Decay (Book 2): Humanity

by Locke, Linus

  A young man, a boy really, watched his father walking slowly in front of him. The father was barely visible through the smoke, and he couldn’t help but think this was going to end badly for them. He knew, at his young age of fourteen, that they were at every disadvantage here. He tried to talk his father out of coming. Telling him that they couldn’t win this battle here, but he is just a boy after all. What does he know about war?

  He felt something streak past him in the smoke. The streak was followed by a muffled scream. Soon there was another streak. Soon there was another scream. The boy’s heart pounded. He could feel it in his eye. Keeping his father in view, he kept walking forward, praying under his breath. God protect my family. The frozen grass crunched just to his left, and the scream was so close. Something sprayed his coat and jeans all down the left side of his body like a Super Soaker.

  Wiping at his side with a gloved hand, he brought the hand to his masked face. Blood. Blood had sprayed him. Just then he realized he had lost track of his father. He had walked on not realizing his son had stopped following. The boy ran forward in a panic. Searching and spinning, he knew his father couldn’t have made it far. Stepping on a soft, wet dirt pile in the field caused him to hit the ground hard, spraining his wrist.

  The boy lay on his back to catch his breath, lifted his head, and realized the dirt pile was his father’s body. The man’s face had been crushed into his skull, but the boy knew that terrible haircut. His mother had cut their hair–his father’s sandy blond was now streaked with blood and brain matter–in the only haircut she knew how to do. A terrible interpretation of Elvis’ hair that looked like it was done by a blind man.

  “Dad!” The boy’s scream came out slightly muffled. Then he saw the fiend ripping strips of flesh from his father’s abdomen. “DAD!” he screamed again. He raised his rifle, still really unsure of how to use it, and pulled the trigger. The round hit the fiends shoulder, irritating the dead man.

  The dead man leapt over the man’s body and tackled the boy, who fired every round from the rifle into the fiend’s dead face. His gray eyes bulged as the pressure built in his skull. Pulling the fiend away, the boy knelt by his dead father and cried. His cries were followed by rage. The people behind the wall were responsible for this, and they would pay.

  Grabbing his father’s rifle, the boy walked through the smoke toward the wall. He would single-handedly take them all down. Caring nothing for the fiends that lurked in the dense smoke, he marched. He marched until his feet hit pavement. He marched until his hands touched the wall that protected the animals that had locked themselves safely behind it. Following the wall along, he came to the hole stoppered by the silver trailer. The two bodies, or what was left of them, lay splattered across the concrete.

  The boy knew why they had been sent. One of them carried a bomb, and he would use it to blow this hole wide open and tear the throats out of each one of these bastards on the other side. After a minute of searching the gooey mess, he found the charge, a heavy wad of clay with a display wired into it. He climbed into the trailer, the smell of rot and gun smoke was so thick it penetrated his mask.

  He didn’t know how big this blast would be, but he estimated this block of C4 must weigh about five pounds if not slightly more. The boy knelt down in the trailer just on the other side of the wall and began to press the buttons on the display. Completely unsure of what he was doing, the boy never knew he died. The blast liquefied his body and turned his bones into powder. Metal from the trailer flew in every direction inside the wall, and the wall, already weak in that spot, collapsed.

  “Michael!” screamed Jonathan as he lost his brother in the explosion. He had been working to stop the water that had been flowing from the well when the explosion took down the wall. The elderly man that he had been working with was killed by a rivet from the trailer. It tore through his heart, splattering Jonathan with his warm blood. “MICHAEL!”

  The gunfire and smaller explosions continued on, producing a deafening roar that Jonathan could feel in his chest. He couldn’t even hear the splashes as he ran through the cold, ankle-deep pool that had filled half of the side yard. Jonathan ran toward the wall, ignoring his squishy boots and cold feet. Guillermo stepped out from the door on the front of the house and yelled to Jonathan as he ran by, but Jonathan heard nothing of what he said.

  “Michael!” he screamed again, this time using a temporary silence to his advantage.

  “I’m here!” Michael hollered back. He climbed over the rubble that used to be a thirty foot wide section of the wall. “I’m fine. We need to move another trailer up.” The twins stepped over several other bodies that had been shredded by the shrapnel.

  “Where did Mad Man Rob go?” Jonathan asked, not realizing that even in this desperate moment he couldn’t shorten it to Rob.

  “He is putting the finishing touches on something. I can move the next trailer in. You see if you can help anyone here, and you may want to keep your weapons handy,” Michael said.

  Another explosion rocked the wall behind them and they both ran for cover. “Where are you going to put another trailer? There is a pile of busted up wall where the other trailer was,” Jonathan stated.

  “I’ll just push it over if I can.” And with that, Michael climbed onto the backhoe and fought to wriggle it from the rubble that had fallen on top of it. Finally breaking free, he drove it around to grab another semi-trailer. With the next one hooked up, Michael dragged it back to the rubble-pile hole and spun it around. It took almost two minutes to work the trailer up the pile, and several seconds for it to roll uncontrollably down into the street.

  Michael took a minute to look out into the field. The smoke was clearing and the army was just about to the street. The trailer tipped over, knocking the door open and the fiends charged out as they climbed to their feet. Turning back in the seat, Michael drove the backhoe toward the next trailer. If he drove fast enough he could return just in time to roll it down into the army. Before he could make it halfway to the trailers, the explosion jolted even the heavy backhoe.

  The wall behind the trailers crumbled, smashing the rear of the metal containers. The doors on the three remaining trailers burst open like someone pulled the string on a champagne party popper, and the fiends that hadn’t been smashed in the back came bustling out like the confetti. They appeared momentarily confused by the commotion, but only momentarily. They began their assault, chasing people down and tearing into them like lions into a pack of gazelles. Michael was stunned. Guillermo had been eerily right about this ending bad for them.

  “Drive!” Rick shouted as he climbed onto the side of the backhoe. He raised his M16 and began firing into the attacking bone bags, but he couldn’t take them down fast enough. Over half of the people they attacked had enough of their bodies left to turn, climb to their feet, and begin their own ruthless attack. Blood sprayed from the running fiends as bullets tore into them.

  Michael turned the backhoe around and drove it back toward the garage. He was passed by Jonathan speeding back the other way in the BMW. Jonathan easily slid the powerful car sideways, batting away the front line of dead bodies charging at him. Spinning around in place, more fiends were knocked down and shredded by the tires. As he came to a stop, the fiends overran him. They piled on top of the car and beat on the windows. Jonathan watched as the glass spider-webbed.

  He drove forward, running over the fiends in front of him and wedging them further on the BMW. Before he realized what he had done, Jonathan could move. The tires spun freely on the slick grass. Unable to move, he watched as the fiends continued to press in against the car. Another explosion rocked the wall to his right, and he turned just in time to see it turn to rubble and fall down toward him.

  A huge chunk of it caught the rear of the car causing the front end to fly up. Jonathan stared through the windshield, straight up at the sky. His heart didn’t skip beats, it jumped clean over them. A second mass of the wall hit the passenger door, causing the glass to shatter
and spray inwards. Then he felt the car slowly leaning. Leaning forwards. Leaning, and then falling. Jonathan braced himself the best he could as the front tires rushed to reconnect with the earth. His head bounced off the steering just as the windshield and driver’s side windows shattered. Hands reached in and began pulling on his shirt and ripping at his hair.

  Chapter 21

  “I found some batteries. I took them out of all of the remotes,” Andy said with a smile that revealed a missing tooth. He kept the hundred dollars he received from the Tooth Fairy in his pocket, yet he had no idea if he would ever need to spend it. Sophia found the money in the hotel manager’s office and decided it wouldn’t matter how much she gave him. Besides, he was pretty excited about having that much money.

  Andy dumped the double A’s and a few D’s from the pouch he made by rolling up the front of his blue shirt onto the king size bed. His smile grew wider as he examined his haul. The boy’s deep blue eyes ricocheted around quickly as he looked at each and every battery. His curly blonde hair made him look like a little surfer ready for the big waves.

  “Perfect! Just in time, too,” his twin sister, Amie, responded. She leaned out the open window on the fourth floor facing the street out front. Her long blonde hair swayed in the gentle breeze. She pointed to the fiends that shuffled along down below. “They’re getting out down there. You were right about waiting for Sophia to come back. It always stirs em up a bit more.”

  Andy looked down and saw the fiends walking back and forth in front of the hotel. They had followed the commotion from the Ramcharger, but now they couldn’t find where it went. Some of them had already begun to forget about what they were after in the first place. The little boy brought his arm up with a double A held firmly in his palm. He took aim by closing one eye and sticking his tongue out, and he threw the battery overhand, as he had seen baseball pitchers do on TV.

  Strangely enough, the fiend had been the owner of the Adina Hotel. His custom tailored suit stained, faded, torn, and bloody, hid his rotting body well. The heat had caused his stomach to swell up and burst. His guts were held in by his tucked-in shirt. Flies swarmed around him, laying their eggs in his ears, eyes, and mouth. The small battery kept going and going and going, right into his neck.

  “First try!” Andy cried out in joy as he high fived his twin sister. They both peeked out the window and laughed as the man in the suit searched casually for the object that had struck him.

  Amie picked up a battery and threw it down. It clattered off the concrete but caught the attention of the fiends in the street. While they surrounded the battery, a few more had fallen to the street. A gentle rain of batteries continued on. Some of them found a soft target, but most of them hit the concrete and rattled away. Neither twin paid much attention as the number of fiends in the street increased gradually.

  As their supply of ammo dwindled, they began to search for other things to throw at the undead. Andy tossed the hair dryer from the bathroom down. It fell hard and fast, smashing into the face of a younger looking fiend that stood just in front of the dead man in the suit. The suited fiend watched the white object fall before it broke the nose of the young fiend in front of him. Neither of them was concerned so much for the fiend’s nose, which now oozed a chunky thick blood. Instead, they looked up in the direction it came from and heard the little girl yell as she leaned out the window and hurled something much larger out the window.

  “Pillow fight!” Amie screamed far too loudly as she hung out the fourth floor window of the Adina Hotel. She flung the pillow out; laughing so hard she almost wet her pants. The soft pillow fell quicker than they had thought it would. It hit the fiend with the busted nose square in the face. The twins saw the suited fiend turn to him, point, and begin laughing, smacking his knee with his rotting palm as he doubled over.

  Only it didn’t happen like that. The pillow bounced off of the chest of the fiend with the bloody nose, and the entire street full of fiends watched it happen. Even though their vision isn’t great, they could see the living bodies in the window high up in the building, two bodies looking down in amusement.

  “What are you two doing?” Sophia came in with a smile on her face that quickly faded as she saw the open window. “What are you two doing?” Her tone changed to panic as she ran to the window. Before she could lean out, the shrieks from down below flooded the room. Forty fiends stood on the street, and Sophia watched as some of them shambled slowly, while others sprinted out of sight toward the underground parking lot.

  “We were just messing with them,” Andy said. He knew they were in trouble, and there was pain in his voice.

  “Deacon!” yelled Sophia as she dashed from the room.

  “Deacon’s back!” the twins yelled excitedly in unison, and they ran out after her.

  Deacon was walking down the hall as Sophia and the twins ran out of the suite. He smiled a big, cheesy smile and knelt down to scoop the twins up in his arms. “How have you guys been?” he asked as he squeezed them tightly.

  “Fine,” they both said together again.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked Sophia, whose face was red.

  “You two need to go back to your rooms and close the door,” she ordered without even looking at them.

  “What is it,” Deacon asked once more as the twins vanished through the door.

  “We are in danger here. The fiends know we’re here. They ran into the parking garage.”

  “We got this. Don’t worry about it,” said Deacon casually.

  “No, Deacon. They ran into the parking garage,” Sophia stated.

  “Ran, like, they ran in, or they ran in?”

  “You asshole, what is so hard about this? They sprinted, Deacon! And the only thing keeping them out is a big glass door leading in from the parking garage.” He could see by the fear in her eyes that she was serious.

  “Roger! Mark!” Deacon ran down the stairs to the third floor in search of the other two men while Sophia barricaded herself and the twins in their suite.

  “What was that?” Roger asked. He had heard someone yelling, but he couldn’t make out if it was serious or play. Roger and Mark were sitting in Roger’s room, a large suite with two separate bedrooms and a Jacuzzi. They were playing poker at the small table in the kitchenette.

  “Sounded like Deacon,” Mark stated. He sat his cards face down on the table to hide his two pairs, stood up, and walked to the open door.

  “Roger!”

  “It’s Deacon,” Mark confirmed. “He’s in here!”

  Deacon charged down the hallway from the stairs. “Both of you, let’s go. Now!”

  Without question, the two followed Deacon. He ran through the hall and back into the large stairway. The last stairwell he was in was a confined, dark, and bloody mess. It reeked of death and decay. The stairwell for the Adina Hotel was outside. The sun shone in and the warm breeze blew in the scent of the salty ocean water. Red stains on the concrete steps were barely visible, yet they remained a reminder that no place was untouched by the death that engulfed the earth.

  Stepping onto the main floor, they heard the thuds from across the lobby. The large empty room allowed the thuds to echo through the halls. The three men jogged quickly to the large glass doors. Without a word spoke between them, they moved the couches, tables, and chairs. Piling them up and packing them tight against the doors just in time to hear the glass crack. Two more thuds, each followed by another crack. Then the next thud shattered the glass.

  “Now what?” Mark asked. He watched the pile of furniture shake as the fiends forced their way in.

  “We need to leave,” Roger said. “You guys head upstairs and be ready to take the fire escape on the north east corner, fourth floor. It will put you out in the alley. I’ll try to get to the truck.”

  “You can’t get to the truck!” Deacon stated. “Did you see the sheer number of fiends in that garage?”

  “That barricade won’t hold for long, Deacon. It’ll come down, and when it doe
s … those fiends will be pouring in. When that happens I’ll get to the Ramcharger and pull it around to the alley.” The men agreed on the plan, and Roger walked through the door to the third floor as they walked up the concrete stairs.

  Deacon banged loudly on Sophia’s door, causing the twins to scream. “Sorry! It’s just me,” he apologized.

  Sophia opened the door and the two men barged through. “Well?”

  “We have to get to the fire escape at the end of the hall,” Mark said. Even with all his running along the beach he was about out of breath.

  “Andy, Amie, let’s go. Everything is going to be fine, ok?” Sophia comforted them. “We are going to walk calmly down the hall.” Sophia signaled for Deacon and Mark to follow her into her room of the suite. “I have weapons in the closet there. Take whatever you think we’ll need,” she said as she grabbed an AR-15 and several spare magazines before pushing her bowler hat down on her head.

  “Nice,” Mark declared, rubbing his hands together like a hungry teenager at a buffet table. He picked up a shotgun and slung it around his shoulder, then reached for a Glock.

  “There are a few .22s in there,” Sophia said. “They may not be high caliber, but we have tons of ammo for those. I guess everyone passed on the smaller stuff.” She patted the two holstered pistols on each side of her belt.

  Deacon grabbed the other twelve-gauge shotgun with an ammo belt full of shells, two of the .22 caliber handguns, and all of the bullets he could stuff into a small duffle bag. The shrieks resonated from the open stairwell with surprising force, reminding the group that they needed to move now. None of them were sure how long it would take for the fiends to reach the top floor.

  “Will they search each floor first or just run right up here?” Sophia asked in a trembling voice.

  “I don’t know,” Deacon admitted. “I can’t imagine they are smart enough to form search parties, but then again I’ve never seen any of them run like that before.