There was a woman in there on the other side of the furniture near the far window. She was sick. I could tell that she had been beautiful once, but now, she was a mess. She stank. Her clothes were torn and dirty. She paced, looking for a way to get to me. When she would get near the bathtub the gong would sound. I looked down and there was a pile of loose bed slats on the floor, and she was stepping on the end of one of them causing it to pop up and hit the tub.
I eased through the window onto the broken glass and old hardwood floors. I had no intention of getting any closer to her. I just wanted to leave the building via the front door.
Then, three honks in a row. Jen and Mr. Somerville were in trouble.
"Shit."
I stepped back out the window to the fire escape and looked through my binoculars to the southwest. I couldn't see anything because of the trees and buildings blocking my view. I was tempted to go up to the third floor, or even up on the roof to get a better view, but I didn't. If they were honking, then they needed me to come get them.
The gong sounded inside again, only louder and different. I parted the curtains with the barrel of the gun, and there she was. She came out of the building fast. The end of my rifle caught her in the chest and snagged on her blouse, and as she came forward against the tip of the gun, she pushed me back. I got as far as the railing and stopped, then went down in a crouch to keep from being pushed over the side. She kept on coming, and the muzzle slid right up her chest and under her chin. Her fingers were inches from my face, and I pulled the trigger.
The rifle jumped out of my hands, and the top of her head came off.
One one thousand, two one thousand.... Then bits of her rained back down.
The horn honked again just as the woman's body slumped down. I pushed her, and she fell backwards through the window and landed hard. Her feet and legs, in black shoes and gray tights, still hung outside over the windowsill at her knees. One of her shoes had fallen off as she fell. The tip of her big toe poked out of a hole in her tights. The red polish on the nail was chipped. Something about that made me feel this overwhelming compassion for her the same way I had for the man I had to shoot at Brian Davies' house. It was those little things--those human things--that got to me.
I couldn't keep doing this to myself.
The curtains sucked out of the window and fluttered in the breeze, and the horn honked again. I picked up my rifle.
There were little bloody pieces of her head all around me and on me. I would need a bath, and I'd probably have to drink again just in case. Much more of this and I might become an alcoholic...for more reasons than one.
Climbing down was going to be harder than climbing up. It seemed like no matter how I situated myself, I couldn't get in a good position to drop down to the top of the truck.
The horn honked again followed by two gunshots.
I'd have to go through the window after all. I tried to step over her, but I wound up stepping on her. The way her body felt under my feet was sickening--firm, yet soft at the same time. Once inside, I ran down the stairs and out the front door.
When I got to the truck I found the one-legged man underneath the fire escape and right next to the door of the truck.
"Figures," I said.
I went around the passenger side, but it was locked. The keys were in the ignition.
Four more gun shots. They were a mixture of the .22 and the shotgun, clustered together and overlapping one another. I could still hear the police siren, too.
"Sonnuvva...."
I went to the end of the truck and got the man's attention so he would drag himself away from that spot and I could get in. He took his sweet time.
"Come on!" I yelled.
He hissed at me.
Then I heard the roar of an engine. I turned and looked south. A block away on Water Street, a white car shot by headed east. I couldn't see who was driving.
Impatiently, I waved my arms at the one-legged man to pick up the pace.
Then, two blocks away, one of the police cruisers came down Walnut with the blue lights flashing. When it got to 6th Street, the driver slammed on the brakes. The tires screeched as the tail of the car fished around, then squealed again as they stomped the accelerator and headed up 6th Street. When they got to me they hit the brakes again.
It was Jen. I went over to the car.
"I heard gunshots. What's going on?" I said.
"We had a little trouble, but it's okay now," she said. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," I said. "Where is Mr. Somerville?"
"He's with that girl," she said. "What is that on you? Is that blood? Are you hurt?"
"No, I--"
"Oh shit!" she yelled, and brought the rifle up and fired.
I turned and the one-legged man was now on his face at the rear of the truck. He twitched a little, and Jen shot him again.
"Are you okay? She asked again.
"Yeah, I'm--"
"Did you get them out? Were they up there?"
I shook my head, "There's no one up there."
"But we saw someone--"
"No," I said. "She was sick. I shot her."
"Oh," she said. She looked sad for a moment, and I knew it was sympathy for me for what I had done, and not for the person I'd shot.
"Are you okay?" she said.
"You keep asking that," I said.
The white car pulled up coming from the north. They had circled around.
Somerville got out. There was blood splattered on his right pant leg, but it wasn't his.
Then the driver got out. She looked like she was in her late teens to early twenties. She was plump but in all the right places. Her reddish blonde hair was cut short. She was wearing a red and black Clayfield High School letter jacket. There was a smudge of something on her cheek and a two-foot length of rebar in her hand. Unlike the rest of us, she wasn't wearing a mask. She was very cute.
"Everything alright?" Mr. Somerville asked me.
I nodded, still staring at the newcomer.
"This is Sara," Somerville said.
"Hey," I said.
She raised her hand timidly.
"Nice to meet you, Sara," Jen said politely.
"Hey," I said again.
Jen turned to me and under her breath said, "Don't get all googly-eyed; she's just a baby."
I ignore that.
"Have you been up there yet?" Somerville asked, looking up to the second floor of the building.
"Yeah," I said. "They were infected."
"Oh," he said, "that's too bad. I had hoped there were more of us."
"Looks like there are," I said, nodding to Sara.
"Yeah," he said, "Sara told me she's been hiding over at the First Christian Church. She really saved my butt back there."
"Are there more over at the church?" Jen asked.
"No," Sara said. "Just me."
"How long have you been there?" Jen asked. "Have you been eating?”
"Since Friday morning," she said. "They had food in the fellowship hall--mostly crackers and ketchup."
"What happened?" I said. "Why were you honking and shooting?"
"I set off the siren," Somerville said. "Then we pulled down the street in the other car to watch. For some reason, the ones from the church came in from behind us instead of in front of us. Before we knew it, they were all over the car--"
"I honked so you could get them off us," Jen interrupted. "Then she came. They left us for her really fast. It didn't take long for her to be covered, too. Mr. Somerville got out to help her and he got cornered.... Anyway, it didn't go exactly as planned, but it went."
Somerville nodded, "It went. Well, that's two buildings down and one to go. Let's check on that other house while they're distracted with the siren. The more of us there are, the better chance we have."
CHAPTER 22
Mr. Somerville drove his truck, I rode with Jen in the police car, and Sara followed behind us in her vehicle. It wasn't that far to the blue house, and other t
han a couple of stragglers, we had clear streets.
I got to thinking that it might be possible to get something to make a loud enough sound to attract a whole town's worth of infected people to one spot. We might have to try some experiments in coming days to see how long they are fixated on the sounds and how long they would stay. Maybe it would take more than just sound to keep them there. The crowd behind the courthouse had been there at least a couple of days, and sound had been enough to keep them around. The place where we found the generator had a few around, but they had left after they'd killed the people there. Perhaps they had been distracted by something else and moved away for a while. If it was more than just sound, then....
"When we're done at the blue house, maybe we should go back to the court square and check that building again," I said to Jen.
"Why?"
"I didn't really search it. I saw the woman on the second floor--that was all. I didn't really have time to search the whole building."
"You think someone else is in there?" she asked.
"I don't know. From what we've seen, it doesn't make sense that the crowd would be hanging out down there because of one of their own was making a little noise."
She took a left onto Bragusberg Road.
"Did you leave the car cranked--the one with the siren?" I asked.
"I don't know," she said. "Mr. Somerville did it. Why?"
"I was thinking that when the battery died, so would the siren. Leaving it running would extend it some."
She looked over at me.
"You've got that stuff all over you," she said.
"I know. I need a shower."
"Amen to that," she said. "So, what are we going to do about the others?"
"What do you mean?"
"Are we all going to camp out at Blaine's? Do you think we should all go back to Brian's house?"
"Oh," I said. "Well, I haven't had time to think about it. Mr. Somerville obviously hasn't been out of his house much, if at all, since this all started, and Sara doesn't seem to have a home. I guess we should at least offer..."
"I don't know," Jen said, parking in front of the blue house. "Councilman Somerville seems to have good intentions, but maybe it would be nice to just be free to live for a while without having to mess with government. I mean, there are only five of us that we know of. If it does come, I don't want to be in charge of anything. I just want to be left alone."
Mr. Somerville knocked on my window. I opened my door.
"You two coming?" he asked.
I nodded, and we got out.
I looked behind us, and Sara was standing in front of her car holding the rebar.
"I told her to wait out here," Somerville said.
I nodded again and smiled at Sara. She smiled back, but only with her mouth.
Before we even got to the porch, we could hear the generator running. It was up on a second floor balcony on the side of the house.
Somerville knocked.
"Hello! This is Nicholas Somerville."
Nothing.
He knocked again. Then—
"Go away! I'm armed!" said a woman's voice.
"We don't want any trouble," Somerville said. "We're just checking on you. We've lured the sick people down the road. Now would be a good time to come out."
"Go away! I can see your guns!
"They're just for personal protection, ma'am," Somerville said. "We don't want to hurt you; we're here to help. I represent the mayor's office."
"Don't need help. Go away!"
"Ma'am, they could be back any minute. It's best if you--"
She fired through the front window. Somerville flattened himself against the wall beside the door. I dropped down in front of the porch and Jen got behind a tree in the yard. I looked to the street, and Sara was crouched behind the car.
"There's no need in this ma'am!" Somerville said. "We're just--"
She fired again.
"Okay!" he said. "Stop shooting! We'll leave."
Silence from inside.
Somerville put his hands over his head, but he didn't drop his shotgun.
"We're going ma'am," he said. "We won't bother you anymore. If you ever do need help just--"
"I don't need your help!"
Somerville motioned us back to the cars.
As we walked back, Somerville said in a low voice, "We'll pull down the block and come back on foot--go in through the back of the house."
"What for?" Jen said.
"She can't stay," he said. "They'll be back."
"That's her decision," Jen said.
"There are not enough healthy people around for us to allow idiots to make their own decisions," he said. "It's for her own good."
Jen stopped at the car and faced Somerville.
"I left a friend this morning, because he made the same decision," she said. "His damn basement was full of them things. If I left him, then I'm leaving her. If she wants to stay, let her. We can come back and check on her in a few days. Maybe she'll change her mind."
"It's a bad decision," Somerville said.
"Yeah," she said.
"Let's head back to the court square," I said. "I want to check out that building again."
Somerville looked back at the blue house then got in his truck.
Jen and I led the way back to the square.
I was relieved to see the one-legged man in the exact spot and position in which we'd left him. We pulled around the building and went in through the now unlocked front door.
It was a large room with a black and white tile floor. There was a counter in the back of the room and a couple of display cases against one wall, but otherwise the place was empty. The entrance to the stairs was in the back.
"Let's split into two groups," Somerville said. "Sara and I will go look in the antique store, and you two search this side. The building has three floors that we know of, but we'll check for a basement and roof access. If there are survivors in here, we need to find them."
As we approached the stairs, I noticed a yellow business card on the counter. The name on the card was Frankie Jakes--a real estate leasing agent. Then I saw a purse in the floor behind the counter. There was a McDonald's coffee cup on its side next to it. The coffee was spilled out forming a dark little evaporated puddle around its mouth. I opened the purse and looked in the wallet for the driver's license. It was the woman upstairs. The name on the license said Frances Ann Jakes.
"Maybe the person she was showing the place to is still inside," I said, handing the card to Somerville.
"Let's hope so," he said.
We separated into two groups at the second floor landing.
Jen stepped into the room full of furniture and stopped at Ms. Jakes' body.
Jen didn't mention the corpse.
"Did you search this room?"
"No, actually, I didn't make it in any farther than this window."
We stepped around the body and wound our way through the furniture to the window on the courthouse side of the building.
Frankie hadn't been sick the whole time. It looked like she'd been hiding here for a little while. There was a spot on the floor beneath the window where she'd made herself a pallet out of a couple of antique quilts. She'd slept there at least one night. In the corner near the old bathtub was a drawer from a piece of furniture. She'd used that as a toilet. The only sign that she had anything to eat was a Snickers wrapper.
I felt even sadder for her than I had before. Jen stepped on the quilts and looked out the window.
"It must have been horrible to look out there and see all those things waiting in the street," she said. "No way out. Nobody to help."
"Let's look on the third floor," I said, eager to get out of the room.
We took the stairs to the third floor. There was a door on the landing accessing it, but it was locked. Jen knocked.
"Anyone in there?"
She knocked again.
"I'll go up the fire escape and see what I can see," I said.<
br />
I went back down to the second floor, did my best not to step on Ms. Jakes, then out the window, and back up to three.
There were no curtains on the third floor windows. I cupped my eyes and pressed my face to the glass. The room was completely empty except for a small table lamp sitting in the floor next to the door. I broke the window with the rifle and climbed inside. I opened the door for Jen, but she wasn't there.
"Jen?"
I found her down on the second floor landing talking with Somerville. She looked up at me as I came down the stairs.
"They found another woman," Jen said. "But we'll have to carry her."
"Let's carry her out, then," I said.
"She's really heavy," Somerville said. "I don't know if we can carry her down the stairs."
"What happened to her?"
"I don't know. Sara found her in a back room. She's not conscious, and her ankle is bruised and swollen."
"I don't mean to sound callous," I said, "but can we take care of her even if we get her out?"
"We can't just leave her," Somerville said.
Sara cleared her throat.
"Maybe a sled? We could get her down the stairs like that."
Somerville and Jen looked at her with confused expressions, but I knew what she was getting at.
"Okay," I said. "There are some old beds in here. If we can get her on one of the headboards we can slide her down the stairs on it. We could tie something to it to lower her down slowly. But once she's down there, we'll need a way to get her in the car. Then after that....I don't know.
She was a big woman, but not that big. Maneuvering down the stairs with her would have been difficult, but once down, I didn't see any reason why the four of us couldn't carry her to the car.
Jen and Sara got the old quilts from the other room.
The King of Clayfield - 01 Page 13
