Among the Dead Book 2 (Among the Living)

by Long, Timothy W.

  No cure. What were they going to do? How would they fix this mess?

  “You said it was mostly fatal?”

  “Yeah. Well, the ones that live aren’t much to look at. They get like the deaders for a while, then they make a kind of recovery, but they’re just about as smart as your garden-variety lobotomy experiment. We won’t be able to find many of them anyway. They still get the subconjunctival hemorrhage. I expect most of them’ll get shot.”

  “Sub what?” I asked.

  “You know, blood in the eyes.”

  “Damn” was all I could say in reply.

  “That is the cure, you know, shot to the head. Heard one of the guys say something like ‘If it’s undead, aim for the head.’ Well, I don’t condone it, but what are we going to do? Round them all up and put them somewhere? We’d need more than a few football fields. But it’s too late even for pipe dreams. Lazarus Black will clear the streets anyway.”

  “That’s the second time I’ve heard that. What is Lazarus Black?”

  She looked at her fellow scientists, who continued to look anywhere but at us.

  Nelson was still in deep conversation with the older man. They had a map out that looked like the layout of the football stadium, and were pointing out pathways.

  “The cure, I told you.”

  “The cure,” I repeated.

  “We have to go,” Nelson said. He grabbed my arm and steered me toward the door.

  “Wait, I want to hear this.”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Tell me now!” I felt frustrated at his evasiveness.

  “Mike, we’ve got to go!” he growled.

  I looked back at my new friend. She just nodded and didn’t bother to smile.

  Nelson dragged me by the arm toward the door opposite the way we had come in. His eyes were intent on nothing else, just the door. I wanted to stay and learn more, but he was freaking the hell out, even though he didn’t say a word. Nelson looked at his wristwatch as he pushed me down yet another sterile white corridor. What did they do, paint these things after they arrived? Where were the team colors? This was a football stadium, after all.

  We came to a pair of doors, and Nelson produced a badge. He zipped it across a scanner, and the door clicked.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  He held up the badge so I could see the face.

  “While you kept her distracted, I took it. Figured it would be helpful. Now listen up. There’s gonna be a shit storm in about an hour, so we need to get the hell out of here.”

  “Is it the Lazarus thing they were talking about?”

  “Yep,” he said and guided me through the doorway.

  I shaded my eyes from the too-bright sun. We hadn’t been inside the building for more than half an hour, yet it felt like a day.

  “Get on the very last car. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.” He pressed the badge into my hand and pointed at the tracks. “You run into any trouble, just flash this. Keep the face covered. If anyone looks at it, you’re fucked.”

  “Thanks for the confidence booster,” I groused. “You were going to tell me about Lazarus Black!”

  “I will, I promise. Trust me. Have I let you down yet?”

  “Christ on a crutch,” I muttered.

  “Just go. You’ll be fine getting to the train. Know what the worst is that could happen?”

  I shrugged.

  “That.” He pointed back at the stadium.

  As we left the room, I snatched a white gown off a coat hanger just as the door slammed shut, almost taking my disguise with it.

  Lester

  “All you crazy asses need to see a shrink.” LeBeau shook his head and moved toward the storage location.

  What the hell was Lester thinking, and who the hell was he kidding? He was no leader, and this was no reality television show. This was life, and his was about to get a lot shorter. At least he still had the gun. If the deaders managed to get in here, he was going to just do it. Put the barrel right up against his temple and blow his brains all over the damn place. Enough with all the stupid decisions he had made over the last few days.

  They were stuck unless the door opened, and the door was never going to open unless they got the stupid lock off. It was a big thick fucker, looked like it could stand up to a sledgehammer.

  LeBeau dragged his pipe up, ran it along the wall like he was going to start a rumble by challenging the door, lifted the bar and swung for all he was worth. The bar hit the metal part that made up the horizontal doorknob, completely missing the lock below it. LeBeau screwed up his eyes as the shock raced up his arms. He stepped back and nearly dropped the bat.

  “Holee sheeet.” He lowered the bar and placed it between his knees, lifted his hands and shook them. Then he blew on them.

  “Lemme try.” Grinder reached for the bar.

  “You ain’t a bitch; keep your fucking hands off my shit!” LeBeau howled at the top of his lungs.

  “Christ, all right!” Les shot at them.

  LeBeau shook his head, lifted the bar and swung again. This time, he angled the blow, but it hit the side of the frame and bounced away, striking the concrete wall adjacent to them, doing a flip, and then clattering to the ground.

  “Oh fuck me, Rosey!” LeBeau said, a lot softer this time, and held his hands up, shaking them in the air.

  “Lemme try that.” Lester snatched the bar and took up a baseball swinging position.

  “We need to …” Grinder started.

  “Hold the lock out.” Les interrupted the kid.

  “Are you fucking crazy? I ain’t losing my hands, dude.”

  “It needs to be up a little.”

  “I was gonna say let’s put something under the lock so it sticks up in the air like a hard-on. How about a rock? See if you can find something. Quick,” Grinder said to the girl. She looked between them and then scurried off in a flash of skirt and leg that Grinder didn’t hesitate to follow with his eyes.

  “You wanna see more of that, you better be right.” Les said, then shifted his gaze to the deaders clambering at the chain-link fence not twenty-five feet away.

  The fence was actually bending in now, and Les was pretty fucking sure it wouldn’t hold up that much longer. He took a tentative swing at the lock and managed to hit the metal part, which tossed it up to strike the doorknob but didn’t do a bit of damage.

  “Try this.” The girl was back with a chunk of concrete.

  Les took the palm-sized rock and wedged it between the lock and the door, but it fell to the ground as soon as he took his hands away.

  “Need something to hold it there, like a bunch of duct tape.” Les looked around the area, but came up blank. Just clusters of vehicles and a whole lot of black space that was decidedly free of magic tape.

  “I found another bar.” Grandma joined them. She held out a long metal bar, much like the one they had, but a bit thicker. Les studied it, then the lock.

  “I got an idea. It’s not quite long enough to reach the doorknob, but if we can find a brick, someone can hold the metal bar under the lock, brace it on the brick, and I can get a good swing.”

  They looked at each other, and Les was a hair’s breadth away from shaking his head and telling them it was a terrible idea, when Grandma, the girl and Grinder all peeled off in different directions to search for a brick.

  “Shit ain’t gonna work.” LeBeau shook his head. “Ah damn! Use the gun! I mean I got a gun. Found it in a car.”

  “Really? You think you could have told us earlier, like when the deaders were banging on the fence?”

  “Chill out, son. It’s a little six-shooter.” LeBeau lifted his shirt to show off the piece. It was tucked into the waistband of his pants.

  “Won’t work either. I saw someone try it once, and all the bullet did was hit the body of the lock and flatten out. Barely even dented the lock. That only works on TV, just like blowing up cars,” Les said.

  “Worth a shot.” The man grinned.
>
  “Oh very fucking funny.”

  “Want me to hold it for you?” Les inquired.

  “No I do not want you to hold it for me. Hold your own piece; this one’s mine.”

  “Fine, but after you kill yourself, I’m taking the gun.”

  “If I do that, I don’t care about it no more. What you gonna do? Make a run for it?” LeBeau asked.

  Lester thought about it, because he only really had one plan.

  “I plan to shoot myself in the head if I have to,” Lester countered.

  “Maybe you go first. Wouldn’t be the first time I saw some scruffy white boy blow his fool head off. Might not be the last way the city is going to hell in a zombie basket. But you think that’s your big farewell, go on, then. I seen this cat back in the day, politician crooked as they come. He got caught doing something he shouldn’t outta have. Know what he did? Took a pistol and put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Right on live television. Now that took balls.”

  “I’m not trying to impress you!” Lester said in exasperation.

  “No shit, Sherlock. If you were trying to impress me, you would’ve showed up with Janet Jackson, a pair of Humvees and enough soldiers to clear our way to Vegas. Or to a liquor store. I’d take either.”

  Lester just stared. “You guys done stroking each other’s dicks?” Grinder interrupted the interchange. His eyes were wide, and he swiveled to get the men to look.

  Lester shook his head and followed the tall guy’s gaze. His eyes opened wide, and a little cry jumped past his lips.

  “We are …” Grinder started.

  “Fucked!” Lester finished.

  Kate

  She pushed the cart closest to the door until it lurched into motion. The bodies and parts jiggled and shook. A head turned to regard her with lifeless eyes. She wanted to feel pity, but all she felt was a sense of loss, as if these men and women had somehow missed out on the honor of falling beneath her blade.

  A flash. She saw herself lying in the room, on the blood-splattered plastic that covered the floor. What would it feel like to watch someone come into the room, pick up the sledgehammer and smash her head in? Would she even feel the blow? Would she hear her brains as they were smashed out of her skull? She almost wished she could watch it.

  But the bastards coming through the door might just want to take her and treat her that way. She shoved the cart until it smashed into the door. Then she grabbed another one and doubled up the barricade.

  She felt safe for the time being. If they worked together, they would probably be able to open the door, but it wouldn’t be easy. To make it harder, she took the sledgehammer and laid the heavy bloodstained side against one of the wheels to act as a wedge.

  She looked around the big room for a weapon of some sort. The walls were bare except for the occasional blood spatter. There were a few desks shoved in a corner, but they looked to have been placed there to get them out of the way rather than for any practical use.

  There were a few medical supplies like gauze and boxes of thin white facemasks. A box that once held syringes sat on one desk, but it was filled with long Q-tips and cotton gauze. Another box held empty vials in it. The kind that were under a vacuum so they could draw out blood. It wouldn’t take much to take a blood test in here, just drag one of the Q-tips along a wall, and you could diagnose just about any disease.

  Banging on the door. “Open up, goddammit!” a man’s voice yelled.

  “In your wet dreams, asshole,” she muttered.

  Two gun butts beat at the door. Then a kick, and it budged. But not far. The carts held, and the hammer didn’t even move.

  If they got in here, she was going to be in a real world of hurt.

  Kate snatched a syringe off a shiny steel table and popped the top off. Then she jammed it into the arm of one of the dead and drew out a thick substance that looked like bloody mucus. She put the cap back on and kept the tool at her side.

  She found another door hidden behind a green curtain, the kind of thing they put around someone in a hospital bed. It wasn’t locked, but it was stuck like there was something against it. She pulled back and used what little energy she had left to kick the door. The knob splintered the wood frame and slammed the door into something heavy. There was a crash and the sound of breaking glass. Items tinkered across the floor, and something wet splattered. She hoped like hell it wasn’t some experiment filled with infected blood. From the looks of the rest of this location, there was a good bit of research going on. Good, maybe someone had a cure so she could go back to her old life.

  Her life? What was her life? Was she really going to take over for Kate, do her daily work, sit around an apartment and watch shit television programming? No, she was going to hunt for as long as she could. She would travel from city to city, enticing and killing her victims with glee. She actually hungered for it. Saliva burst in her mouth like a bubble at the thought of all that fear and the smell of the blood of her victims.

  She poked her head into the room and was greeted by a couple of concerned faces in white masks. They wore yellow suits, and tubes connected them to runners across the ceiling.

  Kate strolled in and approached the first one—a man with a straggly beard that was far from the fashionable stubble she was used to seeing on flannel-shirted men. Like they were heading out to chop up trees instead of looking for a Starbucks.

  “What?” the guy asked.

  “Get me out. Now.” She pulled the cap off the syringe and pointed the bloody tip at his face.

  Haven’t-Shaved-in-a-Week understood that well enough, and he turned and walked to one corner of the room. He pointed, and when she approached the door, he moved aside. She kept her eyes on him the entire time, and even though every muscle in her body screamed out in pain, she managed to hold the tip at eye level.

  He popped the door open and then backed up a few steps. She nodded curtly and slipped through the door into a room filled with the dead.

  They lay in heaps, in piles, arms akimbo, legs askance. They were missing parts, some of which still twitched. A little boy with big bloody eyes and one side torn away kicked a tiny leg back and forth. Blood and gore covered the floor, and the smell was intense, like a slaughterhouse that had stood for a hundred years. This bizarre graveyard was clearly an experimental playground for the assholes on the other side of the door. Now that she was away from them, she felt a moment of panic at the thought that the man might have locked her in here.

  She considered going back into the room she had just left, finding a scalpel and chopping them into little bits. Every one of the bastards. Then she could just give up, take a break, give in. The soldiers would come through the door, and she would finally pay for her sins. They could put a bullet in her head, and she would be able to get some long-deserved rest.

  Through another door she ran.

  She came to a long hallway lined with bodies along the outer edge. She moved past shapes of all sizes, and with various open wounds. Most had gunshots to the face or right in the middle of the forehead. Some lay with eyes wide open, bloodstained irises staring at the ceiling with something approaching recrimination. Perhaps it was her mind playing tricks on her, but she was sure some of those looks fell on her as she limped down the once-white corridor. Someone had laid strips of carpet along the walkway, but it didn’t do much good to stop the blood from reaching her feet. In fact, it provided a place for it to collect so that every step was like walking through wet ground. It sucked at her steps and threatened to catch each one and never let her go.

  She stared down and caught the bloodstained bottom of her pant legs in the garish light. Why was it so bright in here? She paused to tug the fabric away from her calf, but it clung stubbornly, as if glued there. A huge rip along the thigh exposed pale flesh. That was from earlier in the day, wasn’t it?

  Christ. She hadn’t bathed in what seemed a week, and if she were able to smell herself, she would probably terrify anyone she came across. Someone might take her fo
r a deader and blow her head off.

  There was only one way to go, and when she heard a loud click at the other end of the passageway, she simply moved faster toward the exit.

  Double doors met her. She expected to be thwarted at this last moment. She was close; she could almost smell the clean air and sense the heat of the outside world. She took a step out into the light and blinked hard. She was on a road, which didn’t make a lot of sense. Then she realized she was actually at the end of a tunnel. This being a football stadium, it made sense that they would have needed massive entryways like this to deliver food, drinks and equipment. Now it was a graveyard.

  As if the last few areas hadn’t been enough, this was worse. The combination of heat, humidity and rot created a stench that she never wanted to smell again.

  There had to be hundreds of them.

  The bags were body shaped where they were wrapped in black plastic. Farther along, they were simply wrapped in clear plastic. A tiny form lay bound in something resembling a shower curtain. Fingers the size of crayons curled up in a fist. She pushed the hand aside, trying to tuck it back under the tarp, but it didn’t move. Didn’t yield except for a squish that felt like a water balloon. The rest of the arm slid out, and it was twice the size that it should have been. All those gases sitting in the summer heat weren’t doing anything kind to the corpses.

  “Jesus fucking wept,” she muttered before turning to move past a pile of bodies that nearly reached the ceiling.

  Her body ached, her head worst of all. The last hour was a rush. The running and the pursuit. Dealing with the fucking rapist. If she could go back and do it again, she would kill him nice and slow, just the way he deserved.

  She moved in a daze and barely registered the form that moved toward her from the side of the stack of bodies. It stuck to the shadows, and when she turned to confront whatever it was, she was already too late.

  A hand lashed out. She raised her arm defensively, but it wasn’t enough to stop the fist from looping over and smashing into the side of her head. She saw stars and almost went down.