Paul stared out the window, ready for more if she was, heart pounding beneath his heavy coat.
Sophia lowered her gun, a long breath streaming from her red lips. “I told you I had a bad feeling about this place.”
He turned back to the dead farm kid on the floor. Paul was positive they would be okay this far out in the middle of nowhere but apparently the middle of nowhere was just as unsafe as everywhere else. After all, there were three hundred and twenty million people in this country alone.
Chapter Two
TWO DAYS BEFORE OUTBREAK
The Friday night crowd went wild when Paul took the stage, punching their fists into the air and rattling the rafters with their enthusiastic screams. They knew him as much as they knew Lars Ulrich and it was a hell of a rush each and every time, a perk of the job. With a cordless mic hanging in his hand, Paul assumed the front of the massive stage and rested a black boot on a monitor, scanning the sea of black staring back at him inside Wells Fargo Arena. His silence only made them grow louder, more restless. They knew what time it was. They’d been waiting for this all week and he was about to give it to them. Most radio jocks would’ve opened their stupid mouths by now and stepped on the moment but not Paul. No, Paul waited for them to get louder without a single word, making eye contact with each and every hell raiser in the house. The crowd roared with anticipation.
Sometimes less was more.
Satisfied with their passion, Paul brought the microphone to his lips and spoke in a calm voice. “You got anything left in the tank, Des Moines?”
The crowd screamed louder, twenty thousand pairs of bloodshot eyes all on him – including the blue pair belonging to a pretty blond with huge tits in the front row. She waved to Paul and he filled his lungs with a deep breath.
“I can’t hear you!”
The crowd roared again, vibrating the metal scaffolding and shaking the floor.
“Alright, I hear ya. I’m standing right here, for Christ’s sake. What’re you people, drunk?” They cheered and Paul let them settle down before speaking again. “Listen, it is an honor to stand before you today and introduce one of the greatest American rock bands of all time, and I have just one favor.” Sticking an index finger into the air, he linked eyes with the pretty blonde in the front row. “Make em feel at home, Des Moines, and please welcome, Blackened recording artists, Metallicaaaaa!”
The crowd orgasmed and Paul left the stage, receiving a sweet head nod from James Hetsfield on the way out that Paul would never forget. A long-haired roadie swung a flashlight ahead of him as the two sinuously navigated the darkened ramps and taped down wires running like veins across the backstage flooring. A long guitar chord ripped in his ears, making the crowd cry out louder than Paul could ever get them to. The band’s manager fist-bumped him just before he slipped into a winding concrete tunnel. Paul waved to the roadie and kept going, pulse racing with something no drug could ever touch.
Back in his station’s sky box, coworkers and friends high-fived him to Wherever I May Roam. Finding a patch of carpeted wall to lean against, he checked his phone to see that Sophia had made it okay to a small business seminar in Minneapolis for the weekend. He began texting her back when someone stuck a cold can of beer in his face, blocking the screen. He looked up into a pretty pair of hazel eyes and smiled.
“Thanks, Bec,” he said, cracking the can open and stealing a look down Rebecca’s double tank top – black on white. Falling somewhere between a C-cup and a D-cup, he guessed they were real. Real nice.
Rebecca tossed a sweet smelling river of black hair over her shoulder and leaned against the wall next to him. “You have such great stage presence.”
He cheered her with the beer. “Liquid courage, my lady.”
Her eyes glittered under the sky box lights when she smiled. “Were you ever in a band?” she asked, her left breast brushing against his arm, flushing his side with heat.
“No, and that’s for the best.”
In a shiny pair of red fuck-me pumps, she stood at nearly eye level with him, peering into his soul. “So what’s the plan for after the show?”
Paul glanced out into the arena, stage lights flickering across the standing crowd below. Under his breath, he cursed Dan for picking the worst night of the year to work late at the mall. Paul needed a reverse-wingman to stop him from acting upon the knot of need tightening in his gut. His eyes glided across Rebecca’s plump breasts again, heart pounding at just the thought of it. “Not sure what we’re doing yet.”
Chapter Three
DAY SIX
Dan leaned against the farmhouse front door, peering out the peephole with one eye closed. “Man, that is one big dead dude,” he said, jerking Paul from his thoughts.
Carla’s wide eyes cased the room and landed on Paul. “Why is this happening? And if you tell me everything happens for a reason I’ll smack you.”
“Terrorists,” Dan said bleakly, turning to face them. “Or the rapture.”
Carla frowned. “So we got left behind? But we go to church every other Sunday!”
Paul leaned in the doorway to the kitchen and scratched at the stubble on his neck, keeping his back to the dead kid as much as possible because it was easier that way.
Carla turned to Sophia for an explanation but she was too busy slouching in a dog hair-covered recliner to notice, staring distantly into the smoldering fireplace they put out just before dusk. So far, the farm kid was the youngest any of them had put down and Paul could see the gravity of it weighing on his wife’s shoulders. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, intestines twisting into wet knots. These were good people making an honest living and didn’t deserve to go out like this. No one did. The more he grew accustomed to the horror show confronting them on a daily basis, the more the whole thing pissed him off. Anger danced with sorrow and it was anger’s turn to lead. Fucking shit!
“We should leave.” Carla gripped Matt and Mike on the couch like someone might steal them out from under her nose. Both boys shook beneath a hand knitted afghan and it was hard to tell if they were cold or scared to death. Probably a lot of both.
Paul crossed over to the front windows and carefully peeled the dingy drapes back. The full moon above painted the snow-encrusted landscape with an angelic glow, leaving pockets of shadows hugging the tall pines and peeling barn. At least it had stopped snowing. “It looks clear.”
“Well, we can’t stay here! Not with that... thing in the kitchen,” Carla barked. “Plus the window is broken!”
“It’s too dark and snowy to clear another place tonight.” Paul let the drape fall back into place, struggling to restrain his voice. “If more come, we’ll take off in the Jeep.”
Dan jerked his jittery gaze from a living room window to upstairs, like he’d just heard something again. He reminded Paul of when they rented an old house on Saylorville Lake right after college. It was the perfect place to launch their trusty Mark Twain ski boat and didn’t take long to figure out why the rent was so dirt cheap. After spotting a few beady eyed mice sneaking around the house, Dan started setting traps like he was on Scooby-Doo. Eventually, the mice, more or less, disappeared but Dan always thought he saw something scurrying across the kitchen floor or hiding under the couch. He was like that now, seeing things, hearing things, eyes rising to the ceiling even though they’d already rechecked every square foot upstairs.
Paul set a hand on his shoulder, making Dan jump. “It was just some snow sliding off the roof. Relax.”
“What if those things heard the gunfire?” Carla asked, pressing the point. “Let’s just get in the car and go!”
Paul bit his tongue and reloaded his sidearm. “I say we stick around and see what happens.”
“See what happens?” Carla’s soccer-mom hairdo bounced when she cocked her head to one side. “Excuse me, but I have two young boys to think about here, Paul, and I’d rather not just leave it up to chance and see what happens!”
“We all have two young boys to think a
bout now, Carla,” he said curtly, holstering his flat black Beretta PX4 Storm. “I have a wife and best friend to think about as well.”
Carla opened her mouth but thought better of it and turned her pointed glare to a window over a messy desk. “This place isn’t safe,” she muttered under her breath.
Paul groaned and tried to think of a nice way to tell her she was free to leave anytime she fucking wanted, just not in his truck. Mike and Matt drew air through gaping mouths, round eyes locked on Paul. He noticed Dan staring at him as well. They all were. Paul’s brown eyes darted back to Matt and Mike. They were so young. It wasn’t fair. They should be building snowmen and drinking hot chocolate; not covering their ears and screaming when Sophia shoots some random farm kid in the kitchen of some stranger’s house.
Paul let out an exhausted sigh. “We’ll board up the window and leave at dawn.”
Carla opened her mouth to protest.
“We’ll be fine,” he cut her off, tapping the nylon holster strapped around his right thigh. “We’re not carrying Nerf guns here. Try to get some rest for tomorrow. We’ll need it.”
Carla’s jaw came unhinged. Her eyes toured the others before falling back on Paul. “That’s your plan? Board up the window?”
His face soured. “Do you really want to drag your two boys out there into the dark? The cold? It’s suicide and you know it!” He paused to lower his voice. “Look, I get it. I don’t want to stay here either, but we probably just took out the closest neighbors around. We will be fine. I promise.”
Other than an incredulous huff, Carla didn’t respond. She planted a kiss on her boys’ stocking caps, bravely staving off the tears for their sake. She reminded Paul of his own mom. After he and Sophia abandoned their dream home to rescue his mom on the way out of town, his mother had been panic-stricken as well. What mom wouldn’t be? Then she got sick. So sick, she didn’t even want to crochet anymore and she loved to crochet! With her cat softly growling under the bed, he remembered her telling him about the flu shot she got at the pharmacy the day before. Two days later, she shut her eyes and stopped breathing, the cat still hiding beneath the bed.
Hiding like they are now, with the Devil snapping at their heels.
Paul turned his attention back to the window, wondering if there were others like them out there. He shuddered when he thought about out there because out there is where the full moon cast tangled shadows of withered branches upon the pearl white snow. Out there, even the shadows reached for you. His glowing reflection swallowed thickly in the glass. During the first few days of the pandemic, the majority of the zombies they’d seen on the news were children and the elderly, which played perfectly into Paul’s flu-shot theory. When the government and medical communities started dishing out H1N1 warnings like white cake at a wedding reception, the young and the old had been the first to get in line. They’d also been the first to turn, but that was changing. Case in point: The repairman, who was probably close to thirty-five.
Paul took the family portrait into the kitchen, trying to piece together a grisly puzzle in his mind that, in the end, would never make a lick of difference. It didn’t matter what caused it because it was too late to stop it now. That ship had sailed. He held the picture over the broken window to check the fit, staring into the father’s probing eyes. With some nails and a hammer he found in the basement, Paul attached the portrait over the broken window with the family facing outside. The picture wouldn’t stop much but the wind from getting in but it was nice not to have to look into those eyes anymore.
Back in the living room, he knelt next to Sophia in the recliner and placed a hand on her leg. His swollen brain searched through endless combinations of reassuring words, each one sounding worse than the one before it. “Hey, you know you had to do that right?”
She stared past him with unfocused eyes, lower lip quivering. “He was just a little boy,” she said faintly, wiping a tear from her cheek with the back of her glove.
“He used to be, baby, but he was gone before we got here. One of us could’ve been killed or infected if you hadn’t protected us like that.” In spite of his careful choice of words, they still fell on deaf ears. Paul hung his head. They would need her back in the game by morning or next time they might not be so lucky.
Chapter Four
After setting the dead kid behind a small garden shed, Paul and Dan took a long look around with the moonlight reflecting off the freshly fallen snow. Not counting the monsters hiding in the shadows, it was beautiful. Peaceful. From here you would never know the industrialized world was busy collapsing.
Dan jerked his head to a swath of bushy pines. “Did you hear that?”
“No,” Paul replied, pulling his coat up over his neck and jogging for the backdoor like vampires might swoop down next. And at this point, anything was possible. Once back inside the kitchen, they locked the door and tried shaking off the cold clinging to their clothes like smoke.
“I can’t feel my fingers anymore,” Dan said, removing his gloves and blowing into his cupped hands. “I’m serious, man. This shit hurts.”
“Let me see.” Paul lit up Dan’s hands with the flashlight, examining his fingertips for signs of frostbite. “Do you wanna go turn the heat on in the Jeep for a few minutes? Thaw out some more water while you’re in there.”
“By myself? No thanks.” He rubbed his hands together. “Plus we’re low on gas.”
“Jesus Christ,” Paul whispered. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because we were kind of busy rescuing a family, and it was getting dark. We’ll siphon something in the morning.”
Paul nodded and went back into the kitchen to mop a towel around the bloodstained floor with his snowy boot. Dan grabbed more towels from a linen closet and helped Paul rub red circles into the cracked flooring. They worked in silence, listening to Carla tell Sophia she was a divorced thirty-six year-old who had watched two neighbors murder her parents right before her very eyes.
“That is horrible,” Sophia said softly.
Paul stopped the towel. It was good to hear her consoling voice again.
“My parents used to play bridge with them every week too!” Carla laughed like she was recalling some funny moment at the grocery store earlier in the week. “My ex lives in California and after the phones went dead I had no idea what to do. Hell, even Bill O’Reilly had no idea what to do, which was a first!” She punctuated the statement with another nervous cackle that made Paul and Dan swap a heavy glance. Carla’s laughter faded into a thick lull. The wind whistled in the silence stretching between the two rooms and when Carla resumed her horrid tale she spoke in a much graver tone, one that sent chills down Paul’s spine.
“By the time we worked up the courage to leave my parents’ house, those things were all over the place. Luckily, my mom’s minivan was parked inside the garage.” She paused for a passing sniffle. “And thanks to my dad, bless his heart, that man never let a vehicle get under half a tank. Said it was irresponsible, but personally I think he was obsessive-compulsive. Either way, the power was out and the garage door wouldn’t open so I drove through it. The boys were screaming so loud I thought my head was going to explode.”
Paul surveyed the kitchen floor they’d managed to reduce to a pink spot, wondering how many other people got lucky like Carla and her boys. There had to be others who parked in the right spot, or owned the right fence, or had the right weapons. It was in the odds.
“It felt like we were running over telephone poles when I backed down the driveway,” Carla continued in a cold whisper. “But they weren’t telephone poles; they were my parents’ neighbors and friends.” She clapped a hand over her mouth, muffling her words. “Some of them younger than Matthew.”
Paul kicked the bloody towel off to the side and checked the solar powered G-Shock on his wrist. It’d been one hour since the repairman and no one else had followed in his lumbering tracks. They would spend the night in the living room on pillows and blankets, together. In
this world, no one goes alone. Paul’s biggest fear was a group of the undead surrounding them while they slept, entombing them inside the farmhouse with its dusty standard-definition TV and Hummel figurines. In anticipation of just such a scenario, he parked the Jeep in a ready-to-go position outside the back door. If more than a handful or two showed up at once, they would carve a path to the rig and take their chances elsewhere. It was all about increasing the odds in their favor. Every step, or misstep, counted.
When Paul entered the living room, Carla sat up straighter and swiped at her wet cheeks. “Thank you again for saving our lives. All of you.” She placed a hand over her heart. “If you wouldn’t have stopped, I don’t know what…”
“We’re just glad everyone is okay,” Dan said, dropping into a pea green armchair.
Carla’s glassy eyes bounced to Paul. “So, we’re going to the ocean, huh?”
He sat on the arm of Sophia’s recliner, wondering if Carla invited herself along for the ride or if Sophia extended the offer while he and Dan were outside disposing of the dead kid’s body. Not that it mattered; they would never leave them here on their own, but it bugged him just the same. “I figure we’ll keep heading south on I-35, avoid the big cities along the way and put our backs to the ocean where we can figure out our next move without freezing our butts off.”
A Little More Dead Page 2
