There it is. There’s the reason for betrayal. The promise of glory. The promise of a fresh start. I should’ve known.
“You do realize how crazy that sounds, right?” Norm asks. He is next to me, his arm through mine, holding me up because I do feel like I might pass out. Darlene is behind. Herb and Abby are frozen in the corner. Herb sobs no more, just looks on with wide, wet eyes.
Now every warning given to me about Klein in the village — from Grady, from Mother — makes sense. He is crazy.
“No, it’s not crazy,” Klein says.
Father Michael’s lips move in a silent prayer. His eyes are shut, Klein's gun pressing into his temple. I see the skin bunch up there, the red ring already forming.
“If it was crazy I wouldn’t risk my life. Do you know what I had to go through while I was in Washington? The stuff I had to see,” he shakes his head, “it was horrendous. The stuff I had to do, it was even worse.”
I bet it’s nothing compared to what I’ve gone through, the people I’ve lost, and the things I’ve seen and done. I don’t say this. I can see there’s no talking to Doc Klein. His eyes are ablaze with fervor as the floor around him grows with fire. Slowly, the flames lick up the pew, yet we can’t move because Klein has the gun trained on us.
“Don’t you see?” I say, my voice coming back to me.
“I get that I have to do this,” Klein says.
“Maybe you do,” I say. Darlene shudders behind me. “But you don’t have to hurt any of us in the process, Klein. I saved you. Father Michael has nothing to do with this. Leave him out of it.”
“But he does,” Klein says. “He does because he’s my ticket to the Mojave.”
“What?” Father Michael says, choking.
Klein jerks him and starts backing up. He’s such a small man that it’s almost comical to see him wrestle with Father Michael almost twice his size. Klein bends down, the gun now pressed in the priest’s back, and he picks up the fallen papers with nuclear launch codes and schematics I will never comprehend. Then, he’s got the gun pressed back on Father Michael’s temple and they’re backing up toward the door.
“You have the car keys?” Klein all but whispers into the priest’s ears.
Father Michael gulps and nods. “On the inside of that door.” He points to his left.
We can’t do anything. I don’t have a gun and if I did, I wouldn’t trust my aim enough to hit him in the dark. I’m not that good.
“Get them,” Klein says. They are leaning against the wall and Father Michael’s hand reaches around the door. “Don’t try anything,” Klein says. “You do and I will pull the trigger. I don’t want to do that, Father, I don’t. I really don’t, but I will if you make me.”
Herb’s voice booms from the corner of the church where Abby holds him in the shadows. I see the whites of his eyes blazing. “Doc? Doc?” Herb says.
“What, Herb?” Klein asks.
“Why?” is all Herb says and I think I see Klein’s face go squeamish, like his heart has broken right there on the spot, like he’s pained to do this, but he’s bound by a duty none of us can understand.
No. Bullshit. Klein knows exactly what he’s doing.
“I’m sorry,” Klein says.
The car keys jingle and Father Michael’s hand comes out of the darkness holding something that gleams in the low flames. The smell of singed carpet and fear fills the church. The fire separates us from them.
Klein kicks back and they leave the church’s main area. I hear the chain and the lock rattle on the front doors beyond. We dare not move yet, not until we know the gun is no longer pressed against Father Michael’s head.
It’s when I hear a car door slam that I sprint to the doors, running through the fire, not caring if I burn. These flames are nothing to the ones that will fill the world if Klein is successful. High beams almost blind me and the tires of one of the cars skid and burn up.
Then they are gone and so is the rain. I can hear Herb’s cries from out here. As I walk back into the church, the flames now out, doused by holy water courtesy of Abby, I grab another gun and my belongings.
“We have to follow them,” I say.
25
I’m halfway out the door with my own bag full of items in one hand and Darlene’s hand in the other when Norm grabs me. He’s not kind about it, either. He full-on horse collars me. I stop abruptly and almost fall flat on my ass.
“Don’t be stupid,” Norm says.
“What are you talking about? You don’t be stupid, Norm. He’s crazy. I should’ve listened to everyone who told me he was,” I say. I shake my head. Darlene’s hand is sweaty in my own. “He is going to blow us all to hell, man.”
Seriously, I can think of almost nothing worse than having to deal with real zombies, crazy assholes, and crazier cowboys, but one thing I can think of that’s worse is the fire. I don’t know if it’s because I saw it in my head — and sometimes my imagination is so vivid — or not. I do know it’s now no longer a dream; it’s a full-fledged reality.
“You chase him right now with the way you are and you’re just as crazy as Klein, little bro. Maybe even crazier,” Norm says.
Darlene tugs me on the arm. I look at her. There’s no longer fear or uncertainty in her eyes. Now, there’s anger. She rips her hand away from me. It slides easily enough — thanks to my nervous sweat — and tightens her hands into fists. “Jack, he’s right. Listen to us for a change.”
Ouch. Her tone. The way she says ‘for a change’ gets me. It’s like she’s slapped me in the face.
“I always listen to you,” I say.
She shakes her head, her features easing. “No, you don’t. If you’d listened to us, we’d still be — ”
“We’d be dead,” I finish for her. Now it looks like she’s the one who’s been slapped. She shakes her head, mouth a grim line. Then she turns her back on me and heads back into the church.
I can’t believe this. Doesn’t she care? Father Michael was kind enough to take us in and now he’s become a hostage. Not to mention the fact that Klein is about to turn us all into black smears of ash.
Norm walks closer to me. I’m slouching. I only realize it when he stops about six inches from me and I appear much shorter than him. I tried to save my pride by standing up straight, but it’s too late. “We need to gear up first,” Norm says. “We know where the airfield is, but we don’t know how fucked up it is.”
“You do?” I ask.
“Yeah, Klein asked down in the storage right after you left…” Norm says.
“Goddamn it,” I say, more pissed than scared now. We are outside of the church so it’s okay to swear. “He might be gone by the time we gear up,” I say.
“Trust me, Klein is smart, but he ain’t that smart. Getting to the West ain’t gonna be easy at all, big brain or not,” Norm says.
I nod, taking a shaky breath. I’m starting to realize I’ve been blinded by anger, by betrayal. I’m so glad my brother is here to talk some sense into me. I don’t know how I survived Eden or D.C. without him, really.
“Father Michael has weapons and food and new gear. We have medicine and a car. We will be fine, Jack. Just calm down a minute while we get ready,” Norm says. He has his hand on my shoulder. I feel his warmth blazing through my shirt.
I nod. “Okay, but I’d like to move out before sunrise.”
“Sure thing, little bro,” Norm says.
26
Darlene doesn’t even spare me a glance as I walk up the blackened carpet. A few candles are burning, eating away at the darkness. Outside, the sky glows with soft light. Sunrise can’t be more than an hour away.
I’m following Norm and Abby into the dank hall that leads into Father Michael’s storage area. He lights the torch at the top of the steps and shadows dance on the walls.
“You really know how to pick ‘em,” Abby says.
“You met Klein in Eden, didn’t you?” I ask, feeling defensive. It’s not my fault I look for hope wherever I can
get it.
Abby nods. We are going down the steps. She looks so different minus her left hand. “I met Doctor Klein, yeah,” she says, “but I never met that man we saw back there…that was someone else.” Her voice is like the cold edge of a blade touching my spine.
“Yup,” Norm agrees.
The door to the storage area creaks open. The smell of dirt, mold, and dust fills my nostrils. Norm lights another torch.
“Wow!” Abby says, looking at the corner of the room where the weapons are stockpiled. It’s not as good as Grady’s armory back at the village, but it’s pretty close. It makes what I was left with in Woodhaven all those months ago look like a squirt gun in comparison. “We could beat Armageddon with all this stuff,” she says.
I don’t smile like she’s smiling. This isn’t a time to smile. But I do nod and say, “We may have to.”
27
We load everything into the Ford SUV and we even give Herb a handgun, just in case. This town is unknown to us and the fact that we haven’t seen a zombie the whole time we’ve been here just unsettles me. It makes me think shit is really about to hit the fan. That’s another thing I’ve learned in this apocalypse: Shit constantly hits the fan.
Darlene seems happier toward me, but I can see the weariness on her face. She’s sick of this, sick of it all. She told me on the highway a couple days ago. I’m sick of it all, too. I really am. But there’s no escaping it. It’s lurking around every corner like the zombies and their radioactive-looking eyes.
We get into the car. Abby smiles. She’s even jittery, in fact. She loves it because she’s been out of the game for too long. The idea of her going through zombie brain-smashing withdrawal crosses my mind and leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Herb won’t hold his gun. I see him put it on the floor and look at it from the corner of his eyes as if it were a large spider. Norm hits him on one knee, which seems to be inches away from his broad chest in the smaller SUV. “Don’t worry, big guy, it’s all going to be okay,” he says.
“I’m not scared,” Herb says.
This surprises us all. I’m sitting between Darlene and Abby. Darlene was looking out of the window at the rising sun while Abby was trying to strip and clean her pistol with her one good hand, and now they both tense up and face forward. Me with them.
“What? I’m not,” Herb says. “Doc Klein doesn’t scare me.”
Well he should, I almost say, thinking of Klein and his devil horns.
“He’s my friend,” Herb continues.
Norm and I exchange a glance in the rearview mirror. A friend or not, Klein has it out for him.
“You remember where the airfield is?” I ask. “For sure?”
Norm turns the wheel and eases the SUV down the winding brick road and unto the smooth pavement of Butain’s city streets. “Think so,” Norm says. “It was somewhere out past a red barn.”
We are quiet for the moment as the SUV rolls through the dead town. Shuttered windows look on from the sides of residential streets. A car is crashed askew into a telephone pole, the wires sagging down on top of its roof. There are scorch marks on the windows from when this place had electricity, I think. All four of its tires are flat. Two of them are missing hubcaps. Lawns have overgrown to look like jungles. I see a dog slinking between two spilled trashcans, its ribs jutting out, its eyes crazy and starved. Darlene sees it, too, and I hear her low moan of pity. We were always animal lovers too busy to have pets of our own. Stray dogs basically kill me.
I wish Norm would drive faster. I don’t need to see the grand tour of this depressing town. I’ve seen many depressing places in my time on the dead roads. Butain is nothing new, but before we know it, we’re going to look up and see a plane flying through the air and soon after that we’ll see fire. I don’t want that. Thing is, we have to drive slow because the roads look as if a war had been fought in the middle of them.
We are coming to the city’s business district, following signs that say: TO 76 with an arrow pointing this way then that way. The businesses are equally depressing. Shattered show windows. Scorched facades. Cars jutting out of doorways and walls. Skeletons stripped of every last bit of meat.
Darlene turns her head away from the window and buries her face in my shoulder. I stroke her hair.
Abby, on the other hand, looks out the windows with wide eyes and something written on her face that resembles hunger.
We get on the stretch of country road out of the city limits something like five minutes later. Five minutes of silence and dark images passing us by, things I don’t even want to tell you about.
As we drive up the road, I hear Herb’s breathing getting faster. He is scared. We all are.
Then as we take a curve, passing a flipped John Deere tractor, I see it, the barn. It’s a bright red and I try not to notice that it’s the color of blood. Beyond it, we can see the airfield. Large airport hangars stand tall and vigilant against the orangish sky, shuttered.
Norm slows the car to a crawl. My eyes flick to him. I’m enamored by the airport hangars and the speck on the horizon that is Klein’s car; so enamored, in fact, that I don’t notice the passing herd of zombies in the middle of the road.
28
“Shit,” Norm says.
Herb doesn’t go ‘Aw!’ and point at him. His teeth are chattering too bad for him to do that. Darlene grips my arm hard.
The herd cuts through the middle of the road and it’s like being stuck at a railroad crossing where a mile-long train has stopped traffic for half an hour.
In the gap in the packed meat of the zombies, I see red skid marks. Klein, in all his infinite wisdom and luck, must’ve punched the gas to beat the train and clipped a couple of the leaders.
Now, some of them have stopped, their yellow eyes glare at us — somehow bright in the rising sun. This is definitely a nightmare. Pinch me, I must be dreaming. God can’t be this cruel, can he?
More zombies turn their heads. The movement is very rickety, like a rusty hinge, and their yellow eyes blaze. Herb has taken to whimpering. I bring a hand up to my throat to make sure it’s actually not me and I don’t know it. There’s no vibrations underneath so it must be Herb.
Norm looks over his shoulder at the empty road behind us. I put my hand on his arm and shake my head. “We can’t,” I say. “Klein is getting away.”
“Let him!” Norm says. “Look at them!” He points out the windshield. The zombies have started to lumber toward us. Raggedy, blood-stained clothes whip in the morning breeze. Crooked arms and legs move like broken clocks. Their death rattles and grunts are loud enough to be heard through the glass. Actually, their collective dead voices are loud enough to be heard halfway around the world, I think. I can smell the decay on them, the rot, like old earth and worms. These are seasoned zombies. These are not freshly turned humans. They are rotted almost to the bone. Emaciated. Starving.
“If Klein gets a plane — ” I’m saying.
“I know what will happen!” Norm shouts. “I don’t give a shit.”
While we are sitting here arguing, they are getting closer. They don’t seem smart at first glance — they’re not supposed to be smart — but I think there are certain features and survival instincts wired into their dead brains or something because they’re not coming at us in a straight line. No, they’re circling around the SUV, cutting us off from all angles. More stream out from the surrounding trees. Now I can’t see the road at all, just hints of yellow paint that belongs to the double line.
I feel like I’m choking. Abby, Darlene, and I are pushing closer and closer together as the dark shadows do the same.
“Fuck this,” Norm says. He shifts into reverse.
“No,” I say.
“I’m not going to be the one to kill us,” he says.
The first zombie clunks into the back of the SUV. I hear the soft shatter of glass — one of our taillights.
“Let me drive,” I say.
“I’m the driver!”
“Now�
�s really not a time to argue about this,” Abby says.
She’s right.
Norm snarls at her first then he snarls at me. “Fine,” he says and we begin to switch seats. It’s about as graceful as two full grown men can make it — which is to say it’s not graceful at all.
Bloody hands beat on the windows. One zombie, it’s tongue lolling out about two miles long, climbs on the hood of the car. For a second, I think we are stuck here. I think they will keep pressing and pressing up against the frame until they create some type of zombie garbage smasher and the Ford is turned into a compacted cube with us still contained on the inside somehow.
Then I look down at the gearshift and I see the glowing red ‘P’ and the unlit ‘D’ and I stomp on the break, switch to ‘D’, and then stomp on the gas with all of my weight.
The SUV lurches forward.
With all that horsepower under the hood, you’d think we’d plow right through the zombies. We don’t. There’s too many and we don’t have enough momentum going for us. What we need is a big plow attached to the front fender, maybe add some medieval spikes to the plow and just gut all these dead bastards.
Herb has taken to screams again as a zombie smashes his face against the glass, blood-stained teeth and blackened gums streaking down the window. Herb fumbles for his gun, his hands shaking wildly. All the while I’m still pressing down on the gas. “Stop him!” I say to anyone who’ll listen.
The tires start kicking up smoke. It’s smells like burnt rubber. Then the SUV jumps and something goes under the tire — an unlucky zombie. And the smell of burnt rubber is quickly changed to the smell of cooking meat and innards. The tires don’t grip the road any longer. But it’s like we’re driving on ice now, slipping and sliding. But it’s not ice and it’s not banana peels beneath our tires; it’s blood and brains and rotten flesh.
Dead Coast: A Zombie Novel (Jack Zombie Book 4) Page 8
