Life of the Dead (Book 2): Road of the Damned

by Tony Urban

  43

  Hard rain and violent thunderstorms kept the group trapped inside the warehouse for three days. Mead never returned and that bothered Wim. He’d liked Mead in the few days he’d been around him. Most of the others didn’t appear to miss him, and that confused Wim even more than the man’s sudden departure. He might have been an odd duck, but he was incredibly smart and innovative when it came to fighting and defending themselves against the zombies. Wim wanted to search for him, but the rain coming down was of the cats and dogs variety and Ramey and Emory talked him out of it.

  There was nothing to do but talk and talking had never been Wim’s strong suit. Even Emory was running out of stories to tell. Wim had gotten to know Peggy better and he was glad for the opportunity. She was a country girl and reminded him of his mama, only rougher around the edges. She too had grown up on a farm and they discussed that commonality off and on, but like everything else, the interest wore off soon enough.

  Wim knew many of them, especially Mina and Peggy, had grown tired of their quarters. Wim didn’t entirely blame them. The only options for sleep were upright in chairs or prone on the hard floor. The warehouse was dark on a sunny day and an abyss on dreary ones. It felt like an oversized, sterile coffin. Ramey had spoken little about her father, but Wim caught her staring out the windows for long stretches at a time and knew she too was getting antsy.

  Their meager food supplies were dwindling and, when they woke to clear skies on the fourth day, heading out wasn’t just an option, it was a necessity.

  Wim’s plan was to go out and scavenge again, search for Mead, then return to the warehouse to regroup in case Mead returned. He was outvoted. The majority which included everyone except himself and Emory, wanted to say their final goodbyes. Wim didn’t fancy himself any sort of leader and he didn't object.

  Ramey had informed everyone of her father’s letter and they unanimously agreed to head in that direction. As they loaded their supplies into the vehicles, Wim noticed that the steel radial belt was showing through on one of the pickup’s tires. He checked and there was no spare.

  “It’s not safe to drive like that,” he told her.

  “Well, it wasn’t really my truck anyway. Just felt like it.”

  She agreed to leave it behind. It was funny, Wim thought, the way people became attached to their big cages of metal. He knew his own Bronco couldn’t last forever but hoped to delay the inevitable as long as possible.

  Bundy and Mina took the ambulance and Peggy rode in the back. Wim, Ramey, and Emory piled into the Bronco and they left the warehouse in the past.

  Wim and Mina had been taking turns leading the way throughout the day. At the present, Mina was in the lead and he watched the back of the ambulance as it gained on him. It possessed more get up and go than his old Bronco and she had a lead foot. He was also growing weary of the drive. They’d stopped at a few stores earlier in the day and loaded up on food. Bundy even found a shotgun hidden under a checkout counter. They’d seen a few zombies and dispatched them, but it was a monotonous day.

  A sign at the side of the road declared “Coalwood - 2 mi”. Ramey saw it and pulled out her map.

  “That’s on the map! We’re getting close.”

  Wim glanced at the paper. She was right, they were close, but he guessed they still had 20 or so miles to go before they reached the X. A tiny town stood in the distance. It had a single street lined with small, company houses. One gas station stood on the outskirts.

  He couldn’t see any zombies but he wasn’t looking too hard because, in his peripheral vision, he noticed Ramey dancing in her seat. It was excitement over the map. Over her father. Wim had little hope they'd find anything where X marked the spot. He was unsure how she'd handle it if they arrived and found more nothingness. He considered broaching the subject, to possibly soften the coming blow. Before he could say anything, the ambulance disappeared.

  44

  It was morning and Mitch hadn’t slept a minute the night prior. He worried the people who had invaded the hotel would disappear if he dared sleep. That would be tragic because he meant to escape the bunker and he needed distractions.

  On the monitors Mitch saw the people in the resort had come awake and were eating. The woman fed the nerdy dude spoonful after spoonful of what looked like apple sauce.

  “Christ, why did you idiots waste your time rescuing some gork?”

  Mitch knew the odds of them finding their way to the bunker were slim to none. And even if they did find it, they weren’t getting in. The steel doors were built to withstand a nuclear blast and wouldn’t open from the outside without the security code.

  He'd have given anything for a gun. Or even a fucking baseball bat. But all there was, was the letter opener he’d used to kill his mother. That poor excuse for a weapon was still embedded at the base of her skull.

  He needed it though, because fleeing the safety of the control room with nothing was suicide. Mitch was a lot of things, but suicidal, he was not. That meant he had to retrieve the letter opener. And that meant he had to look at his mother’s body.

  Her skin had taken on an almost transparent quality, like all of her internal bits were coated in plastic wrap. She looked like she’d gained 30 pounds due to the bloating. He had to turn her head sideways to access the letter opener and when he pushed against her face, he felt the slimy skin slide and separate from the tissue underneath it.

  His fingers sunk into her rotting flesh up to the first knuckle. He dry-heaved and felt like he was going to vomit, but after not eating for days, nothing came.

  His hand darted out and he pulled the letter opener free with a quick jerk, then he lobster crawled away from her as fast as he could.

  That was intense, he thought and gave a little laugh.

  As he approached the control room exit, he wiped his hands on his pants and stared at the two zombies outside the room. He mouthed, “Bring it, bitches!”

  Then Mitch opened the door.

  Juli had woken two hours earlier. Aben and Jorge were off exploring the hotel again and had invited her along but she wasn’t interested in poking around the same nooks and crannies as the day prior. She decided to organize supplies in the kitchen which was enormous, but woefully lacking in high quality cookware. When she had it sorted to her satisfaction, she moved to the room where the four of them had slept the night before.

  She’d put Grady to bed like a toddler and, in the morning he remained in the exact same position. She couldn’t tell whether he’d slept because his eyes were open when she fell asleep and they were still open when she woke up. For the previous hour, she’d been watching him.

  Bolivar had told her about Grady’s son, and the name he’d spoken. Josiah. Juli’s heart broke for him. The others could never understand that pain, but she could. She lived with it every moment of every day.

  She talked to him off and on, but he never responded. Maybe he really is gone, she thought. Weren’t mental hospitals full of people like this? People that stared into space without a thought in their heads? But if there was any part of him still inside, still aware, she wanted to be there for him.

  She used a wet cloth to wash his face and arms, cleansing away the last remnants of his son’s blood. The wound on his arm appeared to be healing when she changed his bandage, and showed no signs of infection. Bleeding had stopped completely. Thank God for small favors.

  Juli held the catatonic man’s hand and prayed for him.

  Mitch stabbed the first zombie in the eye. The second posed more of a challenge and when he went to stab it, the letter opener hit its cheekbone and the faux sword bent at a 45-degree angle, slicing a chunk of flesh that dangled off the dead man’s face like a piece of bologna. The zombie kept coming for him and Mitch stumbled backward. In the process he tripped over the first zombie and went sprawling on the floor. His ankle twisted underneath him and sent a burst of pain up his leg. He screamed before he could stop himself.

  The sound enraged the zombie even more.
It dove on top of him. The rotting smell coming from its mouth was all too close. Mitch gripped the twisted letter opener in fist and slammed it upward. It pierced the fat flesh under the zombie’s jaw and he crammed it in as far as it would go. Then he twisted and jerked and pulled, doing his best to dice up whatever was inside its skull.

  When Mitch realized the creature was dead, he pushed it off of himself and crawled to his knees. Beyond them, he saw shadows in the corridor. The shadows moved toward him and Mitch didn’t need a fancy private school education to know what was coming.

  Bolivar and Aben worked their way down a long service hall. Ductwork and water pipes lined the passage and the combination narrowed the width of the space to five feet.

  “Do you really think it’s over?” Bolivar asked. They were some of the first words he’d said all morning. “Humanity, I mean.”

  “I wouldn’t say over. I guess I’m telling myself it’s more a chance to start fresh. That’s my glass half full take on it, anyway.”

  “What’s your half empty take?”

  “That we’re all fucked.” He grinned. Even Bolivar gave something resembling a smirk.

  “Let’s go with the former.”

  “Let’s.”

  The hallway seemed to be never-ending. Occasionally they came upon a small door that opened to a closet or storage space, but mostly it was long stretches of nothingness.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” Bolivar watched Aben, trying to get a read on him.

  “No one’s stopping you. That doesn’t mean I’ll answer it.”

  “You’re homeless, right?”

  “I believe we all are.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do. And I am.”

  “How did you end up that way?”

  Aben waited a while before responding and Bol thought he might have overstepped his bounds, but he eventually got around to it.

  “I was back stateside for a little over a year. I’d leased an apartment in the town where I grew up. Where most of the people I’d known before the war still lived.” Aben checked a door. It opened to a close full of cleaning supplies. “I didn’t re-acclimate well.”

  “Did you have much family to fall back on?”

  “Parents. An older brother but he moved to Alaska while I was in Iraq. Haven’t seen him since actually. But when my lease was up, I decided to do one of those cross country find yourself spiritual healing bullshit trips. All new age-y, right? Anyway, after a year or eighteen months of that it got to be a habit.”

  “Did you ever do it?” Bolivar had stopped walking and was watching him.

  “Do what?”

  “Find yourself?”

  “No. But I didn’t look all that hard.”

  Bolivar’s eyes drifted past him, a few yards up the corridor. “I’ll be damned.”

  45

  Bundy ran his hand over Mina’s thigh, pushing it closer and closer to that magical spot between her legs as they drove.

  She swatted it playful. “Do men ever think about anything but sex?”

  Bundy continued caressing. She wouldn't admit that it felt good, and she preferred he didn't stop.

  “I’m not thinking about sex. I’m thinking this is a damned boring trip. It's my duty to do something to spice it up.”

  “Oh, really now?”

  They zipped past the “Coalwood - 2mi” sign. Mina’s heavy foot had the ambulance flying at almost 70 miles an hour.

  “You like spice?”

  “I love it. Hot sauce. Habaneros. Damn, I’m getting hungry again.”

  His hand was between her legs now. His fingers worked overtime. She gave a little shiver and squeezed her thighs together, trapping his hand there.

  “Stop! I don’t want her to see,” Mina whispered with a head tilt to the rear of the ambulance.

  Bundy looked into the back and grinned. “Peggy’s sawin' logs. We may as well be alone.”

  That suited her just fine. She let her legs come apart so his fingers were free. “So what are you hungry for?”

  “I’m not picky. If your food is half as hot as you are, I’m a lucky man.”

  “It don’t matter if I can cook or not. You’re already lucky."

  “Believe me, I know it.”

  He removed his hand from her crotch, an act that disappointed her. She wanted to tell him to put it back but before she could say that, he grabbed her chin, turned her face toward his own and kissed her.

  “What the hell?” Ramey screamed.

  The ambulance seemed to have vanished, like a magician had passed a cloth in front of it, waved a magic wand and sent it to some other dimension. It had been there one moment, gone the next.

  “What happened?” Emory asked from the back seat. He’d just woken from road induced slumber and his voice was groggy.

  Wim slowed the Bronco. He was 50 yards from where the ambulance disappeared. Then, he saw smoke. He slowed further, 20mph, 10, 5. What had begun with a few wisps of white steam had become billowing gray clouds.

  He was only 10 feet from the gaping crevasse in the road when he saw it. The pavement was completely normal, then it dropped off into nothingness.

  “The road washed out,” Wim said as he jumped out of the Bronco. To his left he saw a deep gash in the mountainside where water funneled down. Three days of rain was too much for the hollow to handle and the steady flow had created a chasm 12 feet wide and over 20 feet deep.

  “Oh shit! Oh shit!” Ramey said.

  He hadn’t even known that she arrived at his side. He was too busy staring into the hole in the ground where the ambulance had landed nose first.

  Along with chunks of asphalt and fallen trees, the hole in the ground was filled with hundreds of zombies. Wim couldn’t tell if they’d been washed into the hole during the storm or if they’d fallen in afterward. It didn’t matter much how they got there because they all flocked toward the ambulance.

  “I have a tow rope in the back of the Bronco. Get it.” She sprinted back to the vehicle. He got down on his knees and peered over the edge.

  “Mina! Bundy!” He waited for an answer but none came. The ambulance looked unharmed aside from the smoke pouring out of the smashed radiator.

  He prepared to drop over the edge, into the hole, but before he could do that, the rear door of the ambulance flopped open.

  46

  The ramp’s incline was long and steep and Mitch struggled to catch his breath and keep moving. His sprained ankle was on fire and the only thing that kept him going was the steady chorus of growls and groans that serenaded him from behind, like an undead band that wouldn’t shut the hell up.

  Every few steps he looked back. He knew it was slowing him down but he couldn’t help it. Each time he glanced backward more zombies had come close enough to see and the thunder of their encroaching steps filled the corridor to a deafening level. Mitch believed every zombie in the bunker was giving him chase. A thousand cats and he was the mouse.

  How much further is it? His legs felt like jelly and for the first time in his life he wished he’d have put more effort into gym class. Finally, in the distance, he saw the door. The zombies were closer than ever. Their stench filled the corridor. The smell so oppressive he could taste death in his mouth.

  Mitch smacked into the door, too exhausted to stop the collision. He swiped his key card and waited. At first nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing. Of course a general access card wouldn’t open the primary entrance. He should have known that. How could he be so stupid?

  The zombies were closer. He could feel the concrete floor vibrating under his feet. I never should have left the control room. I should have stayed in there and starved to death. It would be better than this. He stared back at them as they rambled along. There was no need to hurry. Mitch was trapped.

  Aben followed Bolivar’s gaze and saw what held his attention. The hallway ended in a large, steel door with a glowing keypad beside it. Aben jogged to it.

  “We sho
uld get Juli,” Bolivar said

  “Why? Because she knows the secret code?” Aben grinned and randomly pressed numbers.

  “Because she should know we found it. This is why we came here, right?”

  “I suppose.” As Aben continued mashing at the keypad, the door unleashed a groan. They looked at each other in surprise and confusion.

  “That was easier than expected,” Aben said.

  Bolivar raised his eyebrows. “That didn’t actually work?”

  “It’s opening.”

  And it was. The door slid sideways, an inch at a time, and disappeared into a slot in the wall. When it had opened less than two feet, a boy slithered through the opening and fell to the floor.

  Bolivar first thought he was a zombie. His skin was stretched taut across his face and his eyes sunken into their sockets. But when the boy looked at them, Bol realized he was alive.

  “Jesus kid,” Aben said. “You look like shit warmed over.”

  The boy stared up at them confused but his confusion morphed into fear. “Run.”

  “What?”

  “Run!”

  The door continued to open and Bolivar heard something behind it. Movement. It grew louder. And then he heard the growls. He peered into the tunnel. In the dim green fluorescent light he found the corridor was filled side to side and as far as he could see with zombies.

  The boy had climbed back to his feet and took off in a limping, awkward gallop as he moved away from them. "Run, you idiots!"

  Bolivar stepped back from the door. He looked at Aben. “They’re all dead.”

  One glance into the tunnel was enough for Aben. "Come on!” he said to Bolivar.

  But Bolivar lagged behind. He could see them in there. Thousands of them. It reminded him of the Wells Fargo Center all over again. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

  “We have to get this door closed.”

  Aben shook his head, his wild hair flying. “No. We need to go. Now, Bol!”