Dead, But Not For Long (Book 2): Pestilence and Promise

by Kinney, Matthew

  Snake led the way to the front door then stood back as he motioned for Fish to open it. When nothing rushed out at them, Moose went in first with Helga, Wombat and Wolf close behind.

  The lobby was empty, but the moans echoing throughout the building let the group know that they weren’t alone. While there was some light coming in through the front windows, it didn’t extend far down the two hallways that ran off the lobby.

  Moose checked the left corridor, and in the gloom of the darkened building, the hulking shadows indicated that there were several infected wandering the halls.

  The bikers turned the other way, taking out anything moving as they went down the right corridor. As they made their way deeper into the building, it became more difficult to see, though some light seeped beneath the classroom doors. The walls were lined with drawings that had been created in a happier time, and Snake had to look away from the brightly colored pictures of the children with their stick-figure families.

  Rounding a corner, he was glad to see dim sunlight coming from a window at the end of the hallway. It wasn’t much, but it was better than what they’d had. A crowd of infected was gathered at a closed door, clawing at it in a vain attempt to get in. Some of them turned when they saw the bikers and began to stumble their way through the shadows.

  Wombat let out a breath. “They’re almost all kids,” he whispered.

  “I know, but don’t think about it,” Snake said. “And don’t use guns unless you have to. We don’t know how many live people we’ve got in the building, and we don’t want anybody hit by a stray bullet.”

  The moans from the other hallway told Snake that their presence hadn’t gone undetected. They were going to be sandwiched between the two groups of ghouls in a matter of minutes.

  “We need to do this fast,” he said.

  Using their silent weapons, the bikers were able to take out about a dozen of the dead quickly. The rest of the crowd at the door started to stumble over the prone bodies, allowing the group to finish off the last of the infected as they crawled over their fallen comrades. It didn’t take long, but the dead from the other hallway were getting closer, and Snake knew that every minute counted.

  He knocked on the door while the others waited to pick off the dead that were still headed their way.

  A young voice on the other side of the door asked, “Can you talk?”

  Snake was relieved to hear a voice, but the question seemed strange.

  “We’re the good guys,” he replied. “We’re gonna get you out of here.”

  A loud scraping sound came from inside the room as a heavy piece of furniture was apparently moved. Moments later, there was a click as the door was unlocked. It slowly opened and a boy peered out.

  “Can you all talk?” he asked, warily.

  “Our grammar ain’t the best,” Snake said, “but yeah, we can talk.”

  “Good,” the boy said, looking relieved. “Mrs. Tyson said not to let anyone in who couldn’t talk, even if it was a police officer or a firefighter.”

  “Or even Mr. Rodriquez,” a little girl said from behind the boy.

  “Who’s that?” Snake asked, glancing down the hall to see how the others were doing.

  “He’s the principal,” one of the boys said, looking at the biker as if he were stupid. “Everybody knows that.”

  “Uh, Boss, we have company,” Moose said, as the first of dead from the left hallway finally rounded the corner.

  “Don’t mess with them,” Snake said. “Get in here.”

  The other four bikers rushed into the room behind Snake. Wombat came in last and shut the door. Inside the room was a group of about twenty children.

  “Where’s your teacher?” Snake asked.

  “Mrs. Tyson? She’s in there,” said the boy that had let them in. He pointed to a door in the corner of the room that looked like it probably belonged to a closet.

  “She said if anyone lets her out, we’ll be in trouble.”

  “Yeah,” another child added. “It’s like a test. If we let her out, we’ll get an F.”

  “Did everybody in your group come in here, or did some go to another room?” Snake asked.

  “Some people went up to the roof, but we couldn’t get there,” one girl said. “Mrs. Tyson brought us here.”

  “Okay, but is everybody that was with Mrs. Tyson in this room?” Snake asked, not wanting to take the time to search the entire building unless it was necessary.

  “Everybody except Alex and Kayla.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I think they got eaten,” said a solemn-looking little girl. “We heard them screaming. Mrs. Tyson tried to help them, but one of those bad people bit her.”

  “Ah, man, sorry to hear that,” Snake said. He looked around the room and saw a door on the opposite side from where they had entered. “Where does this other door lead?”

  “Outside,” one of the boys said.

  They would have to take the children out the back door and around to the front of the building, Snake decided. He didn’t like it because he had no idea what might be waiting outside. He looked at the kids and noticed that they seemed frightened.

  “Hey,” Snake addressed the children. “That big dude over there, we call him Moose.”

  They all looked at the big biker who had wandered over to the closet door.

  “Know why we call him that?” Snake asked.

  A boy raised his hand.

  Snake pointed at him.

  “Because he’s big!”

  “No,” Snake said, “because he’s smelly, like a moose.”

  The classroom erupted in laughter. When Moose lifted an arm up and smelled his armpit, the laughter increased.

  “You need to take a bath,” another child yelled to Moose, which only added to the laughter.

  “Everyone who thinks Moose should take a bath, say so,” Snake said to the class.

  Every hand shot up, and the children began to make other comments, usually followed by laughter. When the chatter subsided, the moaning in the corridor had gotten louder, and pounding could also be heard from behind the closet door.

  “Okay, guys,” he said, getting the attention of the children. “There’s going to be some big trucks outside. We need to sneak through the back, and when I tell you to run, I want you all to hurry to the trucks, as fast as you can.”

  Snake got on his radio once the children were ready.

  “How’s it look outside?” he asked Fish. “Can you check around the back?”

  He got a reply within a minute. “Looks clear.”

  Snake opened the door and looked around. “Okay, kids, you’re going to go out now, but wait right there. Don’t run until we tell you to.”

  He turned to Wolf. “Keep them there for just a minute. Gotta take care of something.”

  Helga and Wombat led the way out the door, with the children close behind.

  ~*^*~

  ~15~

  St. Mary’s Hospital, Lansing

  “What kind of stuff should I be downloading?” Dustin asked.

  “I think we need to assume that everything online will eventually be lost to us forever,” Doune said.

  “You really think that’ll happen?” Claire asked, surprised. “This information isn’t just floating around in space. It’s on computers all over the world, so it won’t necessarily be gone.”

  “Right, but we have no idea where most of these computers are located,” Jackson said. “And how would we get to them if we did know?”

  “What about libraries?”

  “Again, if we can get to them, that’s great. But who knows how many of them are even still standing? This city is a war zone, and I’m sure others probably are, too. Besides, we can store a lot more information digitally than we can in printed form.”

  “That’s a good point,” Claire admitted.

  “I think Dr. Doune is right,” Jackson continued. “Let’s look at a worst-case scenario to be safe. Imagine that we’ll be starting o
ver almost from scratch someday soon. What will we need to do that?”

  “I’ll concentrate on medical reference materials,” Doune said.

  “Can you spare the time from your research?” Jackson asked.

  “The research can wait a few hours,” Doune said, not quite trusting the others to handle the responsibility. “It’s absolutely critical that we download as much as possible while other computers are still online.”

  “True,” Jackson said.

  “We’ll need dictionaries,” Claire suggested, “including foreign ones. We’ll also need encyclopedias and maps . . . lots of maps.”

  “Right,” Dustin said, grabbing a pen and starting a list. “And music.”

  “No, Dustin,” Claire said. “I don’t think we can consider music as a top priority.”

  “But think of all the songs that could be lost forever,” the teen replied, distraught. “Classics from groups like the Half Broken Craniums.”

  “I can’t believe you used the words ‘classic’ and ‘the Half Broken Craniums’ in the same sentence,” Jackson said, “but Claire’s right. Those are the kind of things we want to worry about after we get the stuff that is vital to survival.”

  “But dictionaries and atlases aren’t vital to survival. Isn’t music just as important as those things?”

  Jackson shrugged, “I think we need to look at this in tiers of importance. First is survival; weapons, fighting techniques, food production, water treatment, medical resources, and any other skills that will keep us alive. Second would be things we need for rebuilding the world if it comes to that; basic carpentry, generation of power, automobile repair, production of gasoline . . . things of that nature. Finally, we’ll need history, art and music etc. These are things that are important to us and we don’t want to lose but that aren’t necessary to keep us alive.”

  “I guess,” Dustin said, obviously not convinced.

  Jackson grinned. “Dustin, there are houses and music stores full of CDs with pretty much every song ever recorded. It’s the same thing with movies on DVDs. We don’t need to worry about that right now, but if things don’t get better, we’ll make sure we collect as much music as we can. We just have to get these other things first.”

  “What about farming?” Dustin asked.

  “Do we need instructions on that?” Claire asked.

  “It’s kind of complicated, actually,” Dustin said. “There’s fertilizer and pest control. You’ve got to know what grows in your climate and when to plant each crop. Some will handle frost, some won’t. Sometimes you have to rotate them, too.”

  “Wow,” Claire said, amazed. “I guess food is something I’ve always taken for granted. If I want to eat, I go to the store and buy something or grab some takeout. I mean, I know where food comes from, but I just never thought much about it. I was born and raised in the city, so I’m clueless about farming.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be grabbing takeout anymore,” Jackson said, typing as he spoke.

  “No more pizza,” Dustin said, looking depressed.

  “Dustin, since you know something about farming, why don’t you handle it? Look up everything you can about food production and archive it,” Claire suggested.

  “Sure,” Dustin said, returning to his computer.

  Doune’s mind drifted as he began to do his searches. He’d never been much of a history buff, but how strange would it be to have a generation of people growing up with no history books and only learning by word of mouth? Would bits and pieces of the world’s history end up lost forever, along with skills and technical knowledge? Would leaders emerge from the ruins or would anarchy prevail, sending the world into a new dark age? The thoughts were depressing and he quickly turned his attention to his work.

  ~*~

  Lansing, Michigan

  The bikers waited outside with the children while Snake and Moose went back inside. Snake went to the door of the closet and grasped the knob while Moose readied his knife. As the door was pulled open, the two men found themselves face-to-face with the teacher turned creature. She lurched at Moose, and he responded by planting his knife in her forehead. She fell back into the closet into a large pool of dried blood.

  “That’s a lot of blood,” he said. “She must have got bitten real bad.”

  Snake knelt down and looked her over, checking for wounds. When his eyes lit on her left wrist, he stood then moved her other arm with the toe of his boot. The insides of both wrists were coated with blood, and a large shard of broken glass lay on the floor.

  “Oh. Maybe she thought she wouldn’t turn if she died first,” Moose said.

  “She did tell the kids not to let her out,” Snake reminded him. “Maybe she was just hoping.”

  He shook his head after one more glance at the teacher. “We’d better get going.”

  Moose joined Wombat and Helga at the front of the group while Snake fell to the back with Wolf. They began to move the group of children along the building. It was going well until Wombat almost slammed into a zombie that suddenly appeared around the corner.

  Some of the children began to scream, and a couple even turned to run back into the classroom, though Snake intercepted them and told them to wait.

  Pulling his machete, Wombat finished off the not-quite-dead man while Helga and Moose jumped in to help with others that were coming their way.

  “Doesn’t look too clear to me,” Wombat said. “I think Fish miscounted again.”

  Snake left his position to run ahead and check out their route. He quickly found that the dead were coming through a hole in the fence, and he sucked in a breath when he saw just how many were on the other side of it.

  “We’re going to have a big problem here in a minute,” he said, trying to keep calm for the sake of the children. “Let’s go.”

  He hurried back to the children, urging them forward, though several of them began to balk as they spotted the zombies coming through the fence. “Come on kids. They’re slow. We need to hurry and get past them.”

  When one of the little girls refused to move, Helga threw her over her shoulder and hurried ahead with her as Snake encouraged the others to run. Once they could see that the rest of their route was clear, Wombat and Moose fell back to fight the dead while Snake and Wolf quickly escorted the children to the trucks. Most of the other survivors seemed overjoyed to see the children, but Snake had to rush their reunion.

  “We gotta get moving,” he said, glancing back at the bikers who were holding the dead back.

  A few of the survivors asked if they could ride on the bikes instead of in the trucks. Snake agreed, knowing that the survivors might feel better if a couple of their people were on the outside. He pointed to three bikes with single riders.

  Wombat and Moose hurried to join the others as the trucks began to pull away. There were some close calls as the convoy left the school since the dead were coming from all directions by that time. Once they put a few blocks behind them, it was smooth sailing, and the trip back to the hospital was made without any further problems.

  “I guess I’d better stay and get these guys into quarantine,” Lindsey told Wombat as she got off his bike. She had taken on the responsibility of getting newcomers settled in since there was little need for a physical therapist.

  “You don’t sound too happy about it,” Wombat noticed.

  “I’d rather be out there with the rest of you,” she admitted.

  “Snake’s got his radio. If you get done soon, give me a call, and I’ll come and get you.”

  “All right,” she said, giving him a smile. She hurried inside as he turned to follow the others.

  As soon as the survivors were dropped off, most of the bikers returned to the site of the office building. The dead were coming out, drawn by the sounds of the engines, and Snake knew that this rescue wasn’t going to be any easier than the previous one had been.

  ~*~

  St. Mary’s Hospital, Lansing

  Autumn tensed, the dental f
loss held tightly in her fist as she watched a pigeon finally land on the roof near her trap. Silently, she urged it to take the bait and step beneath the cardboard box. Instead, it pecked at the cookie crumbs and was soon joined by a second bird and a third. They ate the crumbs and tried to chase each other off, but they did not step under the box. She waited as patiently as possible, and the first time one was halfway under the trap, she pulled the string. By this time, other birds had joined the group, and they all took off in a startled flurry of wings.

  Autumn hurried over, certain that she’d trapped at least one of them, maybe more. The box seemed unusually still when she approached it, and she wondered why it wasn’t moving. She carefully lifted it enough to take a peek. Nothing.

  She knew she’d wasted at least ten minutes already, but she decided she could wait a while longer, especially since Dr. Doune was preoccupied. She settled down to wait.

  ~*~

  The newcomers were escorted to the second floor, where Dr. Sharma and Dr. Martinez were waiting for them. Each person was checked for bites before being sent into the new quarantine room. A couple of them were pulled aside for minor medical treatment, but overall, the survivors were healthy.

  By the time Lindsey arrived with the last group, the room was crowded. She let everybody know that more water was being brought up, and food would follow as soon as Theresa could put something together. By the looks of relief on some of the faces, she guessed they’d done without the basic necessities for a while.

  “You’ll be in here for three hours,” she told them. “We’ve found that the parasite shows up in the blood by that time, so we’ll do a blood test and if you aren’t infected you’ll be free to move about the building.”

  “What if we don’t want our blood drawn?” one woman asked, crossing her arms. She was blonde and beautiful, and Lindsey had the feeling that she was used to getting what she wanted.