Survivors in a Dead World

by Gary M. Chesla

  Jamal looked pissed as he grabbed the hand written map.

  “This Peck’s Lunch on the corner past Trimbal’s, they sold food too, right?”

  “Yea, they sold a few things like bread, milk, soups, snacks and things like that,” Ricki replied.

  “Go see what’s there,” Jamal said. “Devon and George have already filled our tank and are out filling up the cans. Hurry up, I want to look around through town a little before we go.”

  Ricki nodded and walked back out on Ligonier Street and crossed over to the other side of the street. He walked past the bank and noticed that apparently no one had been interested in money when they were leaving. The bank had sustained very little damage.

  Ricki passed the barbershop, the florist and the Post Office, the next building was Peck’s Lunch. Apparently no one needed a haircut or stamps or wanted to send flowers to anyone before they left town. Those stores were missing their doors and front windows, but inside, from what Ricki could see from out on the sidewalk, they didn’t look totally trashed and cleaned out like Trimbal’s.

  Peck’s on the other hand had been trashed. Ricki didn’t go in any further than two steps inside the store. Like Trimbal’s, the place had been cleaned out completely. Anything that anyone could carry was gone. The three poker machines that were against the back wall were still in place, undisturbed. Ricki used to come here after ball games to play the poker machines. Peck’s was the only place around that paid winners in cash when they wanted to cash out. Everyone knew about the machines, even though they were illegal, but no one bothered Peck. Even the lone New Florence police officer had been seen playing the machines from time to time.

  Ricki turned and left the store. Before going back and pissing off Jamal again, he was going to check out the drug store. It was back past the car about half a block on the other side of the shoe store. New Florence had a shoe store that sold and repaired shoes, unlike the larger towns that just sold shoes. If he had time, Ricki planned on going in to find a new pair of shoes.

  Ricki laughed to himself, “Maybe I should tell George where he can get a new pair of shoes since it looks like Devon will be claiming his Nike’s later today.

  Ricki walked up to the front of Mack’s Drugstore. The door and windows, like at Trimbal’s were lying out on the sidewalk. It only took a quick look to see that the drugstore had also been cleaned out too, including the medicine and other first aid supplies.

  This was strange, but Ricki didn’t want to hang around and try to figure it out. He glanced over at the car, Devon and George were getting inside. If he didn’t hurry, the bastards would probably drive off and leave him here.

  Ricki turned and ran back to the car and quickly got into the back seat.

  All three turned and looked at him, “Where’s the food?”

  “I checked Peck’s Lunch and even the drugstore. They have all been cleaned out.”

  “Who took everything?” George asked.

  “The only thing I can think of is when the people decided to get out of town, they stocked up on supplies to take with them,” Rick replied.

  “Did you look in these cars?” Jamal asked. “It looks like most of the people are still here.”

  “No,” Ricki answered.

  Jamal signaled for Ricki to get out and look, pointing with his thumb and his usual sick looking grin on his face.

  Ricki opened the door and got out.

  “This is going to be gross,” he thought to himself, but not seeing any way around it, he walked over to the first car and looked inside.

  He looked inside another six cars before going back empty handed.

  “Shit,” George exclaimed.

  Ricki didn’t know whether George was upset because Ricki didn’t find any food or because he knew without finding any chips, he would lose his shoes to Devon.

  “Since the town isn’t crawling with those things, maybe if we go inside a few of the houses we can find something,” Ricki suggested.

  “This wasn’t supposed to be this hard,” Devon complained. “We found plenty of gas. I don’t understand why these stores are empty.”

  “We might as well take a look,” Jamal said. “I’d hate to go back empty handed.”

  Jamal looked at his map and then further down Ligonier Street.

  “What’s down on the other side of that underpass?” Jamal asked. “You didn’t put anything on the map.”

  “I didn’t put anything on the map for that side of town because I didn’t think you would be interested in anything down there,” Ricki replied.

  “Well what is down there?” Jamal asked impatiently.

  “There is the water company building, a funeral home, a couple of churches, a few houses and a school,” Ricki replied.

  “A school,” Jamal said as he smiled. “Don’t schools have cafeterias? There might be food in there.”

  “If I remember right, they closed the elementary school down a few years back and bused all the kids to Ligonier,” Ricki answered.

  “It won’t hurt to check it out, they might have left some canned good behind,” Jamal said. “We’re going to go take a look.”

  Jamal started the car and pulled out of the gas station and began to maneuver around the cars on the street.

  As they started down through the underpass, George looked at the concrete bridge like structure overhead, “Why does a stinking little town like this have an underpass?”

  “The railroad tracks are up there,” Ricki replied.

  “Why the hell did they put a railroad track through this little place?” George asked.

  Ricki didn’t even try to answer, beside he didn’t know.

  They drove down through the small seventy foot underpass and came up on the other side. Jamal pulled the car to the side of the street.

  They were parked in front of the funeral home. About a half dozen houses lined the street before the yellow brick school house on the right. A red brick building sat across from the schoolhouse. An old tattered and shredded American flag fluttered in the breeze from the flagpole in front of the building. A white sign, leaning to the right and resting on the ground, supported by one post, the other post was broken and laid on the ground beside the sign. The white wooden painted sign, now scraped and peeling, in green letters read, New Florence Library.

  “Let’s make this fast,” Jamal said. “Devon and George, you get out and look in these houses. Ricki, I want you to run down and see if you can get into that school building and find the cafeteria. I want you all back here in five minutes or I’m going to leave without you, now move.”

  Ricki watched Devon and George walk up to the house next to the funeral home. They stood at the front entrance for a long time flipping a coin. Ricki laughed to himself, neither one of them wanted to be the first one to go inside.

  Ricki turned and started walking down the sidewalk along Ligonier Street. The school was only about a block and a half down the street. Between him and the school there had to be around twenty or so vehicles on the street, many looked like they had run into the each other. The way the cars were piled together in places, the drivers were obviously trying to get somewhere fast. They must have been panicked or desperate to run into the other cars like they had. Obviously they had their eyes on something other than the other cars on the road around them.

  Ricki could only imagine the chaos that had taken place here. It had to have been a massacre. There must have been thousands of the dead here for people to smack into each other’s cars like this.

  Ricki was glad to see that most of the dead had moved on or at least right now, were someplace other than on Ligonier Street.

  Ricki looked back at the car and then over to the house where Devon and George had gone. Jamal was sitting in the car and Devon and George had finally worked up the courage to go inside the house.

  Ricki overcame his urge to look away and instead looked inside each of the cars as he walked by.

  Most of the cars were bloody and empty. Many had
the remains of their passengers scattered around inside but none of the cars appeared to be loaded with food or supplies. Ricki didn’t look in the cars to see who was inside or in what condition the remains were in, he looked inside curious about where all the food in town had gone.

  He was still puzzled. If the food wasn’t in the stores and it wasn’t in these cars, where was it? Where did it go?

  Ricki found himself standing at the corner across from the school. A building this large should be approached by more than one person but he couldn’t think about that now. He had to do this on his own.

  He ran over to the row of two foot by three foot long windows that ran along the building at ground level. If he was right, these windows should let him see into the basement. His school had the cafeteria in the basement. Maybe he could look into the cafeteria and see what was there before trying to go inside.

  The first thing he noticed was that there were bars over the windows. He couldn’t get inside through these windows.

  He leaned down for a look. He moved from one window to the next one. He couldn’t see inside. It looked like someone had smeared mud over the inside of the windows. He didn’t understand why there would be mud on the inside of the windows. He knew of people that painted the inside of their basement windows or had blinds on the windows to keep someone from seeing inside, but he had never seen mud smeared on the windows like this.

  He stepped back about ten feet from the building and looked up at the school’s other windows. The windows were about fifteen feet above him. They were barred and had the blinds pulled the entire way down.

  He guessed when they closed the old school down they had pulled down the blinds and did that to the basement windows to keep curiosity seekers from looking in the building.

  The only other place Ricki thought he might have a chance to see inside was at the front door. He walked to the far end of the building, up the sidewalk and climbed the ten concrete steps to the main doors of the school. He could see the wire mesh inside the glass windows in the doors. Someone had apparently tried to break through the windows, the windows had cracks running across the glass from top to bottom, but the mesh had held. These windows too had something smeared over them on the inside.

  Ricki cupped his hands and put them on the windows and pressed his face against his hands, but he couldn’t see anything inside. This was the first building he had seen today that hadn’t been trashed.

  Ricki turned to walk back down the steps.

  As he turned a movement caught his attention.

  He was startled at first, expecting to see one of the dead coming around the corner of the school.

  But the motion seemed to have disappeared around the corner of the school and was moving away from him.

  Ricki finished walking down the steps and cautiously moved to the corner of the school.

  He stood by the corner for a moment and listened.

  He heard what sounded like feet crunching on the ground and the sound seemed to be moving away from him.

  Ricki leaned around the corner and for a brief instant thought he saw a guy disappear around the far end of the school. What freaked him out was it looked like the guy had a stack of books tucked under his arm.

  At first chills ran down his back. A guy carrying books around an old school, did he just see a ghost?

  A dead town with a dead school with a guy wandering around the school with books under his arm, it sounded like a scene from an old spooky movie. A soul that couldn’t move on because it had unfinished business it had to complete.

  If he was able to go inside he would probably see that the classrooms were full of grotesque students being taught by the rotting corpse of a teacher. The boy with the books was probably late for class.

  Ricki tried to recall the vision of the boy with the books. He didn’t seem to be a walking skeleton or look like one of those dead things that had been roaming around the area. He had appeared to look like a normal boy. He was skinny, had scraggly hair and was dirty, but nothing more grotesque than that. In fact he probably looked a lot like Ricki now looked. Like Ricki had looked the last time he saw himself in the mirror back at the community center.

  Ricki thought about the school building. Could there be people living inside the school? The mud that was smeared on the inside of the basement windows and the main doors had obviously been done by someone that didn’t want anyone to see inside. Ricki wasn’t sure he believed in ghosts, but after the last year he now believed in zombies. A year ago he didn’t believe in zombies and was sorry to say that was no longer the case.

  But with everything else he had seen over the last year, he didn’t believe he had seen any ghosts yet.

  He however wasn’t going to rule it out. Nothing could be ruled out in today’s world, not anymore.

  Ricki stepped around the corner of the building.

  “If it is a living person, maybe I should follow him,” Ricki thought. “Maybe he has a way to get inside the school? Maybe there are others? Maybe I could at least find out what the hell he was going to do with those books?”

  If he was a ghost, Ricki laughed to himself at the idea of the guy jumping out from the corner of the building and saying, “Boo!”

  Ricki had taken only two steps when he heard it.

  A groaning sound started somewhere on the other side of the football field.

  Rick stopped and stood perfectly still.

  The groaning was getting louder.

  He stared out across the football field.

  Then he noticed something moving at the far end of Ligonier Street, down past the library.

  Soon the brush across the other side of the football field looked like it was moving.

  Ricki stood still and strained to look in the direction of the sound.

  Then he saw them. There were hundreds of them starting to come out of the brush and pour onto the football field.

  Another large group was now out on Ligonier Street, moving around the cars.

  Ricki glanced behind him, then he started to run back towards the car. He had been wondering where everyone was in New Florence, now that question had been answered.

  Ricki ran down the sidewalk and could now see the Cobalt.

  Jamal was standing beside the car talking with Devon and George.

  They turned and looked at him as he ran up to the car.

  “We have to get the hell out of here, now,” Ricki shouted.

  The groaning sounds were now echoing off the funeral home and the other houses around the car.

  Devon and George were already in the car, slamming the doors.

  “How many?” Jamal asked.

  “Hundreds of them, maybe more,” Ricki yelled. “They are coming up Ligonier Street and there are hundreds more coming out of the woods on the other side of the football field by the school.”

  Jamal jumped in the car and started the engine as Ricki climbed in the back seat.

  Jamal backed the car into the alley, pulled out and headed for the underpass. Progress was slow as they weaved around the pile ups of wrecked cars.

  When they came up out of the other side of the underpass, they started to relax as South Ligonier Street was only occupied with the same mangled cars that they had seen on the way into town.

  “Where the hell did they come from?” Jamal asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ricki replied. “I was looking in through the windows down at the school when I heard them. Then I saw them coming down Ligonier Street and out of the trees. I thought the whole damn woods were coming after me.”

  “Did you get inside the school?” Jamal asked. “What was in there?”

  Ricki thought for a second. If there were people in the school, he wasn’t going to tell the gang. They would want to go to the school and take whatever they had and probably kill whoever was there to get what they wanted. If there were other people like Ricki, he might want to join up with them and get away from Jamal and his thugs. Until he had a chance to find out for sure,
he needed to tell Jamal something that would discourage him from wanting to go back down to the school.

  “That damn school was crawling with those dead bastards,” Ricki lied. “I don’t know how they got in there but they don’t seem to be able to get out. They are just wandering the halls and the basement.”

  “Did you guys find anything in that house?” Ricki asked looking at George.

  “No, the damn place was empty,” George complained, “It looked like someone had pulled a moving van up to the door and took everything.”

  “If we come back here again,” Ricki said. “I would recommend we stay away from that side of town for a while.”

  “I have to agree with the runt,” Devon said. “We should have enough houses on this side of town to keep us busy for a while. That other side of town sounded like Ligonier.”

  When the car reached the top of the little hill leaving New Florence behind, George gripped, “Except for the gas we got, this was a damned wasted trip.”

  “I don’t know,” Devon laughed. “I got new shoes.”

  Chapter 7

  Carrie moved her head but quickly stopped as fast as she started. Her head hurt like hell. Her arm and shoulder didn’t feel much better.

  “What the hell happened?” she thought.

  She opened her eyes and looked around the room, only moving her eyes and not her aching head. She wasn’t sure where she was. It was dark in the room but she could tell it was daytime by the light that was coming in the room around the sides of the blinds.

  She moved her hands slowly. She was covered by a sheet or something. She stopped moving when she realized her shirt was gone.

  “Now what the hell happened to me?” she wondered.

  The last time she could remember waking up without all her clothes on, well she couldn’t exactly remember right now but she did know it hadn’t been good.

  Carrie bit her tongue and strained to sit up, clutching the sheet in front of her to keep herself covered.