No Room In Hell (Book 1): The Good, The Bad and The Undead

by William Schlichter

  “The solar panel will barely power the captain’s machine. At least he used his computer to keep backup files.”

  “Good for us.” Danziger dangles a flash drive before Hyun Su. “Before he died he said plug this into his computer. The password: crimeleadstoprison1.”

  Hyun Su types. The drive opens to a screen of a few dozen folders. He has case files on dozens of unsolved cases. Hyun Su opens one and reads. “The Murphen case. He has evidence the stepson did it.”

  “Hey, don’t waste power. Open the case files on the Blonde Teen Slasher.” Danziger drags a printer over to the desk, plugs it in, and loads paper into the tray.

  Hyun Su reads what appears on the screen. “Why weren’t we given this information? Why did he keep it from us?”

  “He had to sequester it or it was his personal theories on these cases we couldn’t use without direct evidence. What he knew and what he could prove are two different things.” Danziger slams shut the paper tray.

  “He had an unnamed suspect we were never given to investigate.”

  “Print it.”

  “It’s two hundred and eighty pages.”

  “Print it!”

  Hyun Su strikes the key. A low hum begins as the pages stream out.

  Danziger grabs the first few pages scanning the information. “After the killer took my daughter, the captain forbid me any access to this case. I heard he had a possible suspect.”

  “You’d have beaten a confession out of him.”

  “Any father would. He assaulted my little girl. He deserves no trial.”

  “Due process would have assured he stayed in prison,” Hyun Su says.

  The power snaps off. The printer dies in mid-release of paper. Danziger jerks out the half-printed page and rifles through the stack.

  “Damn!”

  “Should we rewire the solar panel?” Hyun Su asks as an offer to assist his friend.

  “No need.” Danziger drops all but one piece of paper. “A list of the addresses of possible suspects. There wasn’t enough hard evidence to request search warrants, but these people were always persons of interest for the chief.”

  Hyun Su glances at the list. “Not a problem anymore.”

  Danziger nods at his partner. Detective Hyun Su leans against the opposite side of the door frame of the rat-infested apartment and returns the nod. Hyun Su kicks in the door. Danziger zips in low, taking cover behind a couch. He rises up, scanning the room with his weapon ready to fire. Hyun Su hangs back.

  “Clear.”

  Hyun Su eases inside with his gun ready. Danziger motions for him to move right toward the kitchen while he goes left to what should be the bedrooms. They split up.

  Danziger kicks a chair as he exits a bedroom. He throws a shoe box onto the couch. Hundreds of Polaroid pictures scatter over the cushions.

  “Damn.” Hyun Su grabs a picture. “Wrong apartment.” He drops the scantily clad image of a prepubescent girl. “Fucking child molester.”

  “Yeah. This was a sick fuck, but not the sick mother fucker who took my daughter.”

  “We’ll find him.”

  “There are two more possible locations.” Danziger holsters his weapon. He storms into the kitchen and tears open drawers. He dumps trash on the couch, flips open his Zippo and lights the end of a roll of paper towels.

  “Danz, you know I’m behind you no matter what. Bastard did…your little girl…I want him dead, too.”

  “Just get to your but, Hyun Su.” He drops the flaming paper towels onto the pictures.

  “I want to leave with the caravan taking off for Fort Leonard Wood. I want out of this city.”

  “Then we have two more locations to quickly search.”

  The couch erupts in flames.

  “Those addresses are overrun by the DKs,” Hyun Su protests. “It’s suicide to go there.”

  “I’ve got to check each location before we join those going to Fort Wood. I’ve got to at least leave with a name or some information allowing me to track him down.”

  Pawing at a chain-link fence, a small dishwater blonde screeches in the low moaning howl typical of the DKs. Hyun Su tugs at Danziger’s arm. He won’t budge. More corpses gather and rattle the fence.

  “Few more DKs and the fence will go.”

  “Look at her, Hyun Su.” Danziger pulls his partner by the shoulder, directing his eyes.

  “Just another naked lame brain.”

  “No. Look at her. She was a teen, blonde.”

  Hyun Su does more than glance at the once human. “She could’ve been fifteen.”

  Danziger crouches down on his hamstrings. Despite the shriveling graying skin, Danziger can tell her inner thighs were bruised. Non-lethal cuts decorate her body.

  “She’s one of his victims.”

  “Agreed.” Hyun Su rises back to his feet. “I doubt she made it from the other side of town to here. Could mean he was once in this area.”

  “He’s still alive and still hunting.”

  “The building you want to search…” Hyun Su points across a stream of undead. “We’ll never get across this street.”

  “They’re slow. We can outrun them.”

  “Danziger. Not a hundred DKs.”

  “We’ve got to get over there. This dead girl’s proof he’s here.”

  “It proves he killed a girl after the plague. He could be far gone. We don’t know how long she’s been dead.”

  More undead push against the fence, hungry for the two cops.

  “When the first few DKs were brought in, the coroner said it was impossible to predict when they died. Even having known they were only dead a day or two at most. She’s not evidence he—”

  “He killed my little girl!”

  Hyun Su shoves Danziger against the dumpster. It rattles. The corpses spit and moan-howl with excitement. Regaining his footing, Danziger takes a step forward pushing Hyun Su back with just his body.

  “Your daughter won’t get justice if they eat you!” One of the poles snaps at the base. The corpses moan-howl, pushing forward. “The fence falls and some of these guys will find their way to the caravan. We’ll be the cause of dozens of deaths if you don’t give up your dick.”

  Danziger glances at the walls of the buildings they stand between. “What the hell are you talking about, Hyun Su?”

  “You know the story about the whale. The peg leg captain was so obsessed with destroying it, that it killed his entire crew for nothing.”

  Danziger jumps up and grabs the ladder of a fire escape. He pulls it down. “We go up. And I’m not Ahab.”

  “You sure?” Hyun Su grips the rung of the ladder.

  “He lost sight of his goal and put his crew at risk. I put nobody at risk but myself.”

  “What am I, chicken chow mein?”

  Danziger jams a cinder block against the door to keep their only escape route from slamming shut.

  Hyun Su stands on the edge of the building staring to the west. “I’m going to miss the view.” Across the city, past streets filled with the undead, stands the towering St. Louis Arch gleaming over the skyline. “How long do you think it will last now there’s no one to take care of it?”

  “This will only be the end of the human race if we let it.”

  “We’ve got to make it through this with our humanity.”

  “We’ve got to weed out the evils of the old world first,” Danziger snaps. His partner shames him with a look. “Okay, you’re correct. I do have to stop chasing my whale.”

  “No. Never. The man needs to die for killing all those girls, but not at the cost of your life. We should leave with the caravan and re-examine how to search for this guy. If he’s not dead we’ll have to go where there are people to get new victims.”

  “Okay, but we’re here. If I leave the city now we’ll have no idea who this guy is. Knowing his address means nothing without his identity.” Danziger points to a side street. “Looks clear. These old factory buildings were being converted to loft apartments.
They’ve been mostly abandoned.”

  “And if this building isn’t where he was hiding?”

  Danziger doesn’t answer as he climbs down the roof ladder.

  “I’m guessing this has to be his door.”

  “An electronic combination lock. Why would anyone need security in an abandoned building?”

  Hyun Su tugs on the door handle. “I thought when the power went down these locks released to prevent being trapped during a fire?”

  Danziger marches back down the corridor. “I don’t know anything about them.” He smashes open the emergency glass of fire equipment and yanks out an axe. “I found a key.”

  Hyun Su steps back—gun ready.

  Danziger swings.

  The metal rings.

  The reverberations, many at a slightly higher tone than living humans hear, echo throughout the building. A DK milling about the doors of the warehouse jerks its head at the noise. Two more quick zings of sound pull it toward the door. It moan-howls and shuffles toward the clear ringing.

  On Danziger’s seventh swing, the axe shatters the lock. Swing number eight sinks the axe into the bolt lock tearing it from the frame. Number nine sends what remains of the lock tumbling across the floor. Danziger pushes the door open slowly. Hyun Su raises his gun.

  DKs gather in what was being remodeled as a lobby to the coming loft apartments. The ringing has ceased but not before it attracted half a dozen corpses to stagger up the stairs. Their moan-howls draw more undead inside.

  Danziger, gun at the ready, circles around a table where straps have been bolted in order to secure a person supine to the table. He smells blood.

  “I would say this could be our guy.” Hyun Su flips the latch on a cabinet. He jumps back as dozens of medical instruments and other cutting tools rain toward him. Hyun Su trips over a chair and swipes his pant leg against a hacksaw.

  Danziger pulls him out of the way of the rest of the falling tools, but not before blood pools at Hyun Su’s foot.

  “I thought spring-loaded booby traps were only in the movies?”

  Danziger flings open drawers until he finds some towels. He rips the cloth to make a bandage. “How bad is it?”

  “I doubt I’ll get time off for being wounded in the line of duty. Hurts like a mother fucker.”

  Danziger yanks another towel and under it a photo album hides. He forgets all about his bleeding partner. Each page of the homemade book has 8x10 portrait photos of young girls between fourteen and sixteen. Some look professional, others look staged. All look dead.

  “Danziger. I’m bleeding over here.”

  Danziger flips faster through the book. He flings it across the apartment with a barbaric war cry. His daughter’s picture hangs torn in his hand. Danziger’s knees buckle.

  He slumps.

  Through his tear-welling eyes, the wavering image of DKs fill the apartment doorway. “Two on the right!”

  Hyun Su spins around at the growing moan-howls. Danziger fires. The DK to the left drops. Hyun Su ends the existence of the two on the right.

  More DKs flood through.

  EMILY STARES AT an actual paper map her savior has spread across the hood. His .357 holds down one corner of the paper while the Beretta secures another corner and the gun from his left hip, a Smith and Wesson M&P, secures a third corner.

  Emily’s confident he has another firearm on his gun belt he hasn’t drawn. Her boredom gets the best of her and she reaches for the shiny Taurus. He slaps her hand away.

  “Ouch.” She rubs the swollen red flesh.

  He never stops examining the map, taking a compass from his vest pocket.

  “I just wanted to look at it.”

  “It’s not a toy.”

  “I know.” She keeps rubbing the back of her hand where it stings. “What are you trying to do?”

  “Determine how to get back home.”

  “You drove us down a dead end road.”

  “I know.”

  Emily glances again. The front truck tires stop right on the edge of the brown dirt where the road meets the grass. “Just use the GPS.”

  A quick laugh rolls from the bottom of his gut. “Look, little girl, GPS doesn’t work anymore. I don’t know how your generation’s going to survive the end of the world without your cell phones.”

  “So you already said. And I can live without my cell, and my hair dryer, and I bet I can live without tampons.”

  She grabs his full attention. “You bleeding now?!”

  “As if.”

  “They smell blood. You even think you’re going to start, you let me know.”

  “Gross. I never even told my dad.”

  “Fine. But you tell me.”

  “And something else. GPS still works. It’s a satellite navigation system. These dead people aren’t flying spaceships crashing into satellites, so if you have a car charger I can use my phone.”

  “You’re forgetting something.”

  “What?”

  “You need service to operate your phone. Even if these towers work you haven’t paid your bill in months. The computers controlling the phones will have automatically shut down your service since you didn’t pay.”

  Emily’s face melts.

  “Actually, pretty good reasoning, though. There may be hope for you yet,” he complements.

  She finds herself able to smile.

  “A car with GPS should still work, but let me show you how to read a map.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re doing.”

  “Teaching you how to read a map.”

  “No. Why’d you turn down this dead end road?”

  “We’re going to walk overland. It’s faster and maybe safer than the main roads. The biters seem to congregate along it. Then again, so do living people.”

  “I know I shouldn’t trust people after…but not everyone has to be evil.”

  “No. But telling which people are trustworthy now is not the same as it was before.”

  “Will you teach me?”

  “I’m still learning myself. I’ve put together a camp of people I trust. We’re building—rather, rebuilding, a life.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “So far, but we’ve rules, and we still need items to survive. It’s my job to find what we need.”

  “Not even you can carry enough items from the warehouse by yourself to be any use.”

  “Nope. We get back I’ll bring a team to raid the distribution center. Hunting alone for supplies puts fewer people at risk. I would bring a crew of at least ten.”

  “And if you’d gotten there and the place was empty…they could have died on the mission for nothing. Sometimes you speak like you were in the military,” she deduces.

  “They wouldn’t take me. I’ve got a bum leg, but usually I walk it off.”

  “So why park this truck in the middle of nowhere?”

  “I’ve set up, let’s say, stations, where I’ve stashed supplies I need to survive outside my camp. With no cars on the road anymore I don’t find it effective to drive around in one vehicle. It draws attention.”

  “You keep saying. Those people in the camps are just trying to survive.”

  “You forgetting about the ones who nearly raped you?”

  “No, but only a few of them. Most are just hungry and scared.”

  “The people safe in secure camps can afford to be a little nicer than someone out here. Meet someone who’s been scavenging for food for days and doesn’t know how to hunt—see how nice they are.”

  Emily bites her bottom lip. She appreciated the full safety the refugee camp offered even with its overcrowding. But maybe she should have learned more about how to be safe outside the fence.

  “Out here, if someone finds one of my stashes of food or a gassed up truck I just have to walk a little farther down the road, but I know where I have more stashed. I’m not stashing this piece of junk, but I wanted to explore this road and see where it leads. If we cut across country here,” he drags his finge
r along the map, “we will reach a truck I stashed. We take it along some back roads and work our way to my camp.”

  “This must have taken a while to set up.”

  “Each time I go out I’ve got to go farther and farther to find supplies, but at the same time we’re becoming more self-sufficient. Soon supply runs will be a novelty.” He folds the map and slides it inside its waterproof sleeve. “You ready for this?”

  “I think.” She flips the bag over her shoulder.

  He pulls the large bag of food from the truck, removing a can of peaches and stuffing it under the seat.

  “You sound so sure about being self-sufficient.”

  “We’ll have to give up certain material items, but yeah, I think it will work.” He picks up his magnum and checks the chamber before holstering the weapon.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “Don’t want to be caught with an empty chamber.”

  “But you haven’t used that gun. You use this one.” She points to the Beretta.

  “I will fire this one. It has eight shots and I keep it super shiny. It distracts people. They are too busy watching this hand-cannon to pay attention to what I’m doing. They figure I will pull it and not the hidden Beretta I have holstered behind it.” He picks up the Beretta. “I like this gun. It’s lighter, easier to pull and accurate.” He ejects the clips. He counts ten rounds and one in the chamber. “This one’s my favorite, sixteen shots, Smith and Wesson M&P. Everyone says it has a kick. I don’t feel it.”

  “Why not pull it since it has more bullets?”

  “Tried. I draw the Beretta faster, and speed, even against the biters, is essential. So I keep it as a backup on the left hip. It also provides a distraction. They don’t know which side I’m drawing from. It provides an extra half-second and keeps me alive.”

  Emily smiles. “If thirty-five bullets can’t keep you alive then you’re in trouble.”

  “You’ve got to get them out of the holster first, and not miss.”