Race the Dead (Book 1): The Last Flag

by Cavanagh, Wren

  “Dr. Aluri, let’s get you into something warm too okay?” Emma place her hand on her woman’s arm and guided her away from the door.

  Anjali nodded, tried to smile. Her teeth chattered, but not as bad as Lew’s. “Thank…you.”

  They walked up to the second floor. The store was small, especially when compared to its big city brethren, but it had a bit of everything. When they were done, dressed up in sweats with the logos of the local teams and layers of dry socks, they were at least warmer and comfortable.

  “Here, put this on.” Emma passed Lew a wool hat.

  “Thanks, i still can’t feel my ears, Scott get here?”

  “Oh, yeah. Had to knee him in the nuts.” She paused. “After I jabbed him in the throat.”

  “Way win friends and influence people, darling.”

  “It influenced, all right,” Emma replied with a judicious nod, and filled in Lew about the confrontation. When she was finished, he drew her into his arms. She laid her head against his chest, listened to the strong steady beat of his heart and let it calm her. “If I wasn’t so tired I could stay like this all night, what a shitty day.”

  “It’ll get better. Tomorrow we’ll challenge Scott for the third flag, and get out. Or maybe just get out — the hell with the flags and prizes. What do you say?”

  “No, we need the money, I need you, you can’t give up Lew.”

  “Let’s go sleep on it, maybe this isn’t the way,” He replied. “What use is the money if either one of us dies. Can’t bring us back. And how long would I really get to live.”

  “Maybe a long time, maybe just few months more and I be grateful for every one of those days I’d get to spend with you.” Emma lifted her face to his, kissed him again and this time felt the heat that rose from his body, she pulled away and stared at him. “You have a fever.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We must win. I am not leaving without the money.”

  He smiled and drew her near, kissed her again, his lips soft, but dry and fever hot. She caressed his face then hugged him tightly before she broke the embrace and got up. “Let me go check on Dr. Aluri, and then I’ll be right up.”

  Emma found her asleep on a staged display of camping gear, cocooned in a sleeping bag on a foam mattress pad, her face barely visible. Surrounded by cute cardboard animals, new products and fake logs and fake fall leaves, it made Emma think of a surreal Disneyesque nativity. She would have liked for the woman to have eaten something, for some information on how she wound up in this situation but she was too tired to wake her and too tired to ask. Still, without knowing her history, Emma felt uneasy about her presence. A compromise is needed, she thought, and made her way to the sport section. It took only a few minutes to find what she wanted, and on her return, careful not to wake the doctor, she secured a bike chain around her feet and locked the other end to the barbecue grill.

  So, I was finally rescued. Almost.

  I could say, “Dear Diary, they came back for me!” But they didn’t, not really.

  They came back for a “flag”, a living flag if you will. And I haven’t kept a diary since I was ten, when one of my little brothers stole it, opened the worthless decorative lock and read it, out loud — to everyone at the dinner table. If Nixon had such little brothers, imagine how different history would be, what a lessons he would have learned early in life.

  Yeah! There! Wow, my memory is not just improving, it's floods back in spurts: family memories and civics all in one shot. Wish my speech would catch up. I still communicate like a wet brained, mush mouthed, late stage alcoholic. Anyway, I digress. Things still turned out okay. They were solicitous and I even got to clean up in the store restroom. They said the water was ice cold but I'm still not feeling much. My body is numb; it feels novacained from head to toe, but I shampooed my hair and brushed my teeth. Thank you, God. Being clean again, what a miracle feels like. I’d like to say that I look pretty hot now, the fairest of them all. But the mirror is being disagreeable.

  When I walked out of the restroom, they were all there: Ross, Emma and Lew. My new friends. I hope! We chatted, mostly they chatted, but not for long. We're all so tired, they look so drawn.

  And they didn’t even die.

  ----------

  The cheap alarm clock Carson had grabbed in the electronic department vibrated against his chest, he frantically pawed at it and shut it off. Groggy, feeling not at all rested, he paused to make sure everyone was still asleep then reaching for Tessa and shook her awake.

  “Wait for me at the main entrance,” he whispered in her ear. “Wanna grab a few more things.”

  She nodded and left, silent in her socks and holding onto her shoes, a near comical figure as she walked away on cautious tippy toes. Carson waited until she was clear of the room, then went over to his father. The flag was in his backpack and in easy reach. Still, as he opened it, his heart beat in his chest like a jackhammer. He sighed with relief when he found it and didn’t bother closing the backpack before he moved toward Emma. He knelt by her side and held his breath, then ever so gently and ever so slowly, he pulled the flag from under her pillow. Finally he headed downstairs. Quiet as a cat, he did a quick detour through the sport section, where he picked up two baseball bats. Neither he nor Tessa saw Anjali, and it wouldn’t have mattered if they had. At the check stands by the exit he found Tessa, her backpack shouldered and ready to go.

  “Here, take this,” he murmured and passed her one of the bats then went back behind the check stand and grabbed a handful of plastic bags and passed them to her. “Wrap your shoes in those bags and duct tape ‘em in place so they don’t come off,” he said softly as he did the same. “Okay…done? Let’s go.”

  He undid the padlock and chains they’d used keep the store’s doors closed and took both with him. Once outside, he locked the doors again. It wouldn’t do to have some of them dead people come in and eat them. Not at all.

  “Cold.” Tessa wrapped her arms around her slight frame.

  Her brother gave her a quick once over, wishing he had brought some blankets to use as ponchos, but he was not going back in. They’ll be ok. Had to be. “Yeah, we’ll walk fast—it’ll keep us warm. C’mon, sis. Quick.”

  They headed off. Sunrise was hours away but the snow reflected enough light so that seeing wasn’t a problem. Their footsteps broke the snow mantle with clean, loud crunching sounds, followed by the whisper of the sound of attrition as their feet sunk in the softer snow below. Carson paused, looked back at their footprints, then at the padlock doors. Please quit guys, he mentally begged. Please quit this game. That money won’t be worth it when you're dead. He took out the flags from his pocket and showed them to Tessa whose jaw dropped open in surprise.

  “Why did you take them?”

  “Cause I hope it’ll make them give up and call for an extraction. No flags — you can’t win. And they have a new person to take care of; it’s too hard. They gotta quit, and that way they won’t get hurt.”

  “Okay.” And then, “Mom?”

  “We’ll come back for her, we’ll find a way, now save your breath and walk fast.”

  ----------

  She left her home for the last time at three in the morning. The changes affecting her eyes made driving in the dark hard, but doable, and once she hit town it wasn’t as much of a problem. Even Los Angeles, crowded mess that it is, was quiet and lit up this early in the day and far more private. As she drove, she saw clandestine traffic taking advantage of that privacy, the ritual of bringing out the dead was now done by many under the shelter of darkness.

  At a red light, she saw a muzzled man with vacant eyes and bloodless skin; a younger man had him by an arm and guided him along. They looked in each other’s eyes, and in the younger’s she saw his frustration, tinged with glimmers of desperation. He looked away and pushed along the dead m
an, who stumbled and almost fell a few times, but the son always held him up. Yeah, it had to be his son: the resemblance between the two was easy to see and he handled the dead man with patience and consideration. Father and son then, thought Cheryl. Hiding and moving the old man until he can come to terms with his death.

  She watched them go. Once they got to a minivan parked on the other side of the street, junior pushed the dead man in the passenger’s seat, slammed the door closed, then ran to the driver’s seat and for a half a block drove off like he had just robbed a bank, then gained control and slowed down at a normal speed. She wondered what would he do? Give up and set old dad loose in the desert and run? Hide him in a shed or garage until he accepted that the old man wasn’t coming back? Or turn in him to a health center, or crack his head open himself? So many choices. Hell, she snorted, maybe he just wanted the social security check to keep coming in regularly and he’d drop the old man down a well.

  Further along Cheryl noticed a ruin of a truck that must have first hit asphalt in the 1970s as it come to a screeching halt in a desolate parking lot that had been last paved around the same year. In a frenzied hurry, an older couple dressed like old time country singers jumped out the cab and dragged a hooded figure dressed like a square dancer from the bed of the truck. They looked guilty as sin and twice as surreal; Cheryl thought she could also see shame and disgust on the woman’s face. Each grasped tightly at one of the thin arms of their captive and when they felt they were far enough from the truck, they tore off the hood from a young woman who once might have been pretty. Her battered face indicated that her death hadn’t been natural, and without doubt it hadn't been peaceful. The man planted his boot on the small of her back and shoved hard. Dulled by death, she did nothing to break the fall or keep her balance, and flew to the ground without grace. Her face hit the dry and dirty asphalt.

  The couple ran back to their shitty truck and drove off in the same panicked manner as they had arrived. The girl in the parking lot got up, a confused tourist to the land of the living — lost, unwelcome and unwanted. Cheryl followed her progress in the rear view mirror as she walked away in the graceless gait of the dead. A diminished and diminishing figure who she would soon be someone else’s problem or nightmare, plaything or slave — mindless, powerless, and confused.

  So far the turned were easy prey and it terrified Cheryl. Dead, she could handle. Being powerless, losing control, losing her mind…That was something else.

  At the production building, as she let herself into the gated lot a medium sized moving van parked on the other side of the street, pulled out into the road, and followed her in. She drove on into the deserted garage and parked close to the elevator, grabbed a large black nylon bag, and got out. The other driver stopped just inside the gate, left the truck idling, and got out of the cab.

  “Here’s your money,” she said. “Black nylon bag, so cliché.”

  The heavyset, Middle Eastern-looking man took the bag from her, opened it, and quickly counted the cash inside. Cheryl rolled her eyes in annoyance; she had already dropped a large advance on him a week back. He knew her money was good.

  “Cliché works for me.” He closed the bag, tossed it in the cab of the truck, and jumped into the driver seat.

  The man put the van in gear and drove up to the stairwell entrance as she brought down the gate and then walked after the truck. By the time she caught up the driver was already unloading the cargo. He unlocked the latch and slid the door up. They began to fall out then, the one in the front pulling out the ones behind, tethered together, a writhing miscellany of cold bodies. Some had makeshift hoods over their heads, fashioned from produce bags or burlap sacks, while others were muzzled or had mouths closed with silver duct tape. None could bite. As of yet.

  The driver took an end of the rope and dragged the dead away to give himself some space, then tied it to a post and made his way back to the truck. “Forty nine.” The driver was nervous, tense. “We done.”

  “We’d agreed on fifty.”

  He climbed back in the cab, keeping a wary eye on Cheryl. “Shit lady, one must have fallen off the truck,” he said and did a double take when he realized just what had him on edge. The eyes of some of the turned he had pulled off of the van were a lot like the eyes of the woman who stood in front of him. The woman who was now smiling at him — a smile that was razor thin, tight, and all too cold.

  He got the uncomfortable notion that he was the only live body in the garage and it was starting to freak him out more than just a little bit. My Saturday Night special is in the cab, he thought. You just wait ‘till I get my hand on it bitch, you’ll have your fifty bodies.

  “You cheated me.” She took a step toward him, her voice a dry rasp.

  He backed to cab of the truck while keeping his eyes on her, he opened the door and reached for the gun in the passenger seat. Strong hands gripped his neck and pulled him in before a vise-like bite clamped down on his shoulder and his screams began to echo in the garage. He howled in pain and tried to break loose, but the woman had slammed the door shut on him and was pushing against it with all she had. Inside the cab, Rod’s jaws met each other as they bit through soft muscle and fat. He didn’t stop to savor the treat and kept biting and chewing, biting and chewing, lips smacking noises drawn out by the screams.

  Outside the van, Cheryl looked at the man thrash and fight to break free, smearing the windshield in shades of red. She wondered if playing possum might have worked better for him, but had to acknowledge that was pretty hard thing to do while someone was biting chunks off you. Finally the flailing stopped and she opened the door, and dragged the newly dead man to the floor.

  “Fifty.”

  She untied the lead of the rope that tethered her bounty from the post and propped open the door to the stairwell, as she rose toward her destination she lead in her newly acquired followers. Like orderly children on a school trip, they followed without an argument.

  ----------

  The restaurant was one of those franchised American diabetes factories: an IHOP, or maybe a Denny’s. He couldn’t tell. He had been to an IHOP once. A dude he hitched a ride with had bought him a large breakfast there, and talked about Jesus and what Jesus could do for him for an hour straight, it had bored him to tears, but the man had meant well and he had relaxed as he ate, nodding and agreeing in all the right places to make him feel like he was doing some good.

  Outside the California sun held no warmth, its light was weak and shallow and the snow stuck selectively to odd surfaces: to palm trees and telephone poles but not on the lawn or the large heard of plastic pink flamingos that crowded the sidewalk strip out front. He knew this was a dream, but that was ok too. Because he was too cold and too hungry to care, and following the logic of dreams he figured there’d be hot good food in the restaurant, snow be damned.

  The place was full, but the herd of obese diners that waddled quickly to and fro seemed to vanish off and on. He’d look and there wasn’t anyone around. He’d look again and the place was full. The patrons ate with gigantic, white, square teeth that were only possible in a dream and he heard their teeth scrape forks and bones, saw the food stains on the white enamel with insane, hyper-detailed clarity. The retro style diner booth he sat in was comfortable and he sank in the red fake leather cushions as the chrome details of the napkin holders reflected the cold hard light. He picked up the menu but it didn’t help much, as every time he read it the text changed, and in the end he just knew to order the Super Big Boy Winter Deluxe Supreme.

  The waitress managed to be motherly and sexual, a brunette and a blonde, fat but at times slender, she delivered a plate that took most of the table’s surface. Half of it was loaded with waffles and pancakes, with and without toppings. The other half was covered with omelettes, eggs over easy and scrambled, potatoes and bacon, sausages and hash. His hollow guts growled with anticipation. The food steam
ed in the cold air and fogged all the windows. God, this is amazing, he thought. If only it wasn’t so damn cold. So cold.

  Cagey, he looked over his shoulder; sure someone would come and take his food from him. And with a spike of fear he saw that they were all staring back at him: the waitresses, the cooks, the customers. They watched him like a hawk, while they chewed air like their life depended on it. Jaws muscles bulged and worked under the smiling faces—bulged and worked, the sound getting louder. He better hurry up and eat, he had to get out! He snapped back to his plate and dug in, shoving food into his mouth, an amazing forkful of pancake, bacon and fruit, slathered in real hot maple syrup. He unhinged his jaws like a boa to fit it all in, and his audience clapped and chewed louder in admiration. From the corner of his eye he saw cameras. They would love him worldwide. He snapped down his unhinged jaws…