They had a sign hanging on a tree in their driveway. It had a picture of a gun and said “We don’t call 911” on it. She dialed anyway, not really expecting anything and got another “all circuits are busy.”
She needed a weapon. And protective clothing. She couldn’t get bit. Part of her mind was screaming at her, “Are you retarded? A zombie apocalypse?” but the other part was cold and analytical. Sorting the images and video she had seen, compiling it with what was outside the window. It was absolute civilization ending chaos.
No one was going to come rescue them. Maybe in a few days when things settled down but right now it was every man for himself. She was going into Mama Bear mode. Her baby needed her.
She was in her office, mind racing on what was the best course of action to get to the school to get her son. She had nixed the idea of stealing a motorcycle, too dangerous. She had seen the way those ghouls had leaped and run at anything that was still human on the traffic camera feeds around the city.
They would pull her off in a heartbeat. She needed something big. Something that could drive down sidewalks and knock the little cafe tables and chairs out of the way. Run over parking meters, if necessary. A Hummer. Maybe some urban cowboys pickup truck that had a bull bar up front. The parking garage attendants had keys to a lot of the vehicles, the ones that were on the lower levels in valet and long term parking areas. Maybe there was a truck down there. She knew you couldn’t hot wire one like they do on TV all the time.
Johnny was always quick to laugh at those situations every time one came up, talking to the television and asking “What about the locked steering column? What about the chip in the key? How are you going to release the shifter?” until she would have to elbow him to get him to be quiet.
She was looking around, trying to see what could be used as a weapon before heading down to the garage when she heard a commotion in the lobby.
“Crap!” She should have locked the doors! Stupid, stupid, stupid! Her office was devoid of anything that could be used to hurt someone. No ball bats, no heavy art objects. Not even an umbrella. Her eyes fell on the shelves along one wall. The office came with its own bookcases when she had moved up a notch on the corporate ladder a few years ago.
However, one of the first things she had done was add a few shelves to hold some of her photos and plants. Holding those shelves up were large L-shaped brackets picked up from Home Depot and screwed into the wall. She ran over, swiping everything off and onto the ground, the clatter of crashing planters and breaking picture glass loud in her ears. Louder than what she heard down the hall, shouts and sounds of furniture being tipped and drug around.
She ripped the shelves off the brackets easily enough but had to struggle to work the screws out of the walls. They finally broke free and she bent them hurriedly into U shapes and gripped one in each hand. She had something now that could be shoved into the face of any attacker. It wasn’t much, but it was better than the little key ring knuckle duster she had in her purse.
She went quickly to the door and inched it open, trying to see both ways down the hallway. The only noises she heard were still coming from the lobby, but she caught voices. It sounded like Mr. Sato, his English was good, but he still carried a distinct Japanese accent. She ran towards them to see if she could help, it sounded like they were blocking the doors. As she rounded the corner, somebody saw her and screamed then she saw Phil turn and bring his gun up towards her.
“Whoa, Whoa, Whoa!” she yelled, holding her hands up, the brown shelf brackets wrapped around them looking like little spears. She could see where they had drug desks and filing cabinets over to the glass doors, blocking them. Outside in the corridor, she saw mangled people in business suits and dresses beating on the doors, trying to force their way through. There weren’t many, maybe eight or ten, but seeing them up close for the first time drained the color from her face. It was worse than anything she could have imagined. The fury as they fought each other to get to the living was unreal and unrelenting. They were tearing each other apart out there. As she watched, a man in a shredded suit pulled a huge hank of hair out of a woman who was pressed against the glass, trying to force her way through. She was jerked backward and the suited man took her place, his bloodied hands and face against the door, smearing it with gore from the handful of bloody scalp he still clung to. The pounding was relentless but the doors shouldn’t break, they were tempered safety glass and they were in steel frames. They’ll hold, she told herself. There were a half dozen people in the lobby and they quickly went back to stacking and dragging things in front of the door. She joined in, tipping over a bookcase and struggling with it until Phil came over and helped her put it in place. After a few minutes, they had a substantial barrier that went all the way from the doors to the solid wood at the base of the receptionist’s desk. There was no way for the doors to open now but if the glass broke… well, that was a different story. Those things could probably force their way through the pile of office furniture if it did.
Lacy looked around at the frightened, sweaty faces. She recognized a few by sight but the only ones she knew were her boss, Mr. Sato, Eric and Phil. He was one of the security guards that manned the station on the ground floor. He was a burly black man, quick to laugh and smile but also quick to run off anyone causing trouble or panhandling on the sidewalk out front. He had been the first person she had met years ago when she entered the building, slightly scared and slightly desperate, resume in hand. He had escorted her to the 28th story and on the way up in the long elevator ride that seemed to stop at every floor, they had struck up a friendship. It was him more than her carefully prepared resume that had gotten her the job. Plenty of qualified applicants had applied, but he had walked her right past reception and directly into the Human Resources office. Told the HR director this was the one, he had a feeling about her. Then he nodded and walked out, heading back to his post. She had really, really needed the job. Johnny had been kicked out of the Army over that incident in Afghanistan nearly two years before and had been unable to find work. Their savings was gone, her 401k cashed in. She had gotten the job and she had thanked him profusely. Even bought him a new holster for his gun with her first paycheck when she noticed his was looking a little threadbare.
“Everybody get away from the doors,” Phil said. “If they don’t see us, maybe they’ll wander off.”
“I’ve got coffee in the break room.” Lacy said “Everybody, this way.” and led the unfamiliar people away from the receiving area and towards the lunch room. The coffee was still hot, but it was going on three hours old. No one seemed to care as they got their cups and either sat down looking exhausted or wandered over to the window to stare out at the chaos. Anyone that had a phone was trying to dial numbers and then sharing with the ones that didn’t. No one was getting through.
“What happened downstairs, Phil?” Lacy asked as he was the last to pour, doctoring his cup up with plenty of sugar and milk.
He didn’t look over at her, just slowly stirred and poured, methodically making his coffee just the way he liked it.
“It happened fast, Mizz Lacy,” he said. “There was a disturbance outside and Jerry went over to see what was going on. We had both just come on duty and I was still running over the paperwork for shift change. One minute, the early birds was coming in like normal, the next…The next, everybody done gone crazy. I saw Jerry go down when he tried to break up a fight. I saw him fall, saw his head get ripped nearly clean off. Saw enough blood shoot out of him to kill any man. Before I could get to the door, I saw him get back up and start running after people. Biting them.”
Lacy didn’t say anything. Didn’t know if there was anything TO say to that. She dumped the remainder of the coffee out in the sink and started making another pot.
“They was a few people running for the doors and I let them in and locked up behind them. We was all just standing around, not believing what we was seeing. Then some guy came running at us from across the lobby, crazy
like the ones outside. I put two bullets in him and he didn’t even slow down. Jumped on old Mrs. Carlton from fourteenth floor. I ran up and put one in his head before he would stop chewing on her.”
Lacy poured the water into the Brewmaster and dug the coffee and filters out of the cabinet, listening with dread and a feeling of sickness in her stomach.
“We tried to help her, stop the bleeding and such. They’s a first aid kit at the security desk.” He went on, almost in a monotone, his language slipping back to the way he used to talk on the streets before he had landed this job in the corporate world. He was remembering but trying not to see it again in his mind’s eye. “But she turned into one of them, too. By the time we had the bandages on, she was trying to bite me. Only took one bullet that time, though. I knew where to shoot.”
He hadn’t taken a sip of his coffee yet, still stirred the already thoroughly mixed contents.
Lacy hit the button on the machine to get the next pot started and laid a hand on his massive arm, stopping the stirring action. She squeezed, no words possible, no words needed. Phil seemed to shake himself internally, gave her a half smile and put the cup to his lips, blowing to cool it down a little.
“That’s when Mr. Sato from twenty-eighth said he had a satellite phone in his office.” He went on. “Everybody was trying to call and no one was getting anything other than busy signals or not even that, just being disconnected before it would ring. So we started to head up here. But while we were waiting for the elevators, a bunch of those crazies came in through the mezzanine entrance. I didn’t have enough bullets to take them all down, so we ran for the stairs. There were a lot more of us in the lobby when this all started, Mizz Lacy. I don’t know if they split off and hid or if they got taken down in the stairwell. I was first in, maybe I should have been last. I don’t know. I was just trying to make us a path up here. We went up to the third floor and ran to the elevators there. We made it in but when we got out here, there were a bunch of them in the hallway. The rest of the story you know. That’s about when I almost shot you.” He grinned a little. “Glad I didn’t.” He added.
“Me, too,” Lacy said. “Is there any way to get down to the parking garage? Phil, I need to get out of here, I need to get to the school to get my kid.”
He shook his head. “No way. The garage is open to the street, it’s probably full of those things. Mizz Lacy, you haven’t been out there among them. They are faster than us. They are stronger than us. They’re nearly invincible. You couldn’t pay me any amount of money to go back down there. Not until the police or the Army get things cleaned up.”
Mr. Sato, the CEO of the American division of Satoshiri Electronics, came bustling back into the room with his satellite phone in his hand and announced that he had made contact with someone in the Governors’ office. They had assured him that the Army would be out soon to get things back under control. And yes, of course, they would be evacuating personnel from the rooftops with helicopters. There was a quiet cheer as the small crowd greeted the news.
“Did they say when?” someone asked
“Do we need to get up there right now?” another added, fear evident in his quavering voice.
“How will we get past those things in the hall?”
Mr. Sato looked at a loss as all the questions came flying at him, the people talking over one another. As Lacy handed him a cup of coffee, Phil raised his hands and made shushing motions. “Settle down, people. I don’t think we need to leave here just yet, we have a clear view of the city. When we see the Army or the National Guard clearing the streets, or we see the choppers start coming in, then we can head to the roof. The elevators will take us almost all the way. I have the keys to the access door, so we’re only five minutes away when we need to be.”
There was an audible sigh of relief from the harried office workers. Just ten minutes before they had been out in the hallways and stairwells and had seen half of their number killed or bitten, drug down and savagely attacked with claws and teeth. They had no desire to go back out there.
Just then, Lacy’s phone sounded off with a toot toot of a big truck’s air horn. The text tone from Johnny. It was like a minor miracle. A message had gotten through on the collapsing, overused digital network. “I got a text!” she announced and reached for her phone. Everyone else caught on quickly and pulled theirs out and instead of trying to place voice calls, they started to text message, hoping theirs would make it through the overworked system.
Chapter 6
As Gunny came down the ladder off the catwalk and into the back of the kitchen, Tiny was there, waiting to go up. He had the Garand slung over his shoulder, a box of shells in his jacket pocket, a two-way radio clipped to his belt. Gunny raised his eyebrows, questioningly.
“Cobb wants a watch, can’t see much out of any of the windows now,” Tiny said.
Gunny nodded then asked “Billy okay? Gumball and Ozzy make it in here?”
“Ozzy did. Ain’t seen Gumball. He get bit in that scuffle?”
“Yeah. Him and a couple of other guys I don’t know. They back at Doc’s?” asked Gunny.
“Yeah,” Tiny said. “This is some crazy shit, Man. You ought to go see Cobb. He’s down there with them.” The big man was subdued. Saddened as he turned towards the ladder.
Gunny laid a hand on his arm “You get a hold of Tanya?” he asked. Tiny just shook his head and mounted the ladder, heading up to take first watch. Gunny cut through the back way into the kitchen, through the store rooms and out into the back of the main building.
He knew what Tiny was going through. Tanya, his wife, worked in downtown Birmingham. Gunny’s wife worked in Atlanta. Both bad situations if this were everywhere.
He needed to see Wire Bender, see if there was news from the internet or any of the Ham operators near home. Gunny knew this route through the maze of store rooms because he had helped Cobb carry in some produce that had “fallen off a truck” more than once through these doors.
Many of the drivers would give Martha anything extra they had and when dealing with fruits and vegetables, there was always something extra. Receivers would reject whole cases if there were only one bad orange spotted. Melons if they were a day late arriving at the docks.
Boxes of steaks, if the thermometer readings weren’t right on just one sample. Martha passed the savings on to her customers. She and Cookie would always whip up something from whatever she was given and it was the daily special. Many of the tourists couldn’t believe they could get a slice of peach cobbler for fifty cents or a five-dollar steak.
Gunny had to pass Doc’s little office before he got to the CB shop and looked in as he walked by. Wire Bender seemed to know what they were facing and had said everything was under control, so he wasn’t worried about anyone else turning. He figured they had been isolated or something.
What he saw stopped him in his tracks. Apparently, no one else DID know what they were facing. The biker girl was grim-faced and stoic, finished with crying, putting the finishing wraps on Deputy Travaho’s arm as he sat gray-faced in one of the waiting room chairs.
Doc’s assistant, Stacy, was there. She was a night school nursing student who worked for him during the week. She had Ozzy laying on the reception counter, his pants cut off to above the knee and was trying to clean and flush the nasty looking bite wound on his leg. Billy held his radio with his free hand, but there was no chatter on it.
Gunny looked for any of the other men who had been bitten from the brawl in the parking lot. The guy who had been scratched was sitting in one of the other chairs holding a towel across his chest. He glanced around for the other biker or the painter. They both got it pretty bad. These guys all seemed okay. They weren’t going to die or anything.
“Where’s the other biker?” he asked. “Gumball?”
“Gumball took off. So did a bunch of other guys.” Ozzy grimaced through the pain.
“The biker is on the table in the back” Stacy replied. “We did what we could with w
hat we have. He needs to get to town, to the hospital.”
“Not sure if that’s going to happen anytime soon,” Gunny said. “If it’s as bad in Reno as here, there won’t be any ambulances free to run up this way.”
He walked past the desk and into the examination room. The biker was laying on his stomach, a big gauze pad that was starting to seep red taped to the back of his neck. His face was a mess from where he had it crammed into the asphalt. He had his eyes closed. There was a long strip of his scalp and hair missing they had also bandaged.
Gunny shook him a little then stepped back. “Hey, you awake?’ he asked, one hand firmly on his gun.
“Hmmm?” the guy said
“Just hang on, Buddy. I’m going wheel you to the other room,” he said. He didn’t like this. He had seen how fast the guy in the parking lot had turned. Moaning in pain one minute, ripping out throats the next. This guy was barely coherent and he knew he wasn’t doped up because
Doc didn’t keep meds in here. This was just a place where truckers could pay their sixty bucks and get their medical card stamped for another two years. Or pay a little more if there was a little something wrong with them and still get it stamped for two years. He was kind of surprised they even had bandages, but he supposed the board of health checked up on these places from time to time, so they had to at least look official.
He released the locking wheels of the exam table and started to roll him out into the waiting room and the corridor beyond. Stacy looked up from Ozzy’s leg she was irrigating. “Are you taking him to the hospital?” she asked
“To the weight room.” Gunny replied, “It’ll be safer in there.”
“Wait!” she cried out. “It’s filthy in there. There’s infection to think about.”
Yes, there is…Gunny thought. He looked at Ozzy and the shirtless man. The only other two people who had seen someone go from human to dead to monster in a matter of seconds.
Zombie Road: Convoy of Carnage Page 7
