Maria leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not going anywhere with a murderer.”
Calvin rapidly shook his head, folding his arms across his chest as well. “Yeah, we don’t usually hang with killers.”
“We’re all killers now!” Paul shot up from the chair, rage tightening his eyes. “What do you think I am?”
Calvin shed a timid smile. “Killing those dead things out there doesn’t really make you a killer killer.”
Paul’s glare turned icy, chest rising and falling beneath his black t-shirt. “I’m not talking about those things out there, Calvin.”
“Oh.” He cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter. “W-What’re you talking about?”
Wendy dropped a cigarette into a Diet Coke can, making a hiss. “The bottom line is, we need all the gunslingers we can get and Billy is a gunslinger. I’d rather take my chances with him against those things than without him.” She stopped to gauge their expressions, smoke seeping from her lips. “He won’t hurt us.”
“Oh, how do you know, Paulina Gretzky?” Curtis fanned a hand through the air at her. “Did you have a little séance in the bathroom while you were taking a dump?”
“Curtis stop.” Stephanie took off her combat boots and straightened her socks. “Billy’s wife hurt him bad and we could never hurt him like that. We barely even know him.”
A bitter laugh squirted from her brother. “Well, we’re getting to know him better every day now, aren’t we?”
“Can I talk to you for a minute, Paul?”
Sighing, Paul followed Calvin across the mess hall, dragging his feet and dreading whatever what was about to come out of his mouth. Finding the picture of Billy’s dead wife already knocked the tiredness from him and they were losing precious time because at first light they were ghosts. And if they were going to travel twelve hours to a major shoot out, they would need to be somewhat clearheaded by the time they got there and getting zero sleep was just plain stupid.
Calvin stopped next to a table with their coats piled on it and rested his hands on his hips, trading glances with his wife across the room. “If you want us to come with you, that’s fine. But we can’t take Billy. I’m not going to give him the chance to rape and murder my wife while I’m tied to a pipe in the basement of some grain elevator.”
Paul’s face soured. “Huh?”
Folding his arms across his chest, he shifted his weight. “I’m cool with helping you save those people. I mean, I’ve basically been training for this my entire life on Playstation but I’m not about to let that guy around Maria.”
“Playstation?”
“Well, that and Walking Dead marathons, but the point is…”
Paul stepped in his face and looked down on him, his shadow falling over Calvin like a cold black wind. “This isn’t a game, Calvin, and it sure as hell isn’t a movie. A screwdriver isn’t going to do shit to those things out there!”
Calvin held his hands out and backed against the wall, an uneasy smile shaping his lips. “Actually, it’s a TV show but yeah, man, totally. I hear you, fo sho.”
Paul pointed to the locked double doors without taking his hardened eyes from Calvin. “Things will happen out there that will change you forever and there is no taking it back. There is no reset button.”
“I’m not afraid.”
Tipping his chin down, Paul’s voice fell to a grave whisper. “You will be, Calvin.”
Calvin shrunk against the wall and swallowed dryly. “We just want to do the right thing and be of some help, but this Billy guy is a flat-out…”
“Bees!”
Maria’s voice was high-pitched and laced with panic, cutting the room in two. Paul’s head snapped around to the two men in bloody fatigues standing in the open double doorway leading to the restrooms down the hall. Heart jerking, his eyes located the M4 on a table all the way across the room. Sinuously peeling the Beretta from the leg holster strapped to his thigh, he stomped closer to the skinny corpses, coming to a standstill when three more appeared behind them. Taking out the first two with pinpoint accuracy, he backpedaled when a half a dozen cadavers stumbled from the hallway and entered the cafeteria. A high-pitched shriek rang out behind the pack of undead, hurting Paul’s ears over the chorus of gunfire and screams going off around him. Widening his stance, he brought three more flesh-eaters to the floor, clearing a path for the fat woman standing behind them. Sprinting from the hall, she blazed past Paul and tackled Maria onto a table. Sliding across the smooth surface, it tipped, sending them careening into a wall. Calvin screamed out his wife’s name and took off running, handgun pumping in his fist.
Paul turned just in time to deflect a gray-haired man wearing stripes on his sleeves, redirecting the officer’s momentum into a table and chairs with a quick kick to the face. The man’s legs tangled with some chair legs, giving Paul plenty of time to blow the back of his head out through his mouth. On the other side of the room, a soldier pulled Rebecca’s arm to his pointy teeth. She screamed and tried to yank away. Wendy took aim at the man’s head but didn’t fire, swinging the gun back to the peeling mob shuffling closer instead. A burst of heavy gunfire peppered the air and Calvin released a painful sounding cry. Paul barely heard him over Rebecca’s screams as the man tore a chunk of flesh from her wrist. Veins dangled over his lips like Ramen noodles and Paul put a long-distance slug through his neck that left his head hanging by a thread. Calvin screamed Why? over and over and over again, pulling Paul’s panic-stricken gaze to the fat woman lying on top of Maria. He dashed over, terrified of what he would find.
“I shot her! I shot her!”
For a moment, he wasn’t sure who Calvin was referring to until he rolled the heavyset corpse off Maria. Recoiling, his eyes drew to the bullet hole in Maria’s left cheek.
“Shit!” Calvin turned and opened fire on the stream of undead funneling in from the restrooms, his entire body pulsating with each punishing round. “You fuckers!”
Paul noticed two stragglers in uniform disappear into the kitchen and heard Billy’s subsequent cries for help. “Shit,” he breathed, darting around the metal lunch line to find Billy backing away with his hands cuffed behind him. The man and woman limped closer, moaning like they were in constant pain and backing Billy up against a wire shelf stocked with pots and pans. Running to find an angle that wouldn’t get Billy killed with an errant shot like Maria, Paul wasted four rounds and dropped them at Billy’s feet.
Billy looked up, eyes bulging. “Holy fucking shit, that was so close,” he panted, nodding at Paul. “Unlock me, man. Please.”
Paul let a small key dangle from his fingertips and checked his six. “If I unlock you, you back me up on every plan I bring to the table from here on out.” His gaze tightened with his jaw. “And I mean every plan.”
Billy nodded vehemently. “I will. I swear to God.”
Paul studied him for a long moment, trying to see into his soul, trying to find the reins.
“Every plan, Paul! I will.”
“Turn around,” he said, unlocking the handcuffs and slipping them back onto his belt.
Billy rubbed his wrists, looking all around. “Where’s my gun?”
“I don’t know.” Paul knelt down and pulled a handgun from the camouflaged holster strapped to the dead man lying at their feet. He handed it to Billy but didn’t let go. “You better be cool, Billy.”
Billy’s fingers coiled around the grips. “I got your back. I do.”
He let go and Billy popped the magazine, examined it and slapped it back in before racking a load and pointing the gun at Paul’s face. Instinctively, Paul unsheathed his sidearm and aimed for Billy’s nose. “The fuck you doing?!”
Billy tucked his chin into his chest. “Get down!”
Paul ducked and Billy fired a round over his head. Spinning, Paul saw an elderly lady hit the tiles with a double thud that rattled the pots and pans on the wire shelf. Blood, thick and tar-like, ran from a hole beneath her
hairnet to the floor. The white apron tied around her blue dress was covered in red handprints and gave Paul the chills. He looked up from her bloodstained rubber gloves to meet Billy’s wide eyes. “Thanks.”
Billy nodded and followed him out into the cafeteria where at least a dozen corpses were still on their feet. Outside of a man wearing an electric company coat – caught in the wrong place at the wrong time – the dead were all military and all hungry as hell.
“Paul!”
He turned to find Rebecca leaning against a wall, trying to hold the veins and tendons inside her bleeding wrist.
“One of them got me!”
Before he could respond with something that didn’t even matter, someone grabbed him around the neck. He could smell the rot on the person’s breath just before his windpipe closed. Could feel the bone poking through the fingertips digging into his skin. A gunshot rang out, so loud it doubled his vision. Ears muffling, he turned to see Billy lower his newly acquired weapon. He gave Paul a quick wink before turning and shooting two older officers about to rip into Curtis. Curtis stared at Billy with a beleaguered look wrenching his face, momentarily paralyzed until Stephanie’s cry for help pulled him across the room.
Chapter Seven
Paul and Curtis stared up at the ceiling, studying the vent door hanging from its hinges in the women’s restroom. Amazement pulled on their faces like gravity because this was just as impossible as everything else. Corpses walking the Earth. Sophia dead. And stragglers using the ventilation system to access the mess hall. It was a recipe for depression if ever there was one but they didn’t have time for distractions like grief and crying. Not with this mess on their hands.
Paul’s eyes fell to the dead woman crumpled in front of the double sinks. “They’re getting smarter.”
“Yeah, but the real question is, how smart will they get?” Curtis whispered, afraid more were still up there.
His gaze rose to the broken vent again. It was so surreal, it took his brain a few clicks to catch up with his vision. “Looks like it gave under their weight. They got lucky this time.”
“When they start wearing night vision goggles, we’re really screwed.”
“The good news is, I bet they actually have some of those in the armory we can put to good use.”
“Some RPGs would be nice.”
“We take everything we can carry at dawn, grab some quick target practice right by the truck, and get the hell out of here.”
Curtis arched a sandy blond eyebrow at him. “You think it’s a trap?”
“Colorado?”
“They know we have weapons. We told them we were here.”
“We have to be ready for anything, but at this point, we also have to assume Brian was telling the truth. We can’t just let them die. We need them.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Paul tipped his head back and stared at the dangling vent door again. Part of the ceiling around the vent had broken under the girl’s dead weight, sending her crashing to the floor and throwing back the floodgates for the fiends crawling close behind. “How did we not hear them come in?”
“And why is that vent so fucking big?”
“Jesus Christ.” Paul rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Just when I think we’re getting a leg to stand on...”
Curtis studied the dead woman on the floor. She was young and had a big dent in the side of her head from where she met the concrete floor after a headfirst fall. “Yeah, this just upped the ante a little,” he said, taking a step back from the blood pooling around her head.
Exhaling a weary breath, Paul shifted in his bloody Adidas, sidearm jiggling against his right leg. “How did they even know to come in this way? I mean, how is that even possible? They’re…braindead.”
“I’m starting to think it’s all an act to lure us into a false sense of complacency.”
“You may be right.” Rubbing his chin, he blurred the dead woman’s mushy head into an inky blob. “Reminds me of this guy who hid in the attic of this house we crashed at somewhere in Texas”
“The Chevelle guy?”
He nodded. “The guy was definitely still firing on a few cylinders.”
“Wendy said he almost killed you and then you almost killed her and your butt-buddy, Dan.”
“I didn’t almost…” Paul blew out an irritated burst of air. “Sonofabitch snuck up on me when I was taking a nap.”
Curtis wiped blood from his face and flicked it onto the broken mirror above the sinks. “Things are like rats. They’ll find a hole to get in.”
“We should pack up and get the hell out of here right now before they come in through a cellar door or something we don’t know about.”
Curtis checked his watch. “Sun’ll be coming up in a couple hours. We should wait for the light.”
Paul sighed and turned back to the woman at their feet. Curtis was right. It was too dangerous to go anywhere in this world at night if you didn’t have to but the clock was ticking for that family in Colorado and who knew how many more ways there were to get inside the mess hall. The place was huge and just as foreign to him as all the other haunted houses and go-kart tracks they’d squatted at over the past month.
“What’re we going to do about Rebecca?”
Hanging his head, he stared at his shoes. Beecher’s Grocery whisked through his tired mind, sending a stabbing pain into his side. The twisted irony of the whole thing did not escape him. “I don’t know,” he said, walking away.
“Yes, you do, Paul.”
He stopped and slightly turned his head before continuing out into the cafeteria, where it was quiet and smelled like gunpowder and dead. Calvin sat in a far corner on the floor, slowly rocking Maria’s lifeless body in his bloodstained arms while Rebecca sobbed at a table with a towel pressed against her wrist. Curtis was right about her too; there was only one thing they could do to help her now and it sent a cold shiver running down his spine. Stephanie watched him from the other side of the room, long dark hair hanging in her face as she calmly reloaded her gun.
“You want me to do it, boss?” Billy whispered, standing off to the side with a foot resting on a chair. The police utility belt they took from the dead fat cop in Oklahoma was back on his waist and Paul barely looked at him as he passed by.
His legs were so numb it felt like he was gliding on an airport moving walkway and the closer he got to Rebecca, the more he wanted to turn and run. Wendy watched him slog by, looking away from his heated glower because this was her fault and she fucking knew it.
Stopping in front of Rebecca, his pulse thudded in his ears. The tablecloth of blood turned his stomach. “How are you?”
Looking up at him, fresh tears darkened the grime hiding her colorless face. Blood gathered around her arm on the table, running to the edge and dripping onto the floor. “Fucked.”
Pulling out a chair that scraped too loudly in the quiet sucking the air from the room, he sat down and clasped his hands together. “Can I take a look?”
She hesitated before pulling back the towel.
Paul tried not to grimace but it was impossible not to when he saw the mangled mess of severed flesh and nerves. It was a wonder she was even alive. If the virus didn’t get her, which it surely would, she would most definitely bleed out without immediate medical attention. His gaze landed on the open first aid kit on the table. Band-Aids and hydrogen peroxide. That was their medical care now and it was almost funny.
She pressed the towel back over the wound, blood pooling around her feet. “I’m scared Paul. This is really bad.”
“Everything is going to be fine. I promise.”
“He came out of nowhere. I didn’t even see him until it...”
“I know, I know. Just sit here and relax for a second. I’m going to get you some water.”
She chuckled, eyelids heavy and glassy like she just rolled in from an all-nighter.
Rising from the chair, he put his head down and trudged across the mess hall, curling his hands int
o fists as he went. “Can I talk to you?” he whispered without slowing.
Wendy followed him into the kitchen, stopping in front of a lifeless walk-in cooler. Kneeling down, he took the gun from the dead Guardswoman before standing tall and getting in Wendy’s face. His breath washed over her in warm waves, anger constricting his pupils.
“What the hell was that out there?”
Her brow creased. “What was what?” she whispered back.
He pointed to the wall of ovens separating them from the others out in the cafeteria. “You had that shot on Rebecca.”
“No, I didn’t,” she replied, taking a step back and tripping over the dead lunch lady’s legs.
He grabbed her hand and stopped her fall, yanking her hard against him. “I saw it, Wendy. You had a clear shot on that guy and didn’t take it.”
She tried to push away but he held on tight. “Paul, I didn’t have a clear shot and those things were almost on me.”
“Bullshit!” His face twisted in the dim light of a nearby lantern. “You let her get bit.”
A perfectly played shell-shocked expression slipped over her face. “Why are you doing this?”
Dead Series (Book 3): A Little More Alive Page 5
