“A… L… A… M… O… Alamo!” he spoke in his halting voice. Wiggs patted him on the head and grinned. “D… O… M… E… What’s dough-may?”
“It’s dome, Ricky. Alamodome. It’s a stadium where they play concerts and games and stuff,” Wiggs paused. “Used to, at least.” He gently removed the binoculars from his brother’s grip and took a turn searching for signs of life, or death, across the way.
“What do you think?” Deb asked. Jesse frowned and considered their options.
The Alamodome was a huge facility. He had been there a couple of times over the years, with Mel. The building loomed over the highway on the east side of town. Giant pillars loomed into the sky, connected to the earth and the stadium itself with huge wires. The building looked like a suspension bridge and was impossible to miss from the outside. He couldn’t remember much of the inside except that it was in multiple floors with open hallways running around the entire edge of the center of the stadium with entry points along the way. There were concession stands and wide stairwells with lots of nooks and crannies for the dead to hide.
That was if the group that took Mel wasn’t holed up in there. It would be a great stronghold. Lots of entrances, but those would likely be barricaded to create a single choke point for entry and exit. The thick, concrete walls would provide protection from any outside threat and would muffle noise of the living inside. If these Neighbors were in there, it would be an impenetrable castle. No way to know if they could even get close to the building from here; their observation point was too far away.
Plus, there was the congested highway between here and there. Jesse had seen a few gray-skinned walkers milling about the piled up vehicles on the elevated thoroughfare. In the dark, he had caught the reflection of their glassy eyes and terrifying teeth as they bounced between the cars and trucks. There were a few surface streets that snuck under the road, but his six man team would make noise and draw the creatures out from hundreds of hiding spaces. He could take them straight into the grassy fields that led toward Hemisfair Park that housed the big space needle-looking building called the Tower of the Americas. But that way was pitch dark and the rolling hills obscured his view, ending at the crux of the congestion from the surface streets and clogging the onramp. Any route was bound to be a fight for their lives.
“I’m open to suggestions, people,” Jesse called desperately. Nobody moved or spoke for several minutes as they each thought about the options before them. Finally, Wiggs cleared his throat.
“Well, boss. I think we should head over those little hills there. It’s pretty clear and we can always bug out if a bunch of those things trap us.”
“I vote for going on top. Hit the highway here and cruise along the top of the cars, chopping heads along the way,” Ty said. Ice and Deb were silent while Ricky watched joyfully through the binoculars.
Jesse didn’t like any of the ideas. He ran scenarios through his mind.
One. Jog across the street. Enter the park and cross the top of the first three hills. It’s quiet and dark and we see and hear nothing. Over the fourth small hill is a crossroad leading to one of the carpool lots under the bridge. It’s full of the dead. We fire on them as they approach and we try to escape. The crowd is too big. They catch us. Their gnawing teeth rip into my friends and we all die screaming.
Two. Sneak out of the apartment complex into the steep onramp to the highway. Not many cars here since the top of the ramp is blocked by a dozen-car pile up. We climb over it as the dessicated remnants of the car’s occupants moan and growl, reaching for us. By the time the six of us make it through with all our gear, dead are stomping toward us from both directions. We quickly take to jumping from roof to roof over the cars, trucks, and vans congesting the highway. It’s slow going and exhausting. The dead are not hindered by any gear like we are. They reach us and surround us as we crowd on top of a box truck’s flat top. We expend our ammo and create a ladder of the dead for the reanimated to climb. Eventually, we collapse and are overtaken by the climbers.
Three. Approach the underpass and walk into the shadows. Our footsteps echo under the bridge and the dead come to us like a beacon. Unseen in the dark, we hear their growls and chomping teeth far before we see them...
“Wish we could see the other side,” a muffled, hesitant voice said. “It is dark. I want to see the other side.”
“Ricky, quiet. Jesse’s trying to think,” Wiggs admonished.
“No!” Ricky jerked his shoulder away from his brother’s touch. “If we go to the other side, I can see the big steps and door that goes inside. And we can see if any of the bad people are there.”
“He’s right,” Jesse said. As much as it pained him, the risk wasn’t worth it without a better perspective. Mel could be in there, but if they all died trying, what was the point? She would expect him to be smarter. “We can’t risk staging from here without knowing what’s in between here and there. And we don’t even know what the entrance looks like. We do need to see the other side. We take the truck south, until the highway joins the loop. We’ve been there and know it’s mostly clear. Then we backtrack and approach from the east where the population was less dense before the outbreak. Slower, but less risky.”
“Jesse, the longer we wait the longer they have Mel,” Deb said softly. “We’re with you now. We want to do this. Now,” she touched his arm lightly.
“No, boss man is right. We don’t know what’s out there. Can’t do this from here. Not if we want to live. There’s a bunch of buildings just like this on the other side. We skirt around, then we check out the front door like kid brother says,” Ice agreed. She made eye contact with Deb before glaring at Ty and waiting for him to speak next.
“Yeah, like she says. I don’t wanna get killed. We’ll help you find her, though. I don’t think this is the way to do it,” he quickly added. Wiggs nodded in agreement, followed reluctantly by Deb.
“Yeah, okay. If you think that’s the safer way to do this, then I’m in,” she lowered her hand from Jesse’s elbow and puffed her cheeks out in a deliberate, dimpled smile. Softly, she said, “I’m with you.”
Jesse looked at his team. They were all willing to follow him into a fight, he knew that from countless encounters on patrol. But none of them had a death wish, least of all him. He ran his fingers through his stringy brown hair and sighed. He couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to help him find his wife. They weren’t pushing back because they didn’t believe in him, but because they wanted him to succeed in bringing Mel back home.
“Okay,” he stated. “Let’s head to the truck. We’re going south.”
Chapter 12
- Wilderness
Wilderness
Hal Kahn drove his stolen Honda Odyssey in an exhausted daze. He rubbed his face and eyes and yawned with a loud roar in a desperate attempt to focus his attention on the road. He scratched his palm using the stubble that had grown on his face over the last day. He missed showering and shaving this morning because of the early wake up, and was feeling grimy because of the dried sweat and dirty coveralls. He took a swig of tepid water in an attempt to stay alert.
The lights of the van shone forward onto the mostly-clear country road. A few times they had illuminated a bipedal figure stumbling toward the approaching noise of the vehicle, but on each occasion Kahn swerved and sped past any solitary walkers. He had been on the pitch dark road for about an hour and the sun had fully set, leaving the sparse countryside in absolute darkness. There were no signs that anything but Kahn was alive. The grasses on the sides of the narrow country roads were overgrown. In addition to the occasional dead, Kahn also dodged abandoned cars, fallen trees, and other debris in the road.
The van’s lights illuminated a reflective highway sign that Kahn recognized. He had been traveling generally toward the city, but not on either of the main highways to avoid congestion and infected along the main route. He had been weaving in a zigzag pattern from one small road to another, trying to keep a sen
se of direction to advance toward San Antonio. It was slow going, he crept along in fear of coming upon something in the road he couldn’t dodge. Now, seeing the highway sign solidified his exact location and his memories filled in the cloudy mental map.
There were a handful of junked cars clogging the oversized intersection. Before, this area had an egress onto the larger highway with a blinking red light. Now, the hardware for the light had fallen diagonally across the intersection. There was an overturned semi-truck crossing the roads as well, looking like the driver tried to take the turn too fast and tipped. Kahn slowed and watched for movement, headlights reflecting off the front of the fallen big rig.
Kahn jumped as the body of the driver rose into view. It must have been gathered in a heap on the broken passenger door lying on the ground. Its flesh was brownish-gray and looked like there was bloated liquid below the surface. It jiggled with every movement as the corpse tried to push and grip the unbroken glass of the windshield. Kahn watched in frozen disgust as the creature pawed and chomped at the transparent barrier, jowls shaking with each thrust. The window began to show smears of grime as it fought to escape.
He released the brake and let the car ease forward as the bloated creature got traction against the sideways window and pushed with its feet against the bucket seat, pushing a crack across the glass. Kahn didn’t wait for the hungry corpse to escape. His headlights slowly drifted away, leaving the desperate creature once again trapped in darkness.
He pictured the route ahead. The two lane road with center divider would curve slightly to his left as he drove along. There wouldn’t be much on the side of the road here, one bait shop for the nearby lake and a couple other random buildings. Homes would be tucked away off the highway, hiding here on the edge of the city but close enough to commute. Three or four exits would quickly pass, and then another cross street would bring him to the right past a gas station. Two miles farther from there and he’d turn right again. Onto the street leading home.
A pit in Kahn’s gut grew as he drove along. He imagined the burned out husk of a home that he’d find and remembered the heat on his skin as he fought to save his family. He remembered the cajoling laugh of Llewelyn as he instructed the Neighbors to murder Aisha and Daniel by locking them away and torching the house. Fiery tears ran down Kahn’s cheeks as he remembered the fear on their faces.
He guided the Odyssey onto the little onramp and coasted down the gentle decline to the intersection. This one was clear, and the gas station was dark and abandoned. He pulled through the pumps and looked for anything useful. The tall plate-glass windows were all shattered and the remnants of the glass crunched under the van’s tires as he crept forward. There was a tan sedan parked in front of the store but the shop looked empty and looted. Bent display shelves and racks had been pulled out of the broken storefront, and left askew on the sidewalk.
Two bodies rose from the dark interior of the station’s shop. One wore a bright-colored branded polo for the gas brand and the other wore cargo pants and an oversized white t-shirt. Both raised their arms toward the soft rumble of the Honda’s engine and tried to push through the debris. The scattered shelves scratched on the floor as both dead men awkwardly pushed through toward their quarry.
Kahn decided there was nothing here and drove on, not risking a fight with two walking corpses for a couple scattered candy bars.
The drive home was quick and solemn. Kahn’s tears had dried upon seeing the dead gas station worker and looter and hadn’t returned. He couldn’t justify coming here except that he felt compelled to see the crimes the Neighbors committed before he sought them out. The logic of his odyssey was lost in sadness and anger. The world felt too small to be burdened by so much grief.
It was anticlimactic to turn onto the gravel-covered road that led to Kahn’s former property. He expected to feel some sense of relief or nervousness, but there was only numbness as the tires of the van crunched toward his house. Most of the other houses on the street looked unchanged as well, except one that had the windows broken and interior contents scattered across the yard. It was hard to ignore the lumpy corpses decomposing in the grass. There was the tattered clothing and rotten remains of another just in front of his entrance gate at the end of the road. Kahn remembered that one, the bait that the Neighbors used to capture him. Kahn remembered the shock he felt in both his arm and his mind as he dispatched the infected at his mailbox. It could have easily been him dead on that road. Instead, he drove past the sunken, barely-recognizable shape.
The gravel driveway was the same. The little workshop was the same. Kimble’s house, next door, looked the same. His yard and the little woods behind his property were both overgrown as nature started to reclaim the burned ground.
His home, his former home, was a black stain on the green earth. Charred debris from where the frame collapsed stood above the grass, so Kahn could picture the shape he remembered. The garage was gone. The twisted metal doors sat blackened and warped on top of piles of mostly burned material. The rear of the house where the master bedroom used to be, where Aisha and Daniel perished, was black dust in the wind.
He parked and exited the vehicle, stopping the engine. The hot nighttime air made him wince before a soft breeze rustled the long grass around him. He shut the door of the vehicle with a thump and was bathed again in pitch darkness. The barrier fence in the rear of the property was down all along the back edge, and he could see the pieces glowing in the dim moonlight through the wavy grass. That’s how the Neighbors caught me. They hid their trucks in the woods. He high-stepped through the grass toward the back edge of his yard. The foliage was intensely overgrown, and lifting his feet high in the air proved difficult and tiring.
He brought his boot down into something soft and jumped back in fright. There was a sizable brownish lump in the yard underfoot. Worn cloth was visible on the decomposing flesh of the prone figure. Sun-bleached bones glistened in the moonlight where they penetrated the dry decay of the skin. The face was turned away and half-buried in the overgrown field, discarded by time.
Kahn reached down into the crabby grass growing over the limbs. There was a black and solid object next to the body. Kahn dropped to his knees to rip at the turf until he could pull the heavy item from the ground.
It was a pistol. The slide was back and an empty magazine sat in the semi-automatic gun. It had seen better days, having sat in the earth for months, and there was a rusty-looking patina on the weapon. It wasn’t damaged, though, and Kahn thought it might still fire. He turned it over in his hands, feeling the weight and wondering if this man was a Neighbor. Was he there that night? Who was he? The one who hammered the garage door frames to trap Kahn in his own burning house, or the one who dragged his wife and kid to the back bedroom, or the one who poured the gasoline?
Reluctantly, Kahn carefully patted the waistline of the corpse. There was no belt or holster for the pistol that Kahn could find, so he peeled the shirt up and felt for the man’s pants pockets. One had a rectangular piece of metal that Kahn fought to free from the confines of the old jeans until he had a full, albeit rusty, 9mm magazine. He counted 10 rounds as he slipped it into his pocket. The pistol made a satisfying snap as he hit the slide release and slipped it into the opposite pocket of his coveralls.
He stayed, kneeling in the grass next to the decomposed Neighbor, for several minutes. His desire to come here had faded with the macabre search of this man who likely murdered his wife and son. The others who did it weren’t here. There were only the sights and sounds of the summer night, and nature slowly retaking this land from the violence of the inferno. As he rested, he recognized several more human-shaped lumps emerging from the meadow, marking their own graves.
There was no closure here. Aisha and Daniel died at this place, but the power of the crime lived elsewhere. The words printed on the leaflets were his only link to finding Llewelyn Wither and killing him. Kahn’s life held no meaning as long as that murderer was still alive. Closure would come whe
n the Neighbors’ leader was gone from this earth. The man who was more of a monster than the corpses who walked and fed on the living.
The only link to him was in the safe at Boomstick, Kahn’s former workplace. He had made the connection when talking to Kimble. On the day cable news began to report on the outbreak across the nation, a looter had attempted to kill Kahn in the gun store and his brother-in-law Ash had killed the intruder. The memory was vivid even if the words had faded away. Ash put the revolver and the driver’s license of the dead looter in their fireproof safe. The attacker’s name: David Wither. Kahn knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. The big industrial bakery where Llewelyn murdered Ash was not far away from Boomstick, so it was plausible that David was his son or some other relative. Wither was not a common last name, and it was the only thread Kahn had to tracking where Llewelyn currently ran his operation.
First, gun shop to retrieve the license and David’s home address. Then, the bakery to look for clues before heading to David Wither’s residence.
Kahn stood, confident he would find the Neighbors and finally avenge the evil that happened here.
Chapter 13
- Trek
Trek
The drive from his home to Boomstick used to take about 25 minutes. Tonight, Kahn had been driving for six hours and didn’t think he could get to the building by car at all. His attempt to take the direct route put him at the end of a long-dead traffic jam retreating from San Antonio. He was easily able to dodge disabled cars in singles or pairs, but when he found a jackknifed eighteen wheeler blocking all four lanes of traffic it, stopped him altogether.
Nation Undead (Book 2): Collusion Page 9
