The level of conversation in the room, with Darkeem whining about something and Alaia trying to appease him, and the other women arguing unintelligibly, took on the flavor of a Greek Christmas with four generations crammed into a living room the size of a broom closet.
“In case anyone wants to know,” Phoenix said, “the entire circus showed up last night.” He sat down on a metal chair next to Darkeem. Beth handed him a disposable plate, the high-end paper kind, and he reached for a bologna and cheese. Alaia poured him a flat coke, and he wondered how long it had been in the refrigerator. He took a sip. Without carbonization the soda tasted dead – that is, if death had a taste. It was just as flat as that corpse in the coffin, so he set the disposable cup down and took a bite of the sandwich. He shook a bag of Fritos out onto his plate and shoveled a handful into his mouth.
Darkeem started to say something, but Alaia put her hand over his mouth and her eyes lit up.
“Tell me you didn’t hear that?” Ms. New Orleans said. She said she’d just heard something big. Those were her words – partly English, partly bayouese. Then she asked Phoenix what he thought it was, like he should know because he was the only man in the room.
Phoenix, half way through a handful of perfectly-fresh corn chips, hadn’t heard anything. He finished chomping, took a sip of the Coke, which he finally decided was better used to de-acidify corroded battery terminals, and got up. He stepped back into the hall with the sandwich in his hands and listened.
The women started up with their socializing again, and Phoenix yelled for them to hold up for a second. He headed towards the front of the funeral home, took a left into another small hallway, and stopped. He heard a creaking noise, a steady, creaking, groaning sound, like somebody trying to sneak into or out of a bed. The creaking turned to popping, just a few pops at first, then it became louder and more frequent.
He ran back through the chapel towards the front of the building. What he saw shook him. The wooden jamb and the double doors bowed inward, looking like bent popsicle sticks about to snap and splinter. Phoenix hurried back the way he’d come, stuffing the sandwich into his mouth as he ran.
As he came down the hall he yelled, “They’re coming!” And he could hear the doors popping louder, like a tree about to be felled, as they flexed inward beyond what they could bear. And then a crash. The building shook and dust trickled down out of the ceiling tiles. Phoenix reached the kitchen, shaking his head when he saw Darkeem and the others sitting at the table with half-eaten sandwiches in their hands. “Time to go! They are coming! Like, any second now!”
Nobody said a word as they jumped up from the table, scattering chips and plates all over the small dining area. Darkeem shoved his sandwich into his mouth.
The sound of automatic gunfire suddenly ripped through the air, coming through the thin walls around them like a stereo in a low-end apartment complex. Alaia turned her head, trying to pinpoint the direction. The shots rolled from one side of the building to the other, louder near the front – the place was surrounded.
“The Black Op guys – we gotta go,” Phoenix said.
Phoenix looked at Ms. New Orleans and company, their eyes wild with rational fear. “We go to the casket show room and out through that door – it’s clear that way, and it’s just a short run to the woods from there!”
Alaia led Darkeem out of the kitchen and into the hall. Phoenix came out close on their heels. As he ran, he suddenly became afraid that if the Psykotics didn’t get them, stray bullets, which he could hear ticking against the building, might.
A groaning, messy sound, growing louder by the second, filled the halls of the funeral home. Phoenix turned his head around, slowing down enough to glance behind Ms. New Orleans and her friends. The Psyke Virus zombies, fresh off the disassembly line, some with limbs shattered and stomachs chewed open by bullets, came around the corner behind them and started to pick up speed.
Ms. New Orleans stopped and turned around. She pulled her semi-auto out and took aim, filling the hall with head-shattering and jaw-rattling explosions. “You can’t have this place!” she yelled, and she kept firing.
Alaia led the way forward to the casket sales area, turning in when she reached it, holding the door ready as those behind her made a mad dash across the threshold. Ms. New Orleans, who by now must have loaded a new clip, continued firing down the hall. “Anybody seen Beth?” Alaia leaned out and looked back down the hall just as another gun opened up. Beth had joined Ms. New Orleans; and her weapon spewed flame, metal, and smoke.
Phoenix stepped back into the hall, looked towards the women, yelling with fury that the front door had been broken in and that they were wasting precious ammunition. Maybe they couldn’t hear him, so he ran back up the hall and screamed at Beth. “We have to get out of here – stop firing and come on, now!”
Beth agreed, but Ms. New Orleans, with a fresh clip in her weapon, held her ground and kept firing. Eight or nine dead, piled grotesquely one on top of the other, filled the hall, slowing the infected on the other side who seemed to stumble onto the mess. The smell of sweaty, bloody meat reminded Phoenix of a junior high boys’ locker room where wet, steaming dogs, fresh in from the summer heat, unbathed and unloved, lifted their legs near the dirty towel bin.
“I go this,” Ms. New Orleans yelled.
Phoenix and Beth raced back down the hall, both of them breathless in the face of the red tide rolling towards them. When they reached the door to the coffin display room, they looked back at Ms. New Orleans. They saw her drop her gun, clutch her chest, and fall to her knees. They closed the door and locked it.
Alaia, seeing Phoenix, hurried across the casket showroom floor from the far end near the exit. “This way’s blocked,” she said. “You can hear the gunfire – and I hear someone shouting out there.”
A burst of gun fire, high and staccato, ripped through the room, coming from the other side of the door. The jamb of the door near the lock became a mass of flying splinters, and holes appeared in the door around the chrome door lever.
“Maybe they’re here to help us,” Beth said.
“We have it on good authority that they aren’t,” Alaia said.
More gunfire sounded, and the shouts of men rose above the din. The door to the hall, the only other way out of the room, began to bend. The Psyke-crazies now controlled the funeral home; and the Black Ops guys, though they probably had their hands full, controlled the outside.
“Into the caskets,” Phoenix said. He saw Darkeem with a look of sheer terror glistening in his dark eyes, and we watched him raise the lid of a coffin. “Get in, Darkeem! You guys do the same – I’ll hold off whatever comes through the doors.”
Darkeem had chosen a coffin at the far end of the room, a coffin away from the aisle of travel between the two doors, and Phoenix told the others to follow suit. Alaia took the casket next to Darkeem. Phoenix helped her in. He tossed her pack into the box at her feet and closed her inside. Beth and her friend came next, and he quickly helped them into their coffins, carefully lowering the lids. He hurried back towards the door leading to the hall and checked that his gun was ready.
With everyone hidden away, all of them out of sight, maybe the infected would come for him and leave the others alone. He’d do a little dance, shout, maneuver enough in order to make a hole through the mob, and he’d lead them back through the funeral home towards the chapel. In the event they didn’t take the bait, and if he couldn’t exit the room, he’d yell, and it would be every person for himself.
Phoenix startled when the exit door, the one to the outside, finally broke open, and he jumped nervously, raising his weapon in that direction. No Black Ops. Instead, four or five Psyke Crazies, all of them trying to squeeze through the opening, created a nice pile up at the entrance. It bought him a few seconds.
Phoenix, his eyes watching, his ears tuned in, listened to the sound of automatic gunfire, sporadic and distant; and he guessed that the Black Ops team had been pushed back for the moment. He
looked back towards the door leading into the hall and heard the infected standing just on the other side. Time to let them in. He grabbed the door handle and pulled, and two Psyke Crazies spilled forward onto the floor. He backed up a few steps, calling for them to come to him, all the while keeping tabs on a pair of infected that had slipped in from the outside. He moved slowly towards the caskets, taking down the infected as they neared.
Ms. New Orleans had done a good job in the hall. Or maybe the rest of the mob had turned around. But Phoenix saw his opening and, without the slightest bit of deliberation, he took it. He fired off three more rounds, dropping the Psykes with clean hits to the head, and he ran back into the hall. More Psyke Crazies, up and down the halls, were zeroing in on him, so he chose to go left. He emptied a clip, clearing a path, and ran for the opening, reloading as he sprinted past five sets of groping, trailing arms.
Phoenix rounded a corner to the right, coming face to face with a solitary infected. He put his right foot behind her right leg, tipped her over, and kept on at a steady pace. He paused and turned, then he called out; and the bodies wobbled around the corner, hands outstretched, eyes blood red, and they came straight for him. He made his way slowly up the hall and reached the chapel.
Gunfire sounded again. Pistol shots this time, accentuated by the shouts of men and women. A mass of seething, bloody flesh, ripe and redolent, began pouring into the chapel through the three main openings. Phoenix backed up slowly towards the front of the chapel. The room, once a place of singing, prayer, and eulogies, now sounded like a triage unit at a hospital full of dying men and women. More funereal, he thought. Death at its best.
Phoenix backed up, looking from side to side and from front to rear. Bullets he had, and plenty of them; but between the firing and the reloading, the infected would have him. More gun fire came from the left, from the kitchen side of the funeral home, and a single, solitary shot came from his right.
Phoenix started to raise the lid of the coffin. No time to pour sweat over his fear of tiny places, or to fret about whether or not something grand and terrible could, in fact, ever hide beneath one’s bed at night, in the darkness, or to imagine that the dead, or deadish, could really come to life, which in fact was happening all around him at just this moment.
Without bothering to look, Phoenix threw back the lid to the casket, fired point-blank into the faces of two Psyked-out infected persons, and climbed into the occupied box. He laid on top of something soft and squishy and room temperature, and he heard plastic crinkling and crackling, and he quickly wiggled down into the casket. Just as he lowered the lid of the coffin, he felt something cold and wet touch his hand. He pulled his arm into the coffin, grabbed the cloth on the underside of the lid, and pulled it down, holding it shut with every ounce of strength he could muster.
The sound of an explosion, probably a grenade, thundered through the room; and he could hear shrapnel click against the metal casket. Loud blasts of gunfire shook his head, and the cries of men filled the room, voices calling out one to another. Another explosion, and then another, and then more gunfire ripped through the chapel.
But the noise seemed to end as quickly as it had started.
Phoenix heard someone yelling, and the voice sounded like it came from just a few feet away from where he had hidden. The casket lid was jerked open and raised all the way back; and Phoenix, with his weapon in his hand, smiled awkwardly. Two men and a woman, all of them clad in black and wearing black baseball-style caps, each with their guns pointed at him, stood over him. These guys had ditched their gas masks.
One of the men jerked back when he looked inside the casket. “Wow – I guess that’s why they call it ‘closed-casket’. But that really doesn’t mean much today. Hello, Phoenix Malone.” The man turned to the woman standing beside him and said, “Take his gun, make some air holes for Detective Malone, and then button him up, will you?” Then he walked away
The woman told Phoenix to close his eyes and cover his ears. A loud burst of gunfire rang out as a rain of full metal jacket tore through the lid of the coffin, and Phoenix could feel debris, probably fragments of torn cloth and flying metal, falling softly on his face.
The lid to the coffin was closed and sealed.
Phoenix felt himself being lifted and carried away.
Chapter 24
Phoenix didn’t dare turn his head: he felt afraid he’d end up meeting the limp, room-temperature lump of decaying, closed-casket piece of meat snuggling up against him. Nothing but darkness and a few pinpoints of light in this casket, he thought – darkness, danger, and death. He could feel the vehicle on the steep incline of the funeral home driveway, and he felt his body being jostled and jumbled and thrown to the left, along with the body of Mr. Death lying next to him. The vehicle must have hit the main road and turned right. He reached for his inhaler of Oblivium.
The bullet holes in the coffin, maybe twenty or so, allowed him only a tiny amount of light, barely enough for him to see his hands when he held them close to the lid. Behind his head, in the direction of the front seat, he could hear voices – a man and woman. He guessed he was probably in a hearse, and he knew the vehicle was speeding along the road heading north towards Nashville. Phoenix needed to stay coherent and feel for the turns of the vehicle. Unless it turned multiple circles in a parking lot, he’d be able to guess their location to within a few blocks.
The vehicle slowed down and came to a stop, probably in Little Acapulco on Nolensville Road, a place much worse than Acapulco had ever been. The area was just as gang infested as the town of the same name south of the border, where drug cartels made a game out of seeing who could take the town and hold it the longest.
Scattered gunshots rang out, one here and a few over there, and Phoenix listened. Maybe somebody had to clear the road of infected or, hopefully not, kill a few survivors looking for help. The vehicle moved suddenly, jerked and then stop, then squealing its tires; and Phoenix could feel it picking up speed.
He felt around in his pocket for his phone. He found it. He was glad the Black Ops guys, unprofessional to say the least, rednecks to the last, hadn’t bothered to do a thorough search. They did take his gun from him before they honeymooned him in the crate with Mr. Dead, but they hadn’t bothered to check him for any other weapons.
After he found his phone, he lifted up his pelvis and found his combat knife squashed painfully up against his hip. Hardly the assault weapon to use against armed soldiers, he thought.
He took out his phone and checked the battery charge. Plenty of talk-time remained on the device; and as long as the electrical grid stayed alive, so would his phone. He found Alaia’s number and called her. She picked it up after the second ring.
Alaia sounded like she was still in her coffin. “Phoenix?” Her voice was high-pitched and frightened.
“I’m okay, for now,” Phoenix said. “Where are you?”
“Right where you left me,” Alaia said. “I can hear some scuffling in the room, though – but no gunfire.”
“The Black Ops guys have me in a coffin and we’re heading north. If you were CDC, where would you hide out in Nashville?”
“Turn on your GPS and send it to me – you know how to do that, right?”
Phoenix felt like a fool. “You’re the detail person – and that’s a detail. I’ll turn it on in a second. Can you and Darkeem get out of there?”
“Like when, right now? I know you ain’t asking me jump up and see how many of those … those things are waiting for me. What am I, stupid?”
“Just peek out, Alaia, I want you out of there, now,” Phoenix said. “Just do what you have to do. Those Black Ops guys did most of the work. When you get out, take Ms. New Orleans’ car and go.”
Alaia didn’t say anything for a second or two; and the phone crackled in Phoenix’s ear. She came back. “I’ve got two infected people in the room. I’ll deal with them. Just turn on your GPS. I gotta run and make sure Darkeem is okay.”
Phoenix ended the
call. He looked up at the holes in the coffin, berating himself for having allowed himself to be caught like this; and he would’ve turned his head to spit had there been a place for it too land. How could he have had let this happen? He’d been careless. As a detective, he had always been on his toes, alert to anything and everything a suspect, however brilliant or bumbling, might think of doing next. All he would have had to do, back at the funeral home, was set someone up to keep watch, and everyone could have taken turns keeping eyes on the place.
He banged on the coffin lid in a rage, ripping and tearing away what remained of the tattered fabric, hoping to get some more light into his little death trap. He reached for his knife out of anger and drove it into the nearest bullet hole, just above his face. He turned to the right to keep metal from falling into his eyes, and he used the knife to cut through the coffin lid. From bullet hole to bullet hole he cut, oblivious to the turns of the vehicle and, within a few minutes, he had cut out a small hole about twelve inches across.
He couldn’t help thinking about Alaia and Darkeem, and that surprised him. He fumbled with his phone like a short-tempered Dad working to put together a kid’s bike and turned on the GPS. The vehicle was heading north on Nolensville Road. At just that moment, just as he started to set the phone down beside him, it rang.
“Sorry about all of this, Phoenix,” Mr. Krystal said with regret in his voice. “I’d hoped to get you to Dr. Carson’s lab safely and soundly, but something’s come up.”
Phoenix flattened his lips and slowly shook his head. Instead of responding, he remained silent.
“I know you’re listening, and I know you’re probably pissed off,” Mr. Krystal said. “But I want you and your friends, the woman and the boy, to live. You know, there’s a whole new world out there after this virus – but you’ve got to get to the cure first.”
“Now what? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m separated from my friends and riding in a---”
Time Clock Hero Page 17
