One Hour to Live

by Gary M. Chesla

  Bob stood shaking his head when Bill started grabbing his shoulder.

  When Bob looked up, Bill was frantically pointing behind him.

  Bob quickly turned around as he brought the shotgun up to eye level.

  The head of the zombie coming into the kitchen from the living room splattered over the wall behind the creature when Bob fired his shotgun a second time.

  Bob quickly walked over to the closet and grabbed two more shells and reloaded his gun.

  “We better check out the rest of the downstairs to see if any more of those things got inside,” Bob said, “Keep your ears open.”

  “You keep your ears open,” Bill replied, “mine are ringing like hell. I can’t hear shit.”

  “Then stay behind me and keep your eyes open,” Bob said as he walked across the kitchen.

  After they walked through the down stairs, they determined that only the two dead zombies in the kitchen, had managed to get into the house.

  “Let’s get these bastards out of the house,” Bob said.

  “It’s going to smell like hell in here for weeks,” Bill groaned.

  “It smells so bad outside, you won’t be able to tell the difference,” Bob growled, “Besides, this is my house and they aren’t driving me out of my own home.”

  When they dragged the bodies off the porch and tossed them out on Market Street, Bill finally agreed that it smelled better in the house than it did outside.

  As they walked back to the house Bob said, “I don’t know where these things came from, but if they come back, I’m going to be ready for them next time. How about giving me a hand?”

  “Sure, what can I do?” Bill asked.

  “We need to get all my shutters closed and locked and then find some boards to put over the busted window on my back door,” Bob replied. ‘Then we are going to have to go out and get more shotgun shells.”

  “From what I saw, we might have a problem finding that many shells,” Bill replied.

  Bob looked around the yard and down Market Street and let out a big sigh.

  “What do you say we have that beer now?” Bob asked.

  “If the power doesn’t come back on today, it could be our last cold one for a while,” Bill replied. “I don’t know how much beer you have, but I suggest we drink it all while we can.”

  Chapter 12

  September, One year ago

  “Are you awake?” Kevin asked.

  Lisa slowly opened her eyes.

  “Did I fall asleep?” Lisa asked as she noticed the light coming in through the small bathroom window. The last she remembered, the room had been completely dark.

  “I think so,” Kevin replied.

  “I can’t believe it,” she replied, “I was so scared, I thought I would never be able to sleep again.’

  Lisa sat up, “My God, I can’t believe we’re still alive.”

  Kevin sat up next to her.

  “Yeah,” he whispered. “I was starting to worry about that a few hours ago.”

  “Just starting to worry?” Lisa asked.

  “Well, let’s say I was beginning to have my doubts about us making it through the night a few hours ago,” Kevin replied. “It seemed like they were finally going to break the door in, when things got quiet. I don’t know what happened but I was just glad the noise stopped. I thought they were going to drive me insane before they got in.”

  Lisa looked around to clear her head.

  “How long has it been light out?” she asked.

  “About an hour,” Kevin replied.

  “Were you able to get any sleep after that?” she asked.

  “Hell no,” Kevin replied, “I’m not sure I’ll ever sleep again.”

  “Do you think it’s safe to go to the bathroom?” Lisa asked.

  “Really?” Kevin smiled.

  “Sorry, but I have to go,” Lisa grinned. “In fact, we are both lucky that we aren’t lying in a puddle.”

  “Wait here for a minute,” Kevin whispered, “let me check the door and see if I hear anything first.”

  Lisa nodded.

  Kevin slowly stood.

  He groaned as he slowly got to his feet.

  “Now I know what my dad feels like every morning,” he smiled down at Lisa.

  Kevin put one foot out on the floor, but froze as a loud crack sounded when his foot hit the bathroom floor.

  Kevin looked down to see a large splinter of wood lying on the floor.

  He looked around the floor to see it was covered with splinters of wood.

  Then he looked at the door.

  The center of the door had a large crack running down the middle of the door from the top of the door to the floor.

  It looked like a bear had been clawing at the inside of the door.

  Large gouges appeared in the wood with all the clawed pieces of wood now spread across the floor between the door and the tub and toilet.

  Kevin turned and looked at Lisa, “Thank God they gave up and left, this door wouldn’t have held out much longer.”

  Lisa stuck her head out over the side of the tub and looked at all the splinters on the floor.

  Kevin started dragging the side of his foot over the floor, sweeping the splinters behind the toilet and clearing a path from the tub to the toilet.

  When he was done, he moved over to the door and rested his ear against the rough surface of the door and listened.

  After a minute, he turned and looked at Lisa and motioned towards the toilet.

  Lisa slowly crawled out of the tub and moved over to the toilet. She stood in front of the toilet and pulled down her shorts.

  “Don’t flush the toilet,” Kevin whispered.

  Kevin put his ear back to the door, but turned to look at Lisa when the small bathroom began to echo the loud sound of water splashing in the toilet.

  Lisa grinned and shrugged her shoulders.

  Kevin smiled and placed his ear back against the door.

  When the sound stopped, Lisa stood, pulled up her shorts and whispered, “Now what?”

  Kevin looked at the door and thought.

  Then he turned and looked at the small bathroom window.

  “I think we should look out the window and see what’s outside before we try to open the door,” Kevin whispered. “I don’t hear anything, but if they are still out there, I might not be able to get the door closed if they start charging the door again.”

  “OK,” Lisa whispered.

  “Get back in the bathtub,” Kevin said.

  “I don’t want to get back in the bathtub,” Lisa protested quietly.

  “The room is too small for me to get at the window with you standing there,” Kevin whispered.

  “I guess that is a good enough reason,” Lisa smiled and moved back to the tub and stepped in.

  Kevin shuffled over to the window.

  It was about eighteen inches of square opaque gray glass in a corroded aluminum frame.

  The small window looked like the last time it had been opened, Kevin’s grandfather had been a small kid.

  Kevin grabbed the latch and tried to turn it so the window would open, but it didn’t want to budge.

  Kevin tried to put his weight into his efforts to get more leverage against the latch, but all that did was practically break his fingers when his hand slipped and hit the frame.

  Kevin studied the situation and decided to take off his jacket and use it to protect his fingers.

  After tearing a hole in the sleeve of the jacket, he finally managed to get the latch to turn.

  He looked over at Lisa a smiled.

  Kevin turned back to the window and began to push at the bottom of the frame.

  He used the jacket again to cover the glass, just in case the fragile frame gave way or the glass broke.

  Cutting up his hand by putting it through a window was not something he wanted to deal with today.

  Kevin cringed as the years of paint that sealed the window, let loose with a loud crack.

  Aft
er listening to be sure the noise hadn’t attracted any unwanted attention, Kevin pushed the window up and open.

  A gush of foul, putrid smelling air blew in, taking his breath away.

  Kevin looked out the window, as he felt something rub against his arm.

  When he looked down, a curious looking Lisa was also looking out the window next to him.

  “The sun is shining,” Kevin whispered.

  “Yeah, another beautiful day,” she smiled. “I think we should crawl out the window.”

  “You might be able to make it, I’m not sure if I can,” Kevin said.

  “It might be tight, but I’m sure you can do it,” Lisa whispered. “It’s worth a try. I don’t want to open that door.”

  Kevin measured the window with his hands then looked at Lisa, “OK, we’ll try. I’ll go first.”

  “I’ll go first,” Lisa said, “and I can watch while you squeeze out.”

  Kevin didn’t look happy about Lisa going first.

  “If anything shows up, you can pull me back in,” Lisa added.

  “OK,” Kevin said. “I just want to get out of here. We don’t have time to argue about this.”

  “Good, because you would lose,” Lisa smiled.

  “Yeah, I know, I always lose,” Kevin smiled.

  “But isn’t losing so much more fun,” Lisa grinned.

  “Shut up and get moving,” Kevin said as he scooped Lisa up off the floor and slid her, feet first, out the window.

  The window was only four feet off the ground and Lisa was standing on solid ground in a second.

  “OK, come on,” Lisa whispered, “All clear.”

  Kevin was also able to easily slide through the window after stretching his arms high over his head to narrow his shoulders.

  They started to slide along the side of the building, working their way around to the front corner which would lead them to their car and the door to unit 10.

  “I can’t believe the blue sky and all this sunshine,” Lisa whispered. “It doesn’t seem to fit. After yesterday, it should be raining with lightning and thunder. Dark and dreary.”

  “I’m glad it’s not,” Kevin replied, “I’ve had enough dark and dreary things to last a life time.”

  Lisa hung on to the waist band on the back of Kevin’s jeans as they moved along the side of the building.

  When they reached the front corner, Kevin took a quick peek around the corner and quickly pulled his head back.

  “See anything?” Lisa whispered.

  Kevin didn’t answer, he just slowly looked around the corner again.

  This time he didn’t duck back behind the wall, he just stared for a long moment.

  “Look at this,” Kevin said.

  Lisa slowly slid across Kevin’s back and stuck her head around his shoulder to see out in front of the building.

  After staring for a few seconds, she moved out and stood beside him.

  “A bus,” Lisa gasped.

  “It must have been what distracted the dead early this morning and kept them from getting into the bathroom,” Kevin said.

  “Why did it come here?” Lisa asked.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered, “Maybe the zombies down on Route 259 forced it to take a side road to get away from them and they just ended up here.”

  “Talk about making a wrong turn,” Lisa said.

  They stood and stared.

  A Greyhound bus full of passengers had apparently pulled into the Pink Flamingo parking lot in the middle of the night for some reason.

  The bus now sat in the middle of the parking lot.

  The large front door hung open.

  All the windows were also open or had been smashed out.

  Passengers, or parts of passengers, hung from the windows.

  Maybe the dead had smashed the windows and pulled the people out.

  Maybe the dead got in the bus and the passengers were trying to desperately escape by crawling out the windows.

  If that was what they were doing, more of the dead waited below the windows for them to drop into their out stretched arms.

  In either case, the result was the same.

  They were attacked from in front and from behind.

  What was left, hung from the windows of the blood drenched bus.

  Blood ran from the windows, down over the sides of the bus, covering the tires and forming large pools of blood and bits of flesh on the ground.

  It looked like the gates of Hell had opened inside the bus, spilling out through the windows like a water fall.

  Kevin and Lisa couldn’t tell if the bones, body parts and bits of flesh scattered across the now bright red parking lot were from passengers from the bus or from motel guests.

  In all probability, they was a little of both, everywhere.

  “My God Kevin,” Lisa finally said, “That could have been us out there.”

  “Yeah,” Kevin replied, “Out there, in the room, in the bathroom, on the walls….”

  “I get it already,” Lisa whispered, “It makes my damn skin crawl.”

  Lisa grabbed Kevin’s arm.

  He almost cried out as she dug her fingers into his arm.

  “What?” Kevin asked as he looked at Lisa.

  Lisa was still staring at the bus.

  “In the bus,” she whispered.

  Kevin stared at the bus.

  “What’s in the bus,” Kevin asked.

  “Don’t move,” Lisa whispered.

  Kevin looked at the bus, wondering what Lisa had seen.

  Then he saw it too.

  First, he saw one head pop up inside the bus.

  A moment later, a second head joined the first one.

  After the last twenty-four hours, Kevin and Lisa had seen plenty of dead bloody bodies.

  They were ugly, grotesque, blood and all that, but why was Lisa now all of a sudden so terrified of more dead bodies?

  Kevin looked down at Lisa.

  Lisa looked back up at him and asked, “Do you see what is happening?”

  “They’re dead,” Kevin replied.

  “Not anymore,” Lisa said, “It’s spreading. Just like in zombie movies. It’s spreading.”

  Kevin looked back at the bus, at first not understanding what Lisa was trying to tell him.

  Then he saw what she had meant all along.

  The bodies, and the parts of bodies, hanging from bus windows, started to move.

  To move and crawl, or to finish crawling, out of the bus windows.

  Kevin realized what he had been overlooking since their first encounter with the dead last night.

  They had been focusing on what appeared to be dead bodies attacking him and Lisa.

  Then later last night, the dead had attacked and killed everyone at the motel.

  Maybe it was because he didn’t believe in zombies, at least he didn’t believe in them before, that he didn’t even consider this as a possibility.

  But as he and Lisa stood staring at the bloody bus and parking lot, it made sense.

  Terrifying, horrible, fucked up sense, but they should have expected it.

  With every other unbelievable thing that they had seen, why would they have thought it would have stopped there.

  “They are all coming back to life,” Kevin whispered. “All the people that those things killed, are all coming back to life. If shit couldn’t get any fucking worse.”

  A loud crash came from the office area.

  Kevin and Lisa turned to look in the direction of the office.

  The desk in the office had just rolled over and hit the one still standing glass panel that had made up the front of the office building.

  A blood-soaked man, with the side of his face missing, crawled out from under the desk.

  He stood and began to stagger out of the office, into the parking lot.

  “It’s Mike,” Kevin said.

  Soon more bodies began to climb through the broken windows and doors of the motel

  “Tell me you have t
he keys to the car in your pocket,” Lisa whispered.

  “I do,” Kevin replied, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Lisa ran to the car and jumped into the passenger’s seat, not waiting for Kevin to open the door for her.

  Kevin hopped into the driver’s seat, started the car and quickly backed away from in front of unit 10. Unit 10, their favorite place in the world, until today. A place, they both knew that they would probably never come back to again.

  Kevin threw the car into drive and shot past the bus and out onto the road.

  Chapter 13

  September, One Year ago

  Kevin and Lisa both breathed a sigh of relief when they thought they were safely away from the motel.

  “They seem to be coming this way,” Lisa finally said.

  “Yeah, I hope we can get home and warn everyone before they make it to Bolivar,” Kevin replied.

  “I hope they believe us,” Lisa said, “If someone would have showed up when we were at your place eating the other day, would you have believed them?”

  “Hell no,” Kevin replied. “I would have thought they were high on something. I think my dad will believe me though. I doubt he will buy the story about the zombies, but he will at least believe we saw something serious enough that he will get ready to defend himself. I’m sure he will think the government is trying to take over Bolivar. He blames everything on the government.”

  Lisa smiled, “Not my dad. He will look at his watch, ask me where the hell I’ve been and then he will want to know why you kept his daughter out all night. What he will suspect will be way off base, at least it will be this time.”

  “You don’t think he will buy the story that I was trying to protect you from flesh eating zombies?” Kevin grinned. “I have the blood all over me to prove it.”