The Red King (Wyrd Book 1)

by Nick Cole

  As he neared the automatic doors at the front entrance to the store, he heard the drag-thumper making his way, rasping heavily, toward him back down the aisle. Holiday pushed the cart through the electric door, blood rushing into his bourbon-soaked skull. The bottle had been half empty when he put it back in the cart.

  Did I drink that much?

  He rushed out into the night, pushing the cart with all his strength, and emerged into a parking lot full of the living dead.

  It was like walking into a garden of statues. All of them softly swayed in the night under the white, hot sodium cones of light, their faces made pale and washed out, bloodless. Their clothing ragged, torn, bloody. Men, women, young and old. Children even.

  Children, thought Holiday.

  And they all looked at him.

  Blackened teeth slowly baring. Foaming grins. Hands reaching. Stumbling like some grotesque and untrained dance troupe toward him all at once, from every direction.

  Chapter Nineteen

  They were everywhere.

  But they moved slow.

  He dodged them, abandoning the shopping cart. He almost got cut off by a clutch of three of them, three hoary-haired teenage girls, their eyes milky and vacant, one missing an arm. All of them were riddled with deep bite marks and dark dried blood. He was on his toes and literally back pedaling, swiveling and darting toward a darkened Arby’s across the parking lot. Its storefront windows were smashed.

  He ran across a grassy median. He could hear all of them moaning, panting, whispering behind him. Ahead of him a maimed and bloodless worker, formerly of Arby’s, now of the living dead, crawled out through the drive-through window almost shrieking with exertion. The zombie fast food employee flopped down, face first into the drive-through, and clutched wildly at him a moment later as Holiday ran past the flailing thing.

  All around him, in the shadows, in the dark, stumbling through the cones of bright sodium light falling down from atop tall light poles in the upper darkness, the zombies seemed to double in number as they stepped from the shadows into the light. He could hear their grunts, their mutterings, their sudden eruptions of pained torment as they lusted after his living flesh. In the dark, they were not people. No, not at all. They were monsters just like that nameless giant walking out in the fog.

  He could hear the quick slap of his Doc Martins against the still-hot pavement of the warm night. He felt drunk.

  He ran out of the parking lot and into the deserted main road that bisected Viejo Verde. Across the street, he could see the darkened Target and the other stores lined up along its flank.

  Holiday knew he had to lead them away from Frank and Ash.

  I at least have to do that, he thought to himself. Then, “before I die,” he rasped aloud.

  He set off to the south at a trot. Sweating, he could hear his breath coming in soft dry gasps. Just like them. He wondered if somehow he had become one of them. Or was becoming one of them even now. Or, if this was a nightmare and he was still asleep back in the store holding the Maker’s Mark. He threw a glance behind him and saw the numberless mass still coming for him. Two blocks later, he looked back again. They stumbled forward, chasing him. They were mere dark shapes now, falling behind him, each a spindly shadow set against the hot white island of light that was the Market Faire. He kept running. He was heading into a corporate warehouse district, high hills where slick uber-corporation headquarters for extreme gear manufacturers lay side by side with immense football field-sized warehouses and sprawling parking lots. Ahead of him on the street, two or three dark figures struggled awkwardly out of the landscaping and shrubbery, their arms waving stiffly, awkwardly, their movements herky-jerky and sudden.

  Holiday knew they also were zombies.

  He continued on, slowing to a trot, passing a well-lit gas station, a smaller strip mall centered around a Starbucks he never went to and then ahead, he could see the wide curve of the toll road as it spanned two hills above him.

  He checked his phone. It was almost 2 am.

  “I don’t feel all that bad,” he croaked, his skin oily and slick with viscous sweat. I feel like I haven’t exercised in years and yet, it’s as if I never stopped.

  I can’t remember ever exercising.

  He ran on, crossing under the darkness of the toll road overpass.

  An abandoned yellow Volkswagen Beetle suddenly rocked back and forth violently, as a mangled thing surged up against the side window as he ran past the car. Ahead, he could see nothing but the orange light of the toll road falling down onto the road below and turning everything hellish. Ahead, there were more residential developments and a high school less than a mile off. After that would be the next big shopping center, almost identical to the Market Faire.

  Behind him, the shadowy mass surged down the road after him.

  Holiday’s quickly forming plan was to run down to the next shopping center, then turn downhill toward the 5 freeway. If he could lose this mob somewhere down the hill, he reasoned, they might be less prone to come back up after him if he suddenly turned that way.

  He set his mind on sprinting for a bit, but thirty feet later, took a bad step and felt his ankle turn. “Stupid!” he yelled at himself as he hobbled into the next major intersection.

  Silent traffic lights switched from green to red in the overwhelmingly empty space where once cars surged and careened to get to the next place just a little faster than the other guy. Then the lights switched back again.

  The mob came on from the darkness, raggedly, toward the intersection.

  Holiday bent down, spit and tried to catch his breath. His head was starting to pound. He took a step and felt the ankle warn him with a jolt of pain.

  So, I just lost my one advantage, thought Holiday. Speed.

  Again he kicked himself.

  As the first lurching undead of the mob crossed into the lights of the intersection, emerging from the darkness between the tall street lights like sudden phantoms, Holiday limped off toward the high school.

  Beneath the embankment leading up to the high school football field, Holiday stopped again. He had a brief desire to light a cigarette but they were too close.

  If I don’t lose them soon, they’ll wear me out, he told himself.

  He left the road and climbed up the embankment, pulling himself through islands of manicured thorny hedges. He could smell the heavy scent of magnolia in the night. At the top of the embankment he found a chain link fence surrounding the wide athletic field. He climbed the fence with difficulty, landed on his bad ankle, groaned, and set out limping across the red dirt of the track that circled the football field. He crossed underneath some bleachers, watching the shadows for any of the things that weren’t just shadows. On the other side he came to a stretch of blacktop and the windowless school beyond.

  He tried the first door.

  It didn’t even budge.

  It was locked tight. Security door tight.

  He tried several other doors, feeling himself grow frantic with each one that refused to budge, telling himself to slow down and think of something. He knew he was merely reacting and not acting.

  “Always make the enemy react to what you’re doing.”

  Where’d that come from, he wondered at the voice in his head and forgot as a quick glance back toward the field told him that the… the freaks, the zombies, the dead people were stacking up along the fence he’d climbed over. Watching him. He moved clockwise around the darkened building as zombies stumbled in his direction along the fence, knocking each other over in the night as they panted and groaned, following him.

  Maybe Frank’s fence will work, he thought and continued on to the next door, feeling a creeping fear bloom inside him like some unwanted flower or cancer. He came to a wide walkway with a wrought iron gate that was still open. It led into the interior breezeways of the school.

  He tr
ied to close the gate but it was chained open.

  “What the…” He heard distant drum cymbals resound and crash on sudden tinkling notes as he turned back and saw the mesh fence collapse in places along the football field. The zombies spilled across its folded lengths, coming for him now.

  The breezeway was his only option, but the moment he entered it, he knew he was trapped. It only took a few turns down long cinderblock-faced passages to realize this was the case. It was dark and shadowy back in the recesses of the school. Already he could hear the sandy scrape of many, many feet entering the breezeway.

  It’s only a matter of time before they work their way down to me, he thought, as he ran deeper and deeper into the maze-like school.

  He looked up. He could see the open night sky and early morning stars twinkling in the blueness of deep night. He could see the outline of a tree near the horizon farther down the breezeway. It reached up toward the flat roof of the school. Holiday made his way down to the planter it erupted from and climbed into it, starting up the tree.

  There was a moment. A moment of hanging as far out on a slender limb as he dared. A moment beyond that moment where he passed the threshold of safety and grasped for the edge of the roof of the school. One-handed, he caught it, and suddenly felt his grip pull him off the limb. His feet scrambled for purchase on ancient dry shingles along the steep walls under the flat roof and found nothing. He threw his other hand up, caught the edge of the roof, making a shingle erupt with an echo-y crack that must have been well heard. With what little strength was left in him, knowing there wouldn’t be another attempt, he began to swing his feet. He could feel himself gaining momentum, swinging side to side, knowing that shortly he would fling himself too far in one direction to maintain his grip on the lip of the roof. The momentum would carry him back down into the breezeway and reward him with a broken arm or fractured skull. There was no time. Sweating, panting, gasping for air at the top of the next swing, he heaved his legs up over the edge, while pulling himself up with his arms. He felt himself almost black out at the top of his pull. He rolled over onto the hard gravel of the wide flat roof littered with air conditioning units and the occasional basketball.

  Chapter Twenty

  He listened to them moaning down in the breezeway below him for the rest of the night. It didn’t matter, whichever side of the building he checked, they were down there. Waiting. He could hear them beneath the overhanging roof. He saw them straggling across the football field in the predawn dark. He could hear them in the breezeway that ran like a dark slash beneath him. It reminded Holiday of a pit. A pit with dead things in it. Dead things that still moved.

  He walked around for a bit but when he almost tumbled off the loose-gravel roof, either from fatigue or because it was too dark to see now that the moon had gone down, he sat down in the dark and smoked. He could still hear them down there. Occasional gurgling. A low moan. But the feet. The dragging scrape of many, many feet. That was the constant, even as the other noises seemed to fade and rise in waves.

  They know I’m up here, he thought. But how…? He shuddered. They’re dead, how can they know anything?

  At dawn he heard a few birds. Just a few. The sun rose behind a milky haze, turning the morning a tepid yellow. Low-lying mist clung beneath tall trees in a distant housing tract on the far side of the shopping center beyond the school. In the shopping center, there were two overturned police cars in the parking lot. Something, he was too distant to make out details, seemed to be spilled away from the two patrol cars in every direction. The windows of the large grocery store were smashed and he could see glass glittering in the morning light along the sidewalk outside. A few zombies wandered out from the store into the soupy morning light.

  Everywhere he looked he could see the undead. Sometimes in groups, like herds, moving in one direction. Or in pairs, close together but seemingly oblivious to each other. Or alone, zigging and zagging slowly across a parking lot, or into some building. Wherever he looked, they were there. And beneath him were an uncountable number, milling about in the shadowy dark. Still waiting for him down in the dark slash of the breezeway that still seemed a pit to Holiday even though it was morning now.

  And he was out of cigarettes.

  It was Ash who heard them first. Sleeping, half-asleep, some-when else, she heard the sound made by human hands dragged across a mesh fence. That soft, almost slightly musical, scale. She’d been hearing it for some time within an unremembered dream. Hearing it in the dark before dawn. She got up from the tiny bed and looked out the window.

  The streets of the complex were empty. She could see the soft light of first morning in the eastern sky beyond the burned out remains of the ruins on the hill.

  She heard that sound again.

  There was a soft knock at the guest room door.

  “You up, sweetie?”

  Frank had taken to calling her sweetie. She didn’t mind.

  She opened the door. Frank stood there in his robe, his tan silk slacks, slippers.

  “I heard you get up.”

  She resisted the urge to look at her bag. Had he heard her checking it the other night?

  “You hear that sound?” he asked her.

  She nodded.

  “I think they’re at one of the fences.”

  Distantly, they heard a metallic ring. A note, sudden and soft, in the lightening dark. They each knew what had made that sound. They’d heard the same sound when Holiday had dropped one of the metal anchor poles on a sidewalk the day before.

  “That’s not good,” said Frank.

  “No. It isn’t,” replied Ash.

  They went to a door that led out onto a small balcony. Frank gently opened the door and they stepped out into the misty dawn.

  At the far end of the street, walking corpses stumbled this way and that, meandering from side to side, shuffling down the sidewalk. They spilled out into the neighborhood in slow motion. Frank and Ash backed, quietly, inside Ash’s bedroom.

  “That is most definitely not good.”

  “What do we do?” she said.

  Frank went to the window once more.

  “How’d they get through?” he whispered to himself.

  An hour later, the streets were filled with even more zombies. They wandered across the small children’s play area, one of them tripping over the slide only to flail in the sand. They seemed to circle the block, unable to leave the pen they’d forced themselves into.

  “I think there’s less than a hundred,” said Frank.

  They were both watching the street. They could see Holiday’s condo. Each of them was waiting for Holiday to open the door. Hopefully he’d check the street before he walked outside.

  Ash found herself worrying about him. Then she whispered, “I don’t do that anymore.”

  “What?” asked Frank.

  “Nothing,” Ash replied. “So… what do we do?”

  Frank nodded to himself, watching the street, his eyes cold and blue.

  “We’re going to get dressed for work.”

  Thirty minutes later, Frank came downstairs. Ash had put on her same work clothes, scrubbed her face and put her long curly hair back into a ponytail. She was finishing a glass of juice when her eyes widened over the rim as she watched Frank enter the kitchen.

  He wore silk slacks and a light blue silk shirt. He had on mirrored sunglasses. He wore Italian loafers. The clothing was nice, expensive. And so were the mirrored aviator shades. But none of those things were what had made Ash’s eyes go wide over the rim of her juice.

  Frank wore two chest holsters, one underneath each arm. A nickel-plated, pearl-handled .45 poked its butt out of each holster.

  Frank bent down beneath the kitchen sink, reached back into the dark, and took out a matte black plastic case. He clicked open the case, nodded to himself, and then went off to another part of the condo. She
heard him rummaging around in a closet. She peered into the matte black plastic case. Two long tubes. Silencers. She knew what those looked like. But she’d never seen any made out of a polished silver alloy like the matching .45’s Frank was strapping.

  She heard the unmistakable rattle of bullets in a cardboard box, rattling in their plastic trays. She knew that sound also.

  Frank returned, set three boxes of bullets on the counter. Then he drew one of his .45’s, picked up one of the long cylinders and screwed the silencer onto the barrel, tightening it firmly. He lay the .45 down and repeated the process with the other. Once both were so, he took out two spare clips from his pocket.

  “You ever load a gun?”

  Ash nodded.

  “Good, load those,” Frank ordered. Genial, nice, “let me make you dinner,” and, “sweetie,” Frank was gone. His order had almost been a challenge to her. As though he was calling her a liar.

  Ash picked up the clip, opened a box of ammo, and began to thumb shells down into the slotted opening. She kept her eyes on Frank the whole time.

  When she finished, she set them down next to the guns.

  “Okay,” said Frank. “You think you can keep it that cool while we’re out there?”

  Ash hesitated. Could she, she wondered?

  That had always been a question for her.

  Could she?

  She nodded.

  “Cause I’m going to need loaded guns the whole time. You screw that up and drop our bullets… we’re both dead, sweetie. You got that?”

  She didn’t like this Frank. It was a Frank she’d never met. But she didn’t like not being able to hold her own even more.

  “Yeah,” she said, picking up her juice and finishing it. “Don’t worry, I got your back.”

  Frank took a deep breath.

  There was a look that crossed his face. A look that said, I don’t like this guy either. But this guy has to be here right now. He didn’t know if she got that message. There was a part of him, a part of who’d he tried to become, that hoped she did.