The chute door opened slightly and then slapped back shut. A dark smile crossed Jeff’s lips. He had put a set of tight springs on the sucker to discourage his kids from playing with it. The clumsy bastards upstairs were having a hell of a time trying to get a grip on it, thanks to his handiwork.
Setting the gas can down, he picked up the road flare he had also tossed in the room. Cracking the door leading to the garage, he relaxed slightly as he saw that the side door had not been breached. In fact, it seemed that no one was pounding on it anymore. Wedging his foot in the door to keep it open, he turned to face the kitchen.
There was only one thing left to do.
He pulled the cap off the road flare. It burst to life, startling Jeff with its ferocity. Quickly, he touched it to a rag he had soaked in gasoline that sat on top of the washer and watched it burst into flames. He opened the kitchen door just wide enough to slip the flare through. As soon as he heard the flare hit the floor, he yanked the door shut again.
Snatching up his baseball bat, he used it to slide the flaming rag off the washer and directly into a puddle of gas on the floor.
“The house is all yours, guys. Enjoy it,” he said as he scrambled into the garage. He made sure the metal door was shut tight, knowing it would hold back the flames for a while. As he slid into the minivan, he thought about the rest of the gasoline he had used to drench the house. Along with the propane tanks he had opened in the bedrooms upstairs, it should create one hell of a bang.
Chapter 4
The thin metal garage door gave way faster than Jeff had thought it would. Smashing through, he shot down his driveway and plowed directly into one of his neighbors, who had been making his way toward Jeff’s front door. There was a thud as he connected and then a thump as he ran over the body.
Leaning back, he could see three others closing in on the minivan. Without hesitation, he pressed his foot to the gas and twisted the steering wheel. He hit the next one square and dragged it beneath the rear wheels as he moved onto the street, where he grazed another, sending it tumbling back in the direction from which it had come. Jeff straightened the wheel and flipped the van into drive, giving it gas as he sideswiped the third. He accelerated past the three bodies, then executed a sudden stop, the anti-lock brakes preventing him from skidding to a halt. He looked back and saw that the two stiffs that had bounced off the van were already getting back up while the third was having a rougher time of it. Its left side was completely crushed, but it was still trying to rise, unfazed by the massive trauma the two-ton vehicle had caused its body.
Jeff stared at the maimed creature. The power of the hit had ruptured most of its internal organs, and there were bits of gut spread several feet behind it. He watched in amazement as it continued to struggle, deliberately trying to raise itself with its one useful arm, but much of its body had been crushed and sealed to the pavement. Jeff stared into the side mirror, spellbound by the image as he kept waiting for the movement to stop. It never even slowed. The twisted and damaged form seemed incapable of comprehending that it would be unable to remove itself from the ground without assistance.
The other two were almost to their feet. Jeff gripped the steering wheel tighter and flipped the van into reverse again. This time he floored it. The engine roared, and he slammed into the bent forms before they could rise completely. He kept moving backwards and pointed the van at the spot where his first victim lay.
The vehicle jumped slightly, indicating that he had run over the man once again. He hit the brakes and put the van back into gear. This time he moved forward just a little, doing his best to make sure the tire was directly on top of the mangled body.
“Stay down, you freak.” The words sounded nervous to Jeff. He stopped the van and put it in park. A quick check confirmed that the other two would not get up again and that the third was indeed directly beneath him. He heard no more movement.
Shivering uncontrollably, he stared at the dashboard and tried to settle down. He did not want to look up and see how many more ghouls were coming.
Still staring at the speedometer, he felt a thunderous whump. Jeff raised his arm, instinctively shielding his eyes from the bright flash emanating from his house. One of the upper-story windows had blown outward, and shards of glass rained down on the minivan, the yard, and the entire street. The van rocked a bit, and Jeff ducked as he heard the repetitive tinkling of wood and glass bouncing off the roof of the Odyssey.
He had just lifted his head when there was another series of explosions. Bending back over, he let the vibrations roll over him and could have sworn the van slid sideways slightly.
The explosions were muffled, and Jeff guessed it was the propane tanks going up. Two were in bedrooms on the back side of the house. He wondered briefly how the backyard looked.
Slowly raising his head, Jeff stared at his house. As he did, another explosion ripped through it, blowing the front door off its hinges as a giant belch of flame spit from the entrance. Fire was everywhere. Smoke poured out of the garage as another explosion tore a hole out the side of the house where the laundry room had been. Part of the exterior wall smashed into the side of Mark’s house and snapped his split-rail fence into kindling. Jeff watched as the flames billowed toward the sky, his pupils contracting with the vision.
He was beginning to feel the heat out on the street, or at least imagined that he did. The sun beat down as he watched, dumbfounded, as fire devoured his home. Everything was melting: the wriggling bodies packed together like sardines inside, the corpses of his family, all his possessions. It was all gone.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see shadowy shapes getting closer. The fire would probably lure them from all over the neighborhood and beyond.
“Let ‘em come. Let them see what I’ve done.” The bitterness in his voice was thick, but the look in his eyes was sad. Digging into his pocket, he plucked out the picture of his family he had taken from his office.
He stared at it, trying to find a measure of peace from the revenge he had exacted, but there was no peace to be had. With one finger, he traced the image of Ellen’s face—the crazy smile, her hair tousled from the wrestling match with the kids. He studied her, the nose with a slight bend at the tip and the tiny, razor-thin scar on her chin. Jeff’s hand began to twitch, and he pulled his fingers away from the picture and balled them into a fist. He raised it to his mouth and bit into his knuckles.
“I’m so sorry.”
He stared at his children, but could not bring himself to touch their faces as he’d touched Ellen’s. His eyes wandered back to her. Jeff bit deeper into his flesh as random thoughts about his wife filtered in and out of his mind. Then the words came again, stifled by the fist jammed in his mouth.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. But I…” He closed his eyes tightly and tasted coppery blood as his teeth pierced the skin around his fingers. He unclenched his jaw and freed his hand. Wiping the blood on his shirt, he tried to think of what he should say. It seemed ridiculous. His entire family was dead. They were in a place where they could no longer hear him or even care what he might say. But he was compelled to speak.
“I can’t take you with me.” He opened his eyes and looked at the picture again. He tried to memorize their features, tried to absorb everything about them that he could in that instant. “I can’t be thinking about you all the time. It’d kill me quicker than those things would. I just...I just can’t.”
Jeff’s heart raced as he crumpled the picture, the blood from his bite rolling into his hand and trickling onto the photo. He tugged at his wedding ring. His fingers were swollen, so it took some effort, but he finally got the ring off. He studied the simple gold band for a moment.
Pressing a button, Jeff lowered the window and unceremoniously tossed the ring and the crumpled picture out onto the street. Without looking out as they fell, he rolled the window back up. It was done. There was no relief, only a sense of emptiness in a place that had once been full.
He was alone.
Chapter 5
“Holy shit!” Jeff yelled as the teenage girl slammed into the hood of the van. He had been far too busy dividing his attention between the burnt corpses at the entrance of his house and the other bodies that he could see coming toward him in the rearview mirror to notice her immediately. The fleeting hope that she might be normal passed quickly.
He glared at her and wondered why he had assumed she was a teenager. The outfit fit the profile, but it was still hard to tell. Her skin was mottled, gray and green battling it out to see which could grab more attention. What hair she had was once long, straight, and blond, he could tell. Now, those golden tresses were caked in blood and were falling—or had been pulled—out in large clumps. Her left breast was exposed, the nipple bitten off, her belly shirt in tatters. Multiple piercings ran down both ears, and Jeff thought he caught a glimpse of a shiny stud in her tongue. There was a glint of silver in the blackened stump wriggling around in her mouth.
Her goo-encrusted eyes never left Jeff’s as she attempted to climb onto the hood of the van. It was hard to tell if they had once been blue or green with the milky cataracts covering them. The pupils remained their original black and stood out against their pale surroundings.
It was too late to plow her down, since she was already on the bumper, reaching for the windshield. Her desiccated fingers scratched at the metal, trying to get at him. Jeff rubbed his eyes wearily as the girl gained traction and started climbing up the hood.
There was a moist thud as her fist hit the window with little power behind it. The moan that escaped her lips made Jeff giggle uncontrollably. “This shit is just too goddamned funny!” he shouted as she went at the window with both hands. Pus and blood from her mouth and torn breast leaked all over the front of the Odyssey. As he watched the grotesque spectacle, he felt like he was losing his mind.
The other creature that showed up at the passenger door was less of a surprise. The crowd was still sparse but starting to bunch up around the house.
He looked in his rearview mirror, ignoring the two ghouls on top of him for the moment, and did a double take.
They were coming out of the house.
Jeff ignored the pounding on the glass and watched as a handful of his neighbors separated from the conflagration to move slowly in his direction. He scanned the gaping maw that had been the front of his house and saw that there were others behind them, crawling and scratching as they pulled their charred remains out of the fire.
Much of their skin was burnt away, and even the ivory bones underneath appeared singed and blackened. They were blind, their eyes gone, boiled inside their skulls until they had burst and even the residue had melted. One, still on fire, somehow managed to stumble out to the lawn. It moved randomly, its internal radar out of whack as it staggered this way and that. It left a crazy trail of liquefied organs in the wake of its sick dance.
Jeff giggled again at the absurdity of it all. His laughter was drowned out by the rain of blows hammering down on the van. Another slack, mindless neighbor had joined the first two in their pursuit of fresh meat and was actually shaking the vehicle.
He glanced over to the passenger side where two of the rotting monsters were trying to get at him. One was a man with an eye dangling halfway down his face on a stalk of nerve tissue. A good chunk of flesh was ripped clean off his skull. The bone had a reddish-yellow hue to it. The flesh on his fingers had swollen and popped, and the bones sticking out left scratch marks on the window.
The one pushing on the minivan was a real anatomy lesson. Some organs were missing, along with most of its rib cage, but quite a few were on display. His face was covered in ragged strips of flesh as if giant claws had sliced into it. A great deal of meat dangled from his chest cavity, and gravity pulled it toward the ground as he continued rocking the van back and forth.
Jeff hit the gas pedal, and the Odyssey shot forward, shedding the freaks trying to smash their way inside. The girl up front had latched onto the hood, so he spun the wheel with the hope of making her slip off the side. When she refused to relinquish her hold, he shook his head in frustration.
“Come on, honey! I ain’t that good looking!”
Speeding away from the others, he shot down the street toward the entrance to the subdivision. When he reached an area clear of pedestrians, he skidded to a halt. Even with the violent motion of the van, the girl remained affixed to the edge of the hood. Filled with inexplicable rage, Jeff screamed at her. “So you want play, little girl? Huh? Well, I’m ready to play!” He snatched up his baseball bat, opened his door, and jumped out of the van.
Pointing the bat at the teen, who was finally relinquishing her hold on the hood, Jeff moved around the door. “Your ass is mine, bitch!”
Before she could slide off, the first swing struck her arm. There was a distinctive crack as the bone broke. Not surprisingly, the girl seemed unfazed as she plopped to the ground and tried to lunge at Jeff.
He took a backhanded swing at her face, and the bat struck her in the forehead, knocking her off her feet. Immediately, the girl rose to her knees.
“Stay down, you fucking monster!” Jeff punctuated the words with a solid kick to her ribs. The force of the blow moved her sideways a few inches but didn’t deter her. As she growled, he kicked her again, in the stomach this time, and heard the hiss of air shooting through her clenched teeth. He watched as she used the arm he had broken to lever herself to a standing position.
Leaning against the van, Jeff shook his head in disbelief. Her arm was bent at an odd angle and it appeared as if part of the bone was threatening to tear through her mottled flesh, but the teen’s laborious effort to right herself was paying off. Snarling, she planted her feet and prepared to charge.
Gripping the bat in both hands, Jeff swung away. The combination of the power of his swing and her forward motion nearly tore her head from her neck as the bat connected with her right temple. Whatever intelligence remained in her eyes blinked out as the flesh at her throat tore free from her neck and her skull shattered at the point of impact. By the time her body hit the street, she looked no different than any of the other rotting corpses littering the neighborhood.
Staring down at his latest victim, Jeff tried to catch his breath. He was not quite sure how to feel as he watched a puddle of fluid that could not rightly be called blood pool beneath the teenager’s rent neck. Her dead eyes stared up at him mockingly.
Gripping the bat even tighter, he raised it with the intention of slamming down on her again and again, until those hateful eyes were obliterated. But before he could take another swing, the moaning around him increased dramatically.
Jeff looked up. He was surrounded. They were still spread out, but closing in on his position, coming from all directions. He swallowed hard as he realized how stupid it was to have gotten out of the van.
Suddenly, a small shadow flashed across his vision, and he turned. He wasn’t sure what it was, and as he looked between two houses, blinking in the bright sunlight, he couldn’t see anything. Still, it reminded him of the blur of motion he had seen from his front porch not so long before. For an instant, Jeff thought that perhaps it was just some big dog or other animal running wild but dismissed the idea almost immediately. The infected were indiscriminant about what they devoured. He had watched from his bedroom window as a pack of them tore apart Daisy, a neighbor’s Basset Hound, less than a week before. When they were done, even the dog’s bones were gone.
Jeff slipped quickly inside the minivan. He knew only two things for certain: it was time to leave the subdivision, and he had no desire to find out what was out there, moving so fast he could barely catch a glimpse of it.
There were plenty of abandoned cars clogging the street along with the predators following in his wake. He drove carefully to avoid both.
“Sorry folks, but I’m not on the menu tonight.” Jeff smiled and waved, staring out the window at the corpses milling about on the street and the ones
climbing out of broken windows and through shattered doors of the houses along his route. There seemed to be an endless supply of them.
“It’s like I’m the freakin’ Pied Piper,” he laughed as he stared at his trail of followers in the rearview mirror.
As Jeff’s eyes moved back to the road, he slammed the brakes, coming to a sudden halt. A multi-car pileup had clogged up the entrance to the subdivision. As the van idled, he stared at the series of sedans and trucks jammed next to one other and groaned. They were not only on the street, but on the grass as well. One car had plowed into the “Welcome to Stonehill” sign out by the main road, and half of its bricks had fallen on the hood of the vehicle.
Scanning the mess, Jeff realized he wasn’t just looking at some simple twenty-car pileup. Cars in accidents didn’t line up perfectly with one another. Someone had deliberately parked them there to barricade the entrance.
“Great...just fucking great,” was all he could say as he scratched his scalp in consternation. It didn’t take much to guess that the other entrance, on the far side of the vast, sprawling neighborhood, was probably similarly blocked.
Leaning back, Jeff felt like bellowing in rage. He had a full tank of gas and nowhere to go. Somebody had decided to quarantine his neighborhood while he had hidden inside his house over the past several weeks. As he sat and fumed, he wondered whether it had been done by someone trying to keep the infected out...or in.
Listening as the crowd got closer, he reflected on his situation. His family was dead, and his house was a pile of ashes. He had barely made a dent in the rabid population with his little fireworks display, and all he had to defend himself was a baseball bat and a pistol about as impressive as a water gun. To top it all off, there was a huge entourage of rotting bodies following him, ready to tear him limb from limb the moment he stepped back outside the van.
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