The Road to Hell- Sidney's Way

by Brian Parker

  The carts were lined up in three rows in front of the doors. The two rows nearest to the glass doors were side-by-side directly blocking the doors, adding about six feet of standoff distance from anyone inside. The third row of carts was fifteen feet beyond the first two and formed a semi-circle around the doorway, with either end against the building. Three bodies lay in the open area between the carts in different states of decay. None of them looked like recent kills.

  “It’s a goddamned kill box,” he mumbled into the snow beneath him.

  Whoever had set it up was obviously prepared to defend their home and had done so on a few occasions. Jake considered what he knew of the town, which was only what Vern and the girls had told him, pointing out a few locations on a map. There were likely other grocery stores and pharmacies nearby, but he sure as heck didn’t know where they were and didn’t like being on foot in the heart of an infected city.

  He got up slowly and made his way to the outer ring of shopping carts. Whoever had put them together did a damn good job of it. The way they were interlocked, there was no pulling them apart or moving them outward; the only way through them was to go over the top. Jake grimaced as the carts made a lot of noise while he clamored over them into the kill box.

  He looked around sheepishly, wondering if the infected that’d tramped by the back dock were far enough away that they hadn’t heard the noise. It didn’t take him long to figure out as the screams echoed across the parking lot.

  “Fuck,” he grumbled, rushing toward the next row of carts.

  The glass doors slid open a few inches and a green metal broomstick appeared. The large kitchen knife taped to the end with silver duct tape made him stop and raise his hands.

  “Whoa now. I’m human,” he breathed quickly.

  “Who else is with you?” a muffled voice asked, the end of the makeshift spear wavering. From the height of the person holding the weapon, Jake guessed it was either a woman or a kid.

  “No one. I’m just trying to get a few things for my group.”

  The spear dipped. “You have a group?”

  The screams of the infected began to solidify as they got closer, the sound no longer bouncing off of structures further away.

  “Can I come in? It’s gonna get nasty out here soon.”

  “Give me your rifle.”

  “No way.”

  “Then you aren’t coming in here.”

  “Come on, kid. This is—” A body slamming into the shopping cart ring startled him and he spun, bringing the rifle up. Using the iron sights, he snapped a muffled round into the chest of an infected only fifteen feet away. More of them were running across the parking lot, slipping on the snow-covered asphalt.

  “Oh, fuck this,” Jake said, turning. His hand darted out, grasping the broom handle below the knife, and jerked the weapon from the defender’s hands.

  “Hey!”

  Jake dropped the spear and hopped up awkwardly onto the shopping cart barricade. Scooting his butt across the wire mesh, he made it to the door then forced them open. “Shut up and let me work, kid.”

  The top of the barricade made a steady platform for his elbows as he leaned into his rifle and began to fire at the nearby group. The shopping carts did a good job at keeping the infected at bay long enough for him to dispatch the threats. Only one made it up to the top of the first row. It didn’t make it into the kill zone.

  Jake quickly lost count of the number of infected that he shot. He had to change magazines twice, so that was sixty-plus rounds used up—ammunition that he could ill afford to spare. When the immediate area looked clear, he ducked back inside the store and slammed the doors shut.

  “Lock! How do these lock?”

  The youth looked at him dumbly from behind a homemade mask cut from a beanie cap. “You just killed like a hundred of those things.”

  “We’ll talk later,” Jake said. “Do you know how the doors lock?”

  The kid stepped forward and twisted a deadbolt that Jake hadn’t seen. “I can’t reach it, but up top, there’s a bolt. Push that.”

  Jake pushed the bolt on one of the doors upward, slamming it home. Beyond the glass, he could see more of the infected entering the parking lot from wherever they’d been. He grabbed the kid’s arm and pulled him sideways, out of the line of sight of the doors.

  “Hey!” Jake clamped a hand over the kid’s mouth and shook his head violently. He released him slowly then brought his index finger up to his pursed lips, indicating that they needed to be quiet.

  Outside, the screams of the infected intensified as they got closer. Several of the shopping carts rattled. They’d reached the first barrier.

  Jake switched magazines, careful to hold the empty one as he dropped it to avoid further noise. He leaned close to the kid. “How secure is this place?”

  The youth shrugged. “Kept you out,” he whispered.

  “Smartass.”

  The jangle of the shopping carts brought his eyes back to the doorway. The handles began to hit the glass and he frowned, wondering if Walmart had sprung for the shatter resistant glass or if they’d gone cheap out here in Bumfuck, Kansas. Hands beat against the doors as the unnerving screams of hundreds of the infected reverberated through the building.

  “We need to move to the back of the store,” he said into the kid’s ear. “Do you have any weapons?”

  “Duh. Come on.”

  The youth got up and moved away from the entrance. He turned down an aisle leading into the darkness. Jake followed him, resisting the urge to slide his night vision monocular down over his eye. If the kid could navigate his way to the back unaided, then so could he.

  He bumped into the back of the kid, who’d stopped. “It’s right here,” he said, pushing gently on a set of double doors.

  When they were through them and into the stockroom, Jake asked, “Any way to secure those doors?”

  “Not that I know of. We could pile boxes in front of them, but they swing both ways, so it’s kind of pointless.”

  “Hmpf,” he grunted. “What’s your name, kid?”

  The youth pulled the mask from his face. “Mark.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he said, holding out a hand for the kid to shake. “My name’s Jake. How old are you, Mark?”

  “Fifteen. I’ll be sixteen in March.”

  “Only a month then.”

  “A month?” He sounded surprised. “I thought it was like November or maybe December.”

  “Nope. It’s the tenth or eleventh of February. I’m not sure which, but I’m supposed to get my girlfriend something nice for Valentine’s Day.”

  “Girlfriend? There are more people out there?”

  Jake nodded, then cursed since the kid couldn’t see him in the darkness. “We live on a farm about five miles outside of town. There are, let’s see…” He counted everyone off on his fingers. “There are nine of us.”

  “Wow. I ain’t seen another normal person in probably three or four months.”

  “Really? I would have thought it was longer than that.”

  “I used to see these two guys every couple of weeks, driving around like a bunch of idiots with the crazies chasing them, but I never let them know I was here. I was pretty sure they’d have just killed me and been done with it.”

  “The Cullens,” Jake surmised.

  “No idea,” Mark stated. “I never saw ’em before all of this went down.”

  “Well, if it was the Cullen brothers, then you were right for staying hidden from them. They were definitely not good people.”

  “What do you mean by they weren’t good people?”

  “They’re dead,” he responded flatly.

  “You kill ’em?”

  Jake flipped down his monocular and powered it on. “You sure ask a lot of questions.” He stood and walked around the building’s exterior wall until he came to the back door. A metal hex wrench dangled from a chain attached to the push bar. That’s why the back door had been locked. He pushed against it w
ithout hitting the bar. It was secure.

  “Okay,” Jake said when he returned to where Mark leaned against the wall. “I’m gonna go back out there and try to see what I can see. Stay back here.”

  “You ain’t my— Never mind. Okay, I’ll stay put.”

  Jake grinned in spite of himself. The kid was a teenager. It was natural to want to challenge authority at that age. He remembered himself as a teen. Young, dumb, and full of cum, he would have taken on the world. The fact that the kid had survived this long on his own, especially since he’d seen the Cullen brothers on several occasions, meant that he was a survivor.

  And now Jake felt responsible for him.

  He snuck through the doors into the front of the store, slinking low along the back wall until he was at the aisle that led directly to the front doors. He flipped his monocular up, then lifted his rifle to peer through the thermal scope at the doors. A mass of writhing, angry infected were outside, but they were no longer pounding on the doors.

  Jake observed them for several minutes before deciding that it was pointless. They were quickly losing interest and already beginning to wander away. None of the ones out there had actually seen him. They’d been drawn by the screams of the ones he killed. The fact that they didn’t even recognize their dead as anything more than part of the landscape was disturbing. He knew they’d become cannibals out in the desert, but figured that they had some level of awareness of each other.

  Since he was stuck for a while, he decided to collect up the items he’d came into town to get before returning to the back of the store. He flipped down his night vision once more and wandered over to the baby products aisle. He was clueless as to what type of formula to get, but he figured it was better to get all of one brand instead of a bunch of different ones, so he pulled out the empty duffle bag from his backpack and crammed six of the plastic containers into the empty pack, then grabbed two more for good measure. He pulled diapers from their oversized boxes and put them into the duffle bag still sealed in tight plastic wrap. The original packaging would have taken up too much room.

  He’d gotten a large assortment of diapers and a few toys for Carmen’s children when Mark cleared his throat softly behind him. “Shit, kid! You ’bout scared the piss out of me.”

  “I waited back there for you. But when I come out here, you’re just looting?”

  “I’m not looting. I told you, I had to come to town to get supplies.”

  Mark thrust his chin out. “Somebody have a baby?”

  “How the hell can you see in the dark?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just used to it, I guess.”

  Jake regarded Mark through his monocular. “Getting this formula and the diapers is the only reason I came into town. I figured we have some time to kill while the infected wander around out there. This way, my gear is ready to go and I can leave as soon as I see a break.”

  “You’re gonna leave me here?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it, really,” Jake admitted. “Must be tough being here all alone, huh?”

  “Yeah…” The kid trailed off. Jake knew the signs. He’d heard variations of the same story a hundred times over.

  “You lose someone?”

  He nodded. “My mom. I guess my dad too, but he wasn’t really in my life, so I don’t know what happened to him.” He paused and then continued. “There was a girl too. We didn’t really know each other that well, but I might have gotten her killed when we were coming here.”

  Jake thought about the body in the back dock. “The girl outside?” he prompted.

  Mark nodded. “Yeah. She got attacked when I opened the back door to the grocery store. A bunch of them freaks ran out and knocked her off the platform. I couldn’t get to her before they’d killed her.”

  The soldier nodded. “At least they killed her instead of turning her into one of them, okay? That’s a much worse fate than death.” He thought about it for a second before going further. “You can come with me if you want to, but it’s not my farm, so Old Man Campbell would have to be the one who decides whether you can stay or not.”

  “You think he’d turn me away? ’Cause if you do, I’m not even gonna bother leaving. I’ve got everything I need in here to last me a long time.”

  “I think he’d let you stay. I haven’t talked it over with my friends yet, but we were originally only supposed to stay with him through the spring planting, then move north. If that’s still what they want to do, then that will just leave Mr. Campbell and his two granddaughters.”

  “Granddaughters?”

  “Heh,” Jake chuckled, knowing full well what the teenage boy was thinking. With practically zero prospects of ever having a girlfriend again, the idea that there were multiple women—of any age—nearby must have been extremely appealing. “Yeah, Katie and Sally. They’re a few years older than you. College girls.”

  The stupid grin on his face grew wider, giving him an eerie appearance through Jake’s green night vision monocular.

  Jake sighed and zipped his duffle bag. “Okay, Mark. I got what I came here for. Looks like we’re gonna be staying a while. This store have any beer in it?”

  “Yeah, it’s over this way,” he replied, waving an arm. “I got rid of all the dairy products down the bathroom drain, but it still smells bad over there, so I try to avoid it whenever I can.”

  “No worries.” He saw a case of Bud Light sitting open and half the contents missing. “You been drinking?”

  Mark shrugged. “What else am I gonna do to pass the time?”

  “You wanna grab a beer or two?”

  “You ain’t mad?”

  “No. Why would I be? You’re not my kid. Besides, when I was sixteen, I was sneaking vodka from my mom’s bottle and refilling it with water.”

  “That’s a pretty neat trick.”

  “Eh, not really,” Jake admitted. “After a few times doing that, it was easy to tell that I’d taken it. Water just doesn’t have the same taste as alcohol, y’know?”

  “I never had it before,” Mark confessed.

  “It’s okay. I prefer whiskey though,” Jake said, easing the pop top on a can of beer in an effort to make as little noise as possible. “So, what should we drink to?”

  “How about getting out of here safely?”

  Jake smiled and tapped his can of room temperature beer against Mark’s. “To girls, then.”

  “What? I didn’t…”

  Jake chuckled softly before taking a long pull from the beer. If he had a white light, he’d probably have seen the teenager’s flushed cheeks. Instead, he just saw the same washed out green that everything in his world was reduced to right now.

  4

  * * *

  BRAZILIAN HIGHLANDS RAINFOREST, BRAZIL

  FEBRUARY 11TH

  “We have a breach!” a diminutive man shouted across the security station in his native tongue.

  The earpiece of Major Taavi Shaikh, the Iranian commander of the lab’s security detachment, translated what the Korean scientist said in real time, but the technology wasn’t required as the red strobe lights protruding from the ceiling were already turning. Mere seconds later, the ear-shattering wails of the facility’s alarms began to wail.

  “Turn that off!” Taavi hissed, gesturing toward the klaxons and the lights. “We have a simple breach. Follow protocol and we will contain it. If we announce to the entire jungle that we’re here, every one of the Cursed will come to us and there will be no hope.”

  The watch officer, a lowly 3rd lieutenant named Khavari that had only been an officer in the Iranian Army for two months prior to this assignment, nodded dumbly and began pushing buttons to silence the alarms.

  It wasn’t going well. The sirens continued to blare, surely echoing across the jungle to bring more of the Cursed to their location.

  “The rest of you, put on your riot gear and go to the maintenance entrance,” the major ordered all of the security personnel who stood nearby, waiting to be told what to
do. His frown turned to a slight smile as the men rushed to their lockers, obedient as dogs. They knew what was at stake with their families’ lives. They would stop this breach and secure the facility like they had dozens of times before.

  “Sir,” the lieutenant said, bringing Taavi’s attention back to him. He pointed to first one monitor, and then another. “I’m not sure if—”

  “Quiet, you fool,” Taavi barked. “Let me see.”

  He leaned down over the security console. What had initially appeared to be a small group of the Cursed had swelled to hundreds. The mixture of local villagers and former Red Cross aid workers tore into every non-infected person they stumbled across in the facility. “Allah protect us,” Taavi muttered, his false bravado falling away.

  He began shouting orders to his men. The facility’s security element was a mixture of North Korean and Iranian soldiers who were trained in subterranean warfare and knew what to do. Of the sixty he’d started with, fifty-six still remained after four of them had committed suicide.

  His men hurried through the preparations for combat, sliding into well-worn riot gear and helmets. Having been the ones to infect the local villages, these men were used to the carnage that the Cursed wreaked. They’d seen how quickly the tide could turn if even a single man was not one hundred percent focused and lost his footing.

  Taavi grimaced as he strapped on his own gear. The facility had never suffered a large-scale breach before. His men would protect it, as they’d done countless times when a few of the Cursed slipped past the outer perimeter. The major wondered what the breach meant for the long-term tenability of the labs in the jungle that had relied on secrecy for so long.

  Finally, the lieutenant found the correct button and stopped the sirens from wailing, but there was no cure for the spinning red lights overhead. The only way to stop those was to cut power to the entire facility.

  “Call the Facilitator,” he ordered the lieutenant sitting at the console. The man was pale, as if a djinn had inhabited him. Shaikh knew that the lieutenant did not have the bite-proof riot gear that the security elements did. His only hope of survival was to hide behind locked doors while the security forces cleared the facility. The only doors that could hope to stop the Cursed were the exterior ones, and one of those was flung wide, fallen off its hinges.