“What path did the others take?” Sass asked.
“Blood trail goes straight through.” Jane answered.
“If a guy that’s been shot can make it, surely we can.” Amanda said.
“We could always go’round da edges.” Marky added giving the wreckage a questionable look.
Everyone quit talking about our options and before I realized it they had spent a good thirty seconds watching me look at the wreckage.
“What?” I asked.
“Which way do you want us to go?” Jane asked.
“You’re asking me?”
“Sure does seem like it, doesn’t it?” Jane said.
“I was waiting on you to tell us.” I said with a hint of a laugh in my voice.
“You’se da leader, Charlie. You’se make da calls, right?” Marky Mark asked.
“Hell no, I don’t make these calls. We have two certified killers who can track a fighting chicken through the jungles of Borneo. This kind of stuff is their call, not mine.”
Amanda did laugh at this. “I don’t think it’s the chickens that do the fighting down there.” She said.
“See, I don’t even know what fights in Borneo.” I said holding out my hands in a case closed gesture.
“If it’s up to me I say we keep following the blood trail.” Jane said.
“Agreed.” Amanda said.
I used my best Captain Picard voice and pointed towards the bridge saying, “Make it so.”
Jane began to lead us through as, from behind me, I heard Marky Mark ask Sass, “Dey always waste time like dis?”
Sass laughed and answered, “Not always like this. We have other ways to waste time that are far more creative.” Through the entire conversation Fred Baker, Samantha’s father, never said a word.
After no more than five minutes inside the shrapnel fun house, we found ourselves nearing the end. Soon we would be able to walk without being consciously aware of where our limbs were at all times. This was when I heard the first hints of the ocean. The waves crashing onto the shore. It came on the breeze; softly at first. Still just a hint of what its full potential was, but it was there. I remembered what we had found the first time we had heard this sound. I feared what lay for us just down the road.
The ocean rolled onto the shore again.
“Anyone else hearing that?” I asked.
“Yes, I hear it.” Amanda said.
“Loud and clear.” Jane said.
“It’s like that crowd on the bridge when we first made it to Johnson City.” Sass said. And that was my fear exactly.
“It’s nowhere near as big as that group was. But it is a group of them.” Amanda said.
“I think our blood trail is about to run out.” Jane added, Amanda nodded her head. “My thoughts exactly.”
Once out from under the overpass, State of Franklin really opens up. To the right you could find a good book at Barnes and Noble and get a bite to eat at one of the handful of restaurants on that side of the road. Sitting high above all other stores on the right side of the road is Sam’s Club, our back up plan.
Much earlier on in our life as roof dwellers Jack decided we needed to have some form of backup plan in case one of the many possible disasters befell us. He said we could lose our home to an invading army, we could have a civil war and be forced out, we could simply run out of provisions, or even outgrow Wal-Mart and need to start a second community somewhere. To this end he wanted a secondary place we could go to find the same safety and security that we had at Wal-Mart. He wanted what we called “site B”, and he wanted nobody but council members to know about it. We readied the building in secret and we have maintained that secret since. Nobody knows that Sam’s is ready to start accepting tenants and I have no desire to let anyone know, especially with that idiot Jericho running around. God only knows what he would do with that information.
To the left of State of Franklin, you have K-mart sitting right beside the interstate and then shops running off into the distance, seemingly all the way to the horizon. It was to the left that the blood trail led, and it was to the left where the zombie ocean crested and washed onto shore again and again.
Leading to the left is a pair of turning lanes. These turn lanes take you onto a small access road that leads to a crossroad where, if you were to turn left, it takes you to K-Mart. If you were to go straight then it would take you into a set of subdivisions and turning right takes you on to the other shops of this complex. The car was sitting in the middle of the intersection and zombies were all over it. The windows had already caved in and there were zombies inside the car. I knew the horror this poor guy had to have felt as he watched the zombies bang their way into the car to get their meal. He was hurt, he was trapped, and he had to have known that he was doomed from the moment that car door slammed shut. This wasn’t like when I had Jane and Shawn put me in the car. This was something far worse. There had been no gunshots because whoever this guy was, his weapons had been taken from him. I’m sure that he had crawled or staggered his way to the car hoping that he could fake dead long enough to figure a way out of this situation. He was in trouble, there was no doubt about that, and his so-called friends had left him. He was slowing them down too much. He had taken too long to navigate his way through the wreckage under the interstate and he guessed that was the last straw. As he cleared the wreckage he most likely saw that the rest of his group was long gone. He strained his eyes and could just make them out disappearing onto the access road for K-Mart. He yelled for them, but they didn’t even look back. He had done his best to chase after them, but the bullet was still in his leg and it hurt like hell. He couldn’t keep up. He couldn’t catch them, and the sun was starting to creep across the horizon. Soon he would be nothing more than a sitting duck. He needed someplace to hide. His lack of mobility seriously limited his options. He had hoped to make it into one of the shops, but that was becoming less and less likely. He looked up the road and saw the car sitting there. It seemed in good shape and he figured that it was his only real option at this point, so he got inside, locked the doors, and did his best impression of a dead body.
I’m not sure if it was when he yelled for his friends to wait for him or if some lucky zombie caught a glimpse of him as he made his way to what he hoped would be his salvation. Something happened to draw their attention to him, and to him they came. They came in waves, crashing upon the car and beating the metal and glass so hard it had to rattle the teeth in his head. I know this for a fact; I lived through what took this man’s life. With each new crack in the widow, with each new figure that appeared beside the car, your heart sinks further and further into despair. I had a gun and extra clips. I could at least fight back and make a go at surviving. And if it looked like there was no way out, I could have ended it myself, if I had the courage. I’m not sure that I do.
This guy had nothing. All he could do was lay in that car and watch as they inched closer to him minute by minute. Finally, the windows start to burst and the hands came in to grab at him. I’m sure he fought them off as best he could, but in the back of his mind he knew it was a losing battle. That’s when the first zombie would have stuck its head into the car to say hello and grab a small bite before going on to visit the neighbors. He kicks it in the face, maybe he even kills it and he begins to hope that maybe he could clog the windows up with dead bodies. His heart feels that moment of hope and joy and accomplishment of actually fighting back and, unbelievably, he seems to be winning. That’s the moment when the windshield, which I’m sure has been sagging more and more under the weight of the dead, finally gives in and crashes into the car bringing a couple of corpses with it. He spins around in the back seat trying to use his feet again to kick, kill, or just push them back out of the car. Then he hears the back window, the one that was right above his head, break inward and he knows in his heart that it’s over. The bodies pour into the car and he does his best not to scream. “I will be strong all the way to the end. I will be a man. I will not g
ive them the satisfaction of hearing my screams.” He thinks. But that’s a lie you’re only able to tell yourself until the first set of teeth break your skin and rip a hunk of you away. That’s when you know you are going to scream. You also know that they don’t care about your screams; the only satisfaction they seek is swallowing hunks of your body. You then have the final realization of your life, you’re not a man. You haven’t been a man for months. All you are is prey, a food source for the newest, most deadly, dominant species of this planet. You’ve been fooling yourself all this time and now you will join the others that fell to these monsters. You will hunt and feed and nothing else will ever matter.
While imagining this man’s last moments there had been another fight raging much closer to home. No more than two feet from Sass and I, Big Lou was going into zombie overload. Looking back, I don’t know how I forgot about him. It was his job to warn us. It was my job to pay attention.
There had been several times before where I had been able to calm him down when we were this close to zombies, but it took every bit of concentration that I could muster. I had to be giving him my undivided attention and constant assurance that things were going to be okay. I didn’t give him anything this time around because I was too busy in my own head visualizing this man's demise. I had forgotten my job and as a result Big Lou, who was on the verge of having a full blown zombie panic freak out, did the absolutely worse thing that he could have done at that moment in time.
Big Lou began to bark.
TEN
The barks were loud, ringing out like Guile’s sonic booms in Street Fighter. On the roof of Wal-Mart, I’m sure the rest of the survivors had no problem hearing Lou as he went into a panic filled meltdown. The others knew what it meant when he barked. He never did it unless the dead were around. Barking meant zombies.
Given that they knew what his bark meant, to hear him in his current state had to make the others in our little tent city question whether we were being eaten alive. I’m sure at least one person on the rooftop gave a little prayer to the big man that we were busy being breakfast, so he could begin planning how to best wrestle control from our one remaining board member. What was I thinking leaving Jack alone to handle him? I hadn’t realized until right then that I had taken the rest of the council with me on this rescue mission. I was sure Jack could handle it, but I certainly left him in a tight spot.
“Back up. Back the hell up.” Amanda was saying.
“No good, they are coming up the road behind us as well.” Sass said.
“Shit.” Jane said looking around, “Nowhere decent to even make a stand.”
But he was wrong. There was someplace where we could make a stand. No, strike that, there was somewhere we could go where we wouldn’t even have to make a stand. There was someplace close by that we could use to escape this army of the dead that were now advancing on us from two directions.
“Go forward and jog left around the bank. We’re heading for K-Mart’s parking lot but stay at the bottom end. We’re heading for the Fidelity building.” I said.
“You don’t mean to…” Jane said, but he knew the answer to that.
“I absolutely do.” I answered.
“It just may work.” Amanda said, “Get heading that way Jane.” As she had said this last bit she drew out the two handguns I had been calling Tango and Cash for the past few months. She hated both names, but had yet to shoot me for it. She began shooting the zombies that were close to the path we would have to follow, making sure that we could safely navigate the intersection. I hung back with her as the others moved ahead.
“Don’t drop them all, but keep shooting, I need them close to us. I need them to see where we go.” I said into her ear as her guns roared again and again. She nodded to me as I moved ahead of her and made to catch up to the rest of the group.
Jane had the others moving at about double our normal speed. I ran up to them and attempted to calm them down. “We don’t have to run.” I said. “I need them to see us go into the building.” This comment made Fred and Marky Mark look at me as if I had lost my mind.
“What do you mean you need them to see where we go?” Fred asked.
I patted myself on the head, “All part of the plan my doubtful friend. All part of the plan.” We had passed Citizens Bank to our left and were currently passing by a dark building who’s sign simply read “Apollo” on it. When I say dark building, I don’t mean that there were no lights on inside, I mean that it set much further off the road than any other building to our left and it was colored grey and black. This made the building seem to kind of be there and not be there at the same time. I have no clue what had went on inside this building before the dead decided it would be a great idea to visit Red Lobster for some of those endless crab legs, but I doubt it had anything to do with the moon landing. To me it looked like the kind of place where Voodoo Hatie sits in the darkened back room and can either tell you your future, sell you a potion, or curse your enemies.
Just beyond the spooky Apollo building was Chucky Cheese. If ever there was a yin yang of the retail world it had to be these two buildings. I wondered if I was right about what went on inside the Apollo building, and I admit that most likely I was very wrong. However, had I been right, I figured that Voodoo Hatie would have already hurled a curse or two at the loud, obnoxious eatery to her left which sold pizza that wasn’t fit to eat and made its customers watch gigantic mechanical rats perform on stage.
On second thought she most likely would have thought that anyone who went into that brightly lit, soul crushing building was more than likely doing more harm to their good spirits and temperament than any curse she could have cast.
As we were passing the den of uneatable pizza I pointed directly ahead to the Fidelity Investments building and said, “That’s where we’re going.”
“Um, Charlie, the entire front of that building is made of windows.” Fred said.
“I know, ain’t it great?” I said in return and effectively killed all conversation as we made our way into the little shopping center where Fidelity sat. In the long building there was Fidelity on the far left with a store named Batteries Plus in the next shop to the right. The shop beside Batteries Plus was vacant and would now stay so until the sun flared up and burnt us all away. The last store at the right end of the building was called Dempsey’s and was a jewelry shop. I had considered going in there and getting me some diamonds once upon a time but had decided that the entire endeavor would end up being pointless and even worse, it may have made Veronica think I was wanting to propose to her. That would have been bad.
“Look man, is der something I’m missing?” Marky Mark asked.
“Yeah, we know these shops. We’ve been here before. Well, Jane and I have been here before.” I said.
“And you’se think dat we can just climb in dese stores and hide?”
“Not at all.” This answer seemed to completely dumbfound Marky Mark. All he could bring himself to do was to give me that look again. You know the one.
“What we doin here then, Charlie?” He asked me with a nice little tense edge to his voice.
“We’re escaping a hungry horde of the dead. Jeez Marky, try to keep up will ya?”
I almost laughed at this point because it looked as if Marky Mark Scapoli was either going to have a conniption fit right there or he was going to punch me square in the mouth. He closed his eyes in an almost exact action that I had watched Amanda do on the first day I had met her and then he let out a long sigh.
“Look, you’se said we couldn’t hide here.” He said.
“Yes, that’s right.” I answered.
“But you’se also said that we’re gonna hide in here. How can it be both ways?”
“I never said we were going to hide in here Marky Mark. I said we were going to escape through here. There is a rather big difference in the two.”
“How’s that?” Marky asked.
“Well hiding involves a lot of crouching and praying and n
ot moving. Escaping involves being sneaky and smart and a good deal of moving. This is pretty straight forward.” I answered torturing him as much as I could. He had already progressed beyond being mad at me and was now treating this conversation as the chess match it was. Fred, bless his heart, was looking from him to me each time one of us would say something, like we were playing tennis. Jane however was ready to proceed. He pulled his rifle back and took a step towards the far left window.
“Break it as high as you can, Jane.” I said.
Jane nodded and broke the top portion of the window out. Fred and Marky both had seen that the inside of this building was about as fortified as it could get. Tall, metal, file cabinets had been slid in front of the windows blocking access to the building once the glass broke. The only way in was up high, where Jane had busted the window.
“Fine, how are we gonna escape dese zombies then?” Marky Mark asked.
“Well, you see Marky, Jane and I are very familiar with this particular set of buildings and we know a path we can take to get us out of here. In order for us to take this path though we have to make the zombies think that we are still where they think we are.”
“We trick em.” Marky said.
“Yes sir. We do what we always do because they always fall for it. And like my dear old dad taught me when I was young, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. We are about to incorporate a little bit of the mischief that all magicians know about. We are about to engage in misdirection.
THEN
DAY 11 OF THE INFECTION
ONE
After twisting my ankle during the little field trip that Jane, Shawn and I took; I was on injured reserve for five days. It was one of the few times where Amanda, Jack and Veronica were all agreed that if I left the wheelchair I had been confined to, they would dump me off the roof. During those five days I did nothing but sit in the big community tent prowling around the web. People would wander in and out during this time and visit with me, but I got the impression that most of them were still pissed at Jane and I for, and I’m quoting here, our complete disregard for ourselves and everyone else on the roof.
Samantha's Song Page 9
