With the noise of the gathering crowd matching the level of the elevator’s warning peal, Tara’s last customer reached the body and dropped her pack to the floor. Gripping her short skirt with one hand, she set her coffee by her pack and, completing a sort of slow-motion curtsy, knelt primly next to the body. While she went to all fours, in what looked like a very uncomfortable position for one wearing high heels, Tara felt a sudden pang of guilt for not following the woman’s lead. Not wanting to be lumped in with the gawking bystanders, Tara willed herself back to work. In an effort to detach from what was transpiring, she began dragging a white towel in big lazy circles across the kiosk’s stainless steel counter.
The busywork distracted Tara for a second, but when she finally looked up, she saw that the elevator had gone silent with the doors locked open, and an older bearded man, presumably a professor, had emerged from the other. As the man skirted the rapidly growing lake of blood, the Good Samaritan shuffled around on hands and knees until she was parallel with the body. Then, as if trying to seize a charmed cobra, she slowly reached out and pressed three fingers gently to the man’s neck.
“An ambulance is on the way!” called a man, a phone pressed to one ear.
Voice wavering, a woman on the periphery asked, “Is he alive?”
Grimacing, the middle-aged woman drew her hand back. She regarded the young student who’d posed the question and shook her head.
“He’s gone. Most of his neck on the right side … where the carotid runs … it’s torn wide open.”
Grateful that it was the woman she’d just served coffee to and not her who had touched the dead body, Tara tossed the towel into a bleach bucket and walked out from behind her kiosk. Without uttering so much as an excuse me or coming through or make way, she elbowed a passage through the throng of people, some of them snapping photos or taking videos with their phones. Just as she found a better vantage point and was absentmindedly rolling up her sleeves, the woman rocketed out of her crouch as if she had just received an electric shock. With the clicking of her high heels the only sound in the atrium, the woman took two steps back just as the body convulsed and began to twitch strangely, like a fish out of water. As if checking to see that she was not the only witness to the dead student seemingly come back to life, the woman turned mechanically toward the crowd and accidentally kicked her Venti cup, sending a torrent of steaming brown liquid across the floor tiles.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the building, aided by the unfortunate placement of a panic bar meant to allow breathing humans a quick escape from the north stairwell in the event of fire or other calamity, an oblivious undead Charlie Noble stumbled off the last step, hit the waist-high metal bar with a full head of steam, and staggered into daylight.
With the door closing at its back, the ashen-faced abomination took a single lurching step forward and made a wild, slow-motion grab for the fresh meat strolling the sidewalk an arm’s length away.
Reacting much faster than one would think a person with their eyes glued to a handheld device would, the co-ed passerby performed a quick stutter-step that caused undead Charlie to miss horribly, perform a clumsy pirouette off the curb, and collapse in a vertical heap directly in front of an approaching city bus.
There was a squeal of brakes as fifteen tons of Detroit metal bled speed. Riding the blast of air ahead of the bus, a drift of red and orange and yellow oak leaves was sent skittering along the ground ahead of it. A fraction of a second later, Newton’s Law kicked in as the shocks and brakes working in unison reeled in the kinetic energy and the bus ground to a noisy halt, its right front tire three inches from the fallen monster’s skull, and the act that may have altered the course of history sadly averted.
Chapter 11
Inside the university’s main entrance, illuminated by bars of sunlight infiltrating the glass atrium, the student who had fled after receiving the mortal wound from undead Janitor Hal was now reanimating in front of Tara, the fortysomething Good Samaritan, and nearly two dozen witnesses—a just-arrived and under-caffeinated Professor Sylvester Fuentes counted among them.
People gasped and a murmur rippled around the lobby as the man, whom the woman in high heels had just pronounced dead, flopped around in the pool of his own blood.
With everyone frozen in place, the pallid corpse suddenly lay flat, turned its head to the left, and fixed a lifeless gaze on the woman in heels.
Feeling a cold chill rip up her spine, Tara put her hand on a stranger’s shoulder and stood on her toes. Through a sliver of daylight between the people in front, she watched her last paying customer stand and inexplicably take a couple of steps toward the thing writhing away on the floor.
No, Tara thought as the lady again knelt next to the prostrate man.
In the next beat, two things happened near simultaneously. First, speaking softly, the woman urged the man to remain still. Then she turned to the crowd and at the top of her voice said, “Somebody give me a hand here.” But before anyone could react, and with the bellowed plea still echoing off the high ceiling, the man sat up straight and grabbed two fistfuls of blonde hair. Already off balance, the high heels doing her no favors, the woman pitched over backward with her straining neck angling straight for the thing’s gaping maw.
At first sight of the supposedly dead man sitting up, every instinct in Tara’s body urged her to run. Yet like a passerby at a fatal car wreck, she couldn’t tear her eyes from the sight her mind was having difficulty processing. And it wasn’t until the woman screamed and crimson blood was gushing from a puckered wound behind her right ear that Tara decided she had seen enough.
As more screams rang out and echoed about the atrium, the man Tara had been using for support doubled over and emptied the contents of his stomach all over his shoes. Then, like a school of fish parted by a predator, half of the people who had been rooted in place dashed toward the entry, and the rest rushed forward and dragged the bloody attacker from the woman’s unmoving body.
Through the dissipating crowd, Tara caught a glimpse of the crazy guy’s eyes and threw a visible shudder. There was almost no white to them. Where she expected to see rage, she only saw two dime-sized pools of black conveying no emotion whatsoever.
As electrical impulses jumped synapses in Tara’s head one word came to mind: Zombie?
In that instant, closing the store, counting the till, and calling her boss to tell him what had happened and that she was leaving as a result ranked in importance just below whatever her last asshole boyfriend was doing at this very moment. Flight instinct activated, Tara grabbed her pack and, without a second glance at the kiosk, made a beeline for the front entrance, thumbing her phone alive on the run. Once outside, she squeezed past a clutch of people talking excitedly into phones of their own. Body-checking slow movers out of her way, she ran down the wide walkway, past a phalanx of cement planters, and turned right at the sidewalk, head down and sprinting for the distant student parking lot opposite the glass skybridge. Backpack threatening to slip off her shoulder, she turned the next corner, crossed the street, and zippered between a pair of cars on their way into the lot.
Slowing to a trot three rows in, she brought the phone to her mouth and instructed her phone’s AI helper to call, “Bro.”
“No match found,” replied the semi-robotic female voice.
Breathing hard, Tara said, “Eff you,” and tapped the green phone icon, selected Contacts, and scrolled down until she found the correct one.
Nearly running headlong into her little red car, she selected the number with the 678 Atlanta area code, hit Speaker, and took a knee next to the car door. As the first ring drifted from the tiny speaker, she set the phone on the ground by her knee, ripped open her pack, and started rooting around inside for her keys.
Before she was wrist-deep into her pack, the first ring had dissipated and a connection was made, going straight to voicemail. She heard a beep and a digital recording of her brother, sounding uncomfortable and out-of-sorts, emanate
d from the speaker: “This is Leland Riker and you have penetrated his cellular phone’s defenses. So um … please … um, leave a message”—there was a pregnant pause and then his voice went on—“and if I can remember my passcode”—another second or two of dead air—“I will call you back A-sap.”
Not likely, thought Tara. And it didn’t surprise her he hadn’t picked up. It was par for the course for typically tech-challenged Lee to accidentally leave the ringer off and then play dumb when called out for it later. So she cursed again and jammed her arm elbow-deep into the pack. She grimaced and rooted around then pursed her lips as she dragged her keys out. Wasting no time, she tucked her phone into the bag and stood up straight. Grimace returning, she watched a pair of black SUVs nose in hard against the curb adjacent to the front entry where people were now surging out in twos and threes, half of them screaming, the rest wearing incredulous looks, their mouths frozen into silent O’s.
Emblazoned on the SUVs’ doors were silver shield-shaped decals sporting the words Middletown Campus Security. In unison the driver and passenger doors on each vehicle flew open and uniformed security guards spilled out. Leaving their doors opened wide, the quartet put their heads down and ran toward the action, blissfully unaware of the scale of carnage they were about to encounter inside.
Chapter 12
Tara punched the button on the fob, popping the door locks. In one fluid movement she yanked her door open and tossed the pack onto the small shelf behind her seat. Casting an expectant glance toward the lot’s secure exit, she slid in behind the wheel and closed and locked the door. Breathing hard, hands visibly shaking, she guided the key into the ignition.
Pausing momentarily to get her breath, Tara was caught off-guard when a woman roughly her age staggered up, stopped outside her door, and bent at the waist. Eyes glazed and mouth agape, the stranger looked Tara in the eye, spread her arms like a pair of wings, and mouthed the words, What the fuck?
WTF indeed, thought Tara as the woman continued on her way and the little three-banger under the hood turned over with nary a sound. She slipped the transmission into Reverse, then flicked her eyes to the rearview mirror, where she saw the woman at her own car working a key in the door.
Coast clear, Tara tromped the gas and J-turned out of the spot. She negotiated the lot at twice the posted speed, dodging a couple of cars reversing from their spaces, and arrived at the exit chute third in line. Thankfully for her, whoever was driving the cars ahead of hers had likely seen the same thing she had and wasted no time getting through the gate. The first sped off to the left, nearly colliding head on with a Middletown P.D. Crown Victoria. The second, however—some kind of modern muscle car painted lime green with twin stripes on the hood—sped off to the right, past the arriving officers, leaving a pair of long, black burnout marks on the pavement and the street clouded with a low-hanging blue haze.
With the green car already out of sight, Tara swiped her key card in front of the reader. It always took a second to register. While she waited for the arm to rise, she looked to the atrium and saw that her kiosk had been pushed up against the glass. Outside the building, the guards were struggling mightily to advance toward the entrance against the river of bodies streaming through the double doors.
About the time Tara was swiping her card at the gate, Patient Zero was back on his feet two blocks away. As Tara waited for the gate to open, Patient Zero made its way up onto the curb and wavered before the closed bus door. And by the time the gate was opening to let Tara drive her car out, Patient Zero was hungrily eyeing the oblivious bus driver bouncing rhythmically in his air-ride seat and talking rapid-fire into a hand-held microphone.
Seeing the man whom he had already written off as street pizza pressing up against the bi-fold doors, the ashen-faced driver, suddenly realizing a coroner wasn’t necessary, called off the meat wagon and stowed the sweat-slickened handset. Suffering from a welling state of shock, the portly driver opened the door and started to babble at Patient Zero. “Thank God you’re alive,” he said, tears welling in his eyes. Choking back a sob, he covered his face with one hand, bowed his head, and exhaled sharply.
A smattering of applause started among the passengers up front and continued to the rear of the bus, rising to a crescendo like a stadium wave until everyone was clapping.
Head down and scrutinizing the stairwell, the beast stepped over the threshold. Acting on a flash of buried memory, it gripped the brushed metal railing and took a tentative step up.
With the clapping slowly giving way to the low hum of conversation, the driver drew a deep breath, shook his head, and said, “Oh nelly. I was sure you were my first … I’ve seen what one of these tires will do to a person’s head. And it’s not pretty … not by a longshot. No, siree.” Calming down a touch, the driver shifted in his seat to wipe his eyes on his uniform sleeve, causing his chair to hiss as it bounced up and down.
While the driver was preoccupied, the corpse conquered another step.
“Come on in,” the driver said, looking up and forcing a smile. “You gonna need one zone or two today?”
Patient Zero made it to the landing and paused. Sounding like a person who had been dealt a lifetime’s worth of misfortune and was having the mother of all bad days, the dead thing emitted a thick guttural groan that resonated throughout the bus.
Seeing the fella’s wobbly legs and awful pallor, and thinking maybe he’d tied on an early one, the driver, who had suffered similar battles of his own with the bottle, made a quick and fatal decision. Intent on letting the day’s luckiest man in the world ride for free, the driver extricated himself from behind the wheel, covered the fare box with one meaty hand, and gently grasped the drunk’s elbow with the other—a move that left him defenseless as he unwittingly became Patient Zero’s next victim.
Losing most of his left ear when the drunk bit down on it, the driver emitted a high-pitched warble and reflexively released his grip on his attacker’s elbow. Hopelessly off balance, the driver fell backward, becoming wedged in the small space between the seat and the horizontally oriented steering wheel.
As Patient Zero ground the bloody hunk of skin-covered gristle between its teeth, the kids immediately to its left started screaming, and the kicking and flailing bus driver instantly lost all appeal.
Chapter 13
Thirty silence-filled minutes after Riker escaped his seat next to Tourette’s Lady, the bus was nearing the Muncie exit and he could see what looked like a half-dozen Day-Glo yellow emergency vehicles, red lights strobing hypnotically and sirens blaring, barreling down a side road paralleling the interstate the Greyhound had finally gotten back to. As the driver braked and pulled the bus hard to the shoulder to heed right-of-way, Riker saw the emergency vehicles curl around the adjacent on-ramp, nose to bumper, and enter the six-lane heading the same direction as the bus and in quite a bit of a hurry.
Thinking nothing more of the first responders who appeared to be doing what they were supposed to—responding first—Riker slipped his four-year-old flip-phone from his pocket and flicked it open. The numeric keypad flared green and he punched 1 followed by the # key and pressed the speaker to his ear.
He listened to the sound of his phone automatically dialing the ten-digits for him, and then endured six drawn-out, warbling rings. Not a message guy, preferring to actually converse—whether over the air, on a landline, or in an honest to goodness face-to-face tête-à-tête—Riker was about to fold his phone and try again later when he heard a beep and, distant and tinny-sounding, his sister’s greeting started playing. He put the phone back to his ear and listened to the pertinent information, after which another tone sounded and the urge to close the phone hit him broadside. Having already come this far, he sucked it up and left a message telling her he’d be at her apartment within the hour. Ending the call a little pissed off at himself for giving in to technology, he folded the Motorola away and recalled that he was about to be let off in Muncie, Indiana. Way different from Atlanta, where one
could be in a cab and pulling from the curb nearly as fast as the legendary Scotty of Trek fame could beam up a four-person away party. And without a smartphone, he conceded, the time he was going to burn trying to find a taxi in the college town was likely going to make a liar out of him. Mulling over the idea of calling Tara back and amending his message, he subconsciously started thumbing the phone’s thin earpiece open and closed repeatedly in one hand. Staring out the window at the squat, appropriately hued battleship-gray Greyhound depot, Riker stowed his phone in a pocket, deciding to let fate run its course on the taxi issue.
As the bus bumped over the curb cut and slipped into a brightly lit bay, Riker saw a second bus offloading passengers, a dozen of whom were already gathered around its rectangular luggage compartment door. Without waiting for his bus to stop completely, he was out of his seat, single gym bag in hand, and edging for the front door.
Riker caught a dose of stink eye from the driver due to his premature approach. Out of respect for her, he stopped behind the line, smiled, and in a low voice said, “The racist pottymouth back there—” He paused while the driver engaged the brakes.
As if saying go on, the driver looked at him in the mirror with one brow arched.
Riker said, “She has a gun in her bag.” He said gun real slow and with menace. Then he lifted his left pants leg, showing off his gleaming metal and carbon fiber prosthesis. “I’m a veteran. I know a Beretta semi-auto when I see one.”
The driver killed the engine. Looking Riker straight in the face, she smiled wide and winked. “Thank you, sir,” she said, throwing the door open.
Riker grabbed the rails and let his muscled upper body do the work as he swung his legs down to the landing. Gathering himself there, he took the final step in one bound, hitting the ground running, prosthetic leg be damned. On his way toward the door to the overly lit waiting room, he peered over his shoulder and saw the bi-fold door closing and the driver with the microphone to her lips.
Riker's Apocalypse (Book 1): The Promise Page 5
