at the two ghouls brandishing his shovel.
“Untie me so I can help him,” Halverson told Victoria.
Victoria appeared loath to obey him. She glanced at Mannering then exchanged looks with Halverson. She fudged, undecided.
“The only reason you tied me up was so I wouldn’t kill Felix. Right?” said Halverson.
“It wasn’t my idea to tie you up. It was Felix’s.”
“Well, he’s not here anymore. So what’s the point? I’m on your side. I can help Hank.”
Halverson knew he had the knife in his rear waistband, but by the time he managed to cut himself free it would be too late to help Mannering. It might even be too late to help himself if there were more of those things lurking in the store.
Victoria dithered a moment longer then worked to unfasten the necktie that bound Halverson’s wrists as she heard Mannering pound the head of the tall ghoul with the back of the shovel’s steel blade.
Mannering was experiencing difficulty swinging the shovel in such close confines. The proximity of the shelves on either side of him was curtailing his swing and hence lessening the impact of the blow to the creature’s head.
In such close quarters, a shovel made a lousy weapon, Mannering realized. In any quarters, for that matter. It was virtually useless here as a killing weapon. He could not get any power behind his swing.
He started hammering down on the thing’s head from above, but he doubted that the impact of such blows would kill the thing. The fact of the matter was that a shovel just wasn’t designed for killing people.
His hands free, Halverson snatched Victoria’s pitchfork and waded into the war Mannering was waging with the two ghouls.
“Whose bright idea was it to use shovels as weapons?” said Mannering in frustration.
“We took anything we could find in the shed,” said Halverson. “We didn’t have a whole lot of choices.” He came up to Mannering and raised the pitchfork in his hands. “Let me try this. I’ve had some luck with it before.”
“Be my guest,” said Mannering, who stepped aside.
Shaving Brush stumbled forward toward Halverson. Halverson thrust the pitchfork upward from waist level and drove the prongs under the chin and upward into Shaving Brush’s head.
Halverson could feel the impetus of Shaving Brush who continued to try to walk forward. The only thing that impeded the creature’s progress was the length of the pitchfork that Halverson grasped. Halverson figured he had missed the creature’s brain.
He kicked Shaving Brush in the chest and, shoving the creature away, yanked on the pitchfork at the same time to dislodge the prongs from the thing’s head. Shaving Brush reeled backward a few steps.
“Poke its damn eyes out,” said Mannering.
That had worked for him before, Halverson knew. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to aim the pitchfork so that one of the prongs would directly penetrate an eye. In any case, it was his best bet.
He reared back and, holding the pitchfork as steady as he could manage, thrust it at Shaving Brush’s head. The prongs missed the eyes, but didn’t miss the head. One of the prongs impaled Shaving Brush’s head flush between the eyes. The prong transfixed the brain and Shaving Brush dropped.
“Good shot,” said Mannering.
Except I wasn’t aiming there, thought Halverson. He hadn’t been trained in the use of pitchforks as weapons at Camp Peary when he was training for the Agency. However, agents were trained to be able to kill with just about any object imaginable, including a pen or one of the bows of somebody’s glasses. Then again, nobody had ever trained him to kill the walking dead.
Halverson withdrew the pitchfork from Shaving Brush and advanced on the wiry Vietnamese creature.
Halverson didn’t waste any time. He went straight for the eyes. He managed to jam a prong into the epicanthic fold over one of the scowling Vietnamese creature’s eyes.
“Turn out the lights,” crooned Mannering, watching the creature’s knees buckle.
Halverson stepped over the Vietnamese ghoul’s corpse and rounded the corner of the aisle. He came up short at the sight on the floor.
A young man’s corpse lay supine. Its arms had been torn off
and devoured, save for the bones that had been picked clean and tossed aside. The corpse’s chest had a gaping hold in it. The organs inside the rib cage had been scooped out. What was left of the man’s bloody entrails lay coiled between his legs.
Halverson heard a shuffling to his left. Turning his head he peered down the next aisle. A small blonde girl in a dirty lavender dress was scuffing toward him. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old. Three thick scars striated her forehead.
Her face a twisted grimace, she raised her arms and scrabbled toward him.
Disgusted, Halverson raised his pitchfork in order to thrust it.
Victoria appeared behind the girl at the other end of the aisle and screamed at him. “No!”
Victoria held her hands up, signaling to Halverson not to attack the girl.
“Shawna,” Victoria said to the girl and strode toward her, her arms outstretched in welcome.
At the sound of Victoria’s scream, the little girl stopped heading toward Halverson and reversed direction toward Victoria.
“Look out!” yelled Halverson to Victoria.
“It’s Shawna,” said Victoria.
“It’s not. It’s one of those things.”
When Victoria beheld the girl’s contorted, sneering face, she froze in her tracks. The girl opened her mouth, exposing jagged teeth and driveling.
“Get away from it,” Halverson told Victoria.
Its arms raised, the thing shambled toward Victoria, groping the air.
Victoria stood in a funk, paralyzed at the sight of the little girl’s wretched face.
The girl creature grabbed Victoria’s arm with its grubby, emaciated fingers.
“Don’t let it touch you!” said Halverson.
He speared the ghoul in the back with the pitchfork’s prongs, which drove clear through the ghoul’s chest and jutted three inches out from it. Then he lifted the creature off the floor and pulled the little monster away from Victoria.
Airborne, the thing squirmed on the pitchfork and flailed its arms and legs.
Halverson reversed the angle of his grip on the pitchfork and, aiming downward, pinned the creature facedown to the floor with the prongs embedded in its back. He stamped on the creature’s spine. The creature continued writhing.
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 41
