Loose Ends: A Zombie Novel

by Jay Wilburn

  It was time to run.

  Doc braced his foot against the center lock bar between the doors and heaved back again. I lost my grip and fell away from him. The door swung out and Doc was pulled out with them. They let go of the door and grabbed at his clothes tearing his shirt. He slammed the door back against their fingers between the door and the frame. It still wouldn’t latch.

  I saw one finger wiggling over the latch. I poked at it and it started wiggling faster. I kicked down on it to try to slip it out until the finger snapped off the hand and fell inside. The door pulled open again revealing snapping teeth. I grabbed the handle again under Doc and braced both my feet against the center post.

  The zombies let go of the door and pressed their faces into the gap. The door slipped out of the hands of the couple that were still holding on and slammed closed and latched. We held on as we heard them pounding on the outside. I slowly let go expecting the door to swing open again, but it held.

  “Jesus,” Doc said, “Their lack of strategy finally fell on our side of the luck fence for once.”

  He ran his hands through his hair in the dark hallway. Light was only coming faintly through long windows in the doors on each side of the hallway going down and from the far end of the hall reflecting off the surface of the banks of lockers.

  I stared down the hallway as the pounding continued on the door behind me.

  “All the doors should be locked,” Doc said. “Should be is a bitch though. Dead people should be in the ground and quiet, right?”

  I kept staring down the hall as Doc felt around his arms and looked through the new tears in his clothes. I looked back at him.

  He called over the pounding, “Are you bit or scratched, Mutt?”

  I shook my head. He looked down at the small tears in his pants.

  He mumbled, “My God, I can’t even tell. Those damn thorns nearly ate me up before the zombies did. Can you believe all that? I’m going to need a flow chart to remember all the stuff we survived to get here. The store and the truck and the tracks and the crossing and the bridge and the fence and the scratch and the neighborhood … Do you believe that biker with the ax? Have you ever seen anything like that before? Have you?”

  I shrugged.

  Doc continued over the pounding. “I haven’t. Then, between those fences. You saved my ass more than once, Mutt. I’m glad I picked you as a partner back at …”

  He fell silent for a moment and looked down at the splinters deep in the heel of his hand.

  He added, “Are you good with flowcharts, Mutt?”

  I shook my head. I had no idea what he was talking about with flowcharts.

  He said, “Well, we have to do some wound licking now. And not to put too fine a point on it, but my backside is burning from some unsavory leakage that needs attending.”

  He pushed open the crash bar to the door behind him without even looking. I expected to see it open to the outside and for the zombies to pour in on us, but it was just a stairwell. It was lit from above and it was empty except for some orange cones and a stack of broken ceiling tiles. There was another set of doors that led outside from the stairwell. They had long slits of wired glass. Zombies were pressing their scarred faces against them and pounding the metal outside as they watched us climb the stairs. There was a skylight casting light down on us through the center.

  Doc’s voice echoed as he called out, “Speaking of licking did you see that crazy creeper in the rave shirt with the torn up hand? That was like something that hatched out of a pod. I bet he was a creep in real life. I wish I had gotten his noggin instead of clipping his collar.”

  As we approached the doors at the top, I started trying to figure out how to shut up Doc. He was acting like we had stepped into a zombie-proof fortress instead of a giant, sprawling building we hadn’t searched.

  He added, “Yeah, and I missed because I think one of them threw a freaking baseball at my head … and hit me dead on. If they are figuring out how to use weapons, we are toast.”

  He was still talking as we walked out on the second floor. I kept scanning through doors and in open bathrooms. We passed dark halls as we walked through the rows of double lockers top and bottom. I looked for names, but these only had numbers. I started thinking about the cards in my pocket again. He kept talking.

  “Do you think those idiots outside will figure out how to turn that key I left? Surely not,” he said. “I mean, they will just keep pounding. Those doors will hold. That key barely turned at all. They’d never figure it out. I’d bet my life on it. I am betting our lives on it. Have you ever heard of the infinite monkeys on typewriters theory, Mutt?”

  He looked back at me. I just shook my head. I didn’t even understand the question. He looked back forward and kept talking.

  He said, “Never mind. You wouldn’t want to know. They’ll never open those doors, said the men who built the Titanic, right?”

  There was that stupid ship reference again, I thought.

  Doc pulled on the door to one of the rooms. He walked down a bank of lockers and tried the next door. The sign next to the second door over the Braille read, J. Baker.

  Doc said, “I hadn’t considered how to get inside here. Maybe the janitor’s closet? We should probably talk less, Mutt. There might be others around. I haven’t even reloaded the gun yet. I’m pretty sure the zombies came after school was out, but night workers might have been in the building or left a door propped or something.”

  We walked down the hall farther. He opened the revolver and dumped out the shells in the floor as we walked. He dug through his pocket and reloaded as we rounded a corner in the sunlight. There was a mural of kids climbing a mountain under the windows.

  He pushed open a door at the end of a short hallway. He grabbed a ring of keys off a hook and handed them to me. He pulled a couple tee shirts off a pile on one of the shelves. He held one up to me. It had a tiger in sunglasses on the front throwing a football and read Marthea High School – AAAA Regional Champs in an arc over the tiger’s head.

  I didn’t think sunglasses were what people wore when they played football. I thought about the biker having them broken by Doc’s ax. It seemed like a ball hitting the frames would hurt their faces too. He pulled a couple pairs of blue, warm-up pants off the shelf .

  We went back to J. Baker’s door. Doc went through about twenty keys before he finally got it open and we went inside.

  There were black tables attached to the floor with sinks at each one. Thin metal stools were pulled up to one side. There was a long counter at the front, a white board, a projector mounted to the ceiling, and a pull down screen. This seemed like an odd set up for a room to watch movies. There were cabinets all along the walls. There was other equipment at the tables and along the walls that I didn’t understand.

  Doc immediately went to a door in the back of the room and began going through the keys again. I looked out the window at the lawn below us. The dead were amassing outside about thirty or forty bodies thick fanning out halfway across the lawn pressing against the doors we had fought to get through and then fought to close.

  Doc said, “Why does a science room need a different key for every cabinet and door?”

  I looked at him and then looked back outside the window. He finally got the door to open. He slapped the light switch inside a couple times and then laughed at himself. He pulled a box off the counter and dropped it so that the door was propped open. It burst open when it hit the floor and the top three books slid out of the side into the room outside the closet.

  Doc called out to me. “There is a better first aid kit under the counter by the board, Mutt. See if you can dig it out. I’ll find what I need in here and then we’ll go about bandaging and cleaning up. There are some medicines for stomachs back here. We’ll have to decide, if we want to risk it.”

  I got the kit as he fumbled around in the closet. I sat on one of the stools and waited. My eyes drifted closed even though I was hurt, itchy, and uncomfortable. Doc sta
rted cussing and slamming things. He started dumping boxes out in the floor and kicking things around. I heard him slip and bump into a cabinet door. There was more cursing.

  I was startled awake by breaking glass.

  All the bottom floor windows were the same, plain glass. There were hundreds of them out there trying to beat their way into the building. We were concerned about them learning how to operate a key and lock while the windows all around the building were made of glass.

  I knocked the stool over with a metal crash on the tile. I whipped my head around and saw the doors closed and the windows intact. I wasn’t sure if Doc had locked the one on the right of the board back when we unlocked the room.

  Doc called out, “Sorry, Mutt, I’m fine.”

  I heard glass shards being pushed around the floor in the closet. I walked into the doorway and looked at the mess. He was swiping the broken glass under the edge of the cabinets using the side of his new sneakers that were striped with green, grass smears. There was clutter all around the floor. The stacks of plastic bins had typed labels and inventories on the outside edge. A few were open and there were bottles, gauze, and few other items stacked on the counter. There were also plastic jugs labeled as distilled water.

  The cardboard boxes that weren’t torn open or dumped out were stacked along the walls and labeled with black, magic marker. Most had Baker on the side. A few had Trasker on the side in different handwriting. Doc was focused on the Trasker boxes.

  He said, “Damn, Baker, moving shit around for no good reason. He was a bad teacher, a bad friend, and unorganized.”

  Doc threw another box. I picked up one near the door and set it on the counter next to me. The side was split and several pamphlets on lab safety poured out of the corner.

  Doc said, “Don’t worry about that stuff, Mutt. I’ll give up in a minute.”

  I kicked a couple books by the door out of my way so I could step back outside. They were labeled with subsequent years, they had the school name, and the sunglass tiger. The volumes on the spines read 34, 35, and 36. The books were titled, The Marthea Marquee.

  I set them up on one of the science tables and picked up my overturned stool. Doc kept rummaging.

  He sang quietly, “There are loved ones in the glory … whose precious forms we often miss … when they close your Earthly story … will you join them in their bliss?”

  He crumpled papers and tossed another box in the corner. Baker’s boxes were in the closet, J. Baker was on the door, and Baker was a bad friend. Doc’s singing reminded me of digging through a trunk and finding John Baker on documents in the mystery house.

  I opened one of the books and flipped through the pages. Most of the pictures were black-and-white. They showed students sitting at desks, playing sports, and making faces. The school was divided into four teams including, freshmen, juniors, seniors, and sophomores. I knew what sophomoric meant. I knew what junior was and seniority. The seniors got the most pages and some color pictures.

  I found an index in the back. I looked up Baker. There was a teacher named John Baker. They had a picture of him at a football game and standing in the cafeteria. There was a shot of him just standing facing the camera among the other teachers. He was the chemistry teacher. He was pudgy and had a round face. He was smiling. I didn’t recognize him from any of the bodies at the mystery house, but those bodies were decayed.

  There was no Trasker and no John Brown in the index for volume 36.

  Doc sang, “In the joyous … days of childhood … we’re often told … of wondrous love … pointing to a dying savior … now they dwell with him above …”

  I pictured myself climbing out a broken window and fighting a zombie quietly, so that the man that called himself John Brown wouldn’t discover me. I pictured myself climbing out a window as my mom screamed for me to go.

  I closed volume 36 and opened volume 35. John Baker was only on one page. I opened to the teacher pages. He was wearing the same shirt with a different tie and he was still the chemistry teacher. There was still no Collin Trasker or John Brown. I closed volume 35 and opened volume 34.

  Doc yelled out, “I got you!”

  I dropped the book and it popped loudly as it hit the floor.

  He walked out and held up his aluminum bar over his head. He just stared at me and then held it out to show me. I didn’t get what he was trying to tell me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the book with the living John Baker that possibly died in Doc’s mystery house.

  Doc shook his head and then swung the bar through the air in the room. It whistled as it cut the air in ways I had heard a hundred times before on this trip. He twirled it in his hands and almost dropped it. He poked the end at the tile floor and pretended to lean on it like a cane.

  “I thought you would be more impressed, Mutt,” Doc said. “I feel like my old self again. Nothing cracks a zombie skull like old faithful here.”

  He picked it up and kissed the metal.

  He said, “That will be the last time I get to put my lips on her before she goes into service, right?”

  Then it hit me that he had dropped his aluminum bar back in the store parking lot. This was another one. He knew it was here. This was another mystery room. I started wondering if the doors opened from the inside without the keys like the ones back at the Complex had. I became aware that Doc was closer to me than I was to the door.

  He stepped even closer.

  He was looking at the floor. Doc poked at the book with the end of his pole.

  He said, “Mutt, what are you reading? You find anything good in there?”

  Doc leaned down and picked up volume 34 as he stood directly in front of me. He set it on the table, opened it, and began leafing through the pages one by one.

  He said, “You find some cheerleader spreading her young, muscular legs for you captured in mid air? The senior section is in color, by the way, if you want to see what color they made the bloomers. You missed out on all that since high school closed down for good when you were just a kid, huh, Mutt?”

  He kept flipping. He paused on the cheerleader pages. Then, he kept turning. He was standing next to my knees facing the table. I couldn’t get up without knocking over the stool. I saw the two guns stuck in his belt just under his hands. One of them was loaded. He had a hunting knife to match the one just under my hand. Both our knives were marred with zombie filth. A scratch would be deadly in time. If one of us were killed by them anywhere except the brain, we would come back.

  As if he were reading my mind, Doc pulled his hunting knife and looked at me. I moved my fingers, but didn’t dare to make the grab. He was even closer to my face now.

  Doc lifted the book once he turned to the teachers’ pages. I felt cold inside. He was going to kill me for snooping on him and he was going to show me what I had been looking for before he did it. As I felt nothing, but icy fear, I remembered my mother whispering to me under the bed that everything would be okay as long as I didn’t say a word. That had been my first and only memory of her for all these years. Now this terrifying journey was unlocking more. I remembered her telling me to not use the baseball because it dented the house … and it might wake up my sister.

  I nearly fell off the stool. I wasn’t even seeing Doc anymore until he lifted the knife in front of my face. He used it to point to a picture I had seen twice already. John Baker’s round face was smiling at me again from over Doc’s filthy knife. He had on the same shirt, but a third tie peeking out from the point of the knife. The caption said that he was the physical science teacher in volume 34.

  Doc said, “The man of the house … the man of many houses, it would seem. The bastard stole my wife after I got fired this school year. You won’t find poor, old John Brown anywhere in here though. You see?”

  He waved the knife in front of my face and around Baker’s picture over the other teachers on the page. He kept holding the book up for me as he lowered the blade down to his side. It hovered over my knee and a few inches from my gut.


  He said, “I was a cafeteria cook. They didn’t put us in the yearbooks. I got accused of some stuff I didn’t do and then I got bounced. My cooking wasn’t that good back then anyway.”

  He smiled in a way that reminded me of when the zombies’ lips drew back right before they bit. I remembered him joking with Chef about being a chemistry teacher. He had said that we could tell from his cooking.

  “You can probably tell from my cooking,” he repeated for me.

  I bet in that moment that I would find Collin Trasker, if I looked, and his picture would look younger, but familiar to me. I scanned over to the bottom right of the opposing page of teacher pictures, but the last one on this spread was Adam Gilroy, the cafeteria manager. Collin Trasker, the chemistry teacher for volume 34, must have been a couple pages over.

  Doc slammed the book making me jump at the noise. My chair squeaked on the floor as the wind blew in my face. He picked up the three yearbooks and threw them back into the closet. He hauled out a couple jugs of water.

  He said, “Help me with this stuff, Mutt, I feel dirtier than a fresh zombie.”

  I got up and walked toward him on watery legs. I tried not to shake as I took the jugs from him and walked them over to one of the tables. He handed me several cases and loose items as I ported them from the closet to the tables.

  After the last one, he shoved the broken carton of yearbooks away from the door and let the door swing closed. He fumbled through the keys until he found the one to the door. He locked up his mess inside and tested the handle twice. Then, the key snapped.

  He turned around and held the ring up to show me the broken end of the key.

  Doc said, “Man, we’re having a time with keys today, aren’t we?”

  I looked at the closet door behind him and shrugged.

  We set up the equipment for filters and the boiling of the water. It wasn’t from a pond, but ten years in a plastic jug was a problem. We couldn’t get a fire going from the alcohol bottles in the burners.