by Geo Dell
“Not on the map...” He shrugged. “I just don't know, Pearl.”
Pearl had stopped on the edge of a housing development. It was dark, lit only by the headlights of the truck. Cars and trucks sat neatly in driveways. The streets were empty. The pavement was cracked and heaved, sand and debris covered the streets in an undisturbed pattern.
“Fucking spooky,” Billy said. “I've seen something like this before.”
“Beth?”
Billy frowned. “Someplace in Arizona... I guess my mind is too tired to think straight... There could be dead in here, Pearl. That's my concern.” He pointed out disturbed areas in the dirt. Places that looked like trails.
“It doesn't have to be dead... Could be small animals raiding house to house... No garbage cans, dumpsters anymore... Or it could be dead.”
“That's exactly what we were thinking, turned out to be wolves...” Billy shook his head. “No. I say we find someplace else.” He looked back along the road, nothing but the red glow of tail lights behind them.
“I'll turn around here in the mouth and then...” Pearl fell silent as strong white light illuminated the sky above a hill not far away.
“Someone coming,” Billy whispered urgently.
“Shit,” Pearl muttered. She hit the gas and drove down into the project. She cut the wheel hard and pulled into the first driveway and shut the lights off. She killed the motor and they sat quietly, watching the lights grow as they approached the apex of the hill. The motor ticked quietly as it cooled off. They both leaned back into the seats, hiding themselves in the contours and the headrests.
The vehicle made the apex and topped the hill a quarter mile away. The headlights grew closer, the sound of exhaust loud in the night. The vehicle never slowed, but swept past the housing project and continued on its way into the city.
Pearl keyed the ignition and the truck rumbled back to life. Billy took a deep breath, released it, and then something hit the truck hard and it rocked on its springs. The smell of death hit them about the same time, and Pearl slammed her foot down on the gas, mashing the pedal into the floor boards.
A rotting hand came through the open back window and fastened around Pearl's throat, her hands left the wheel as she was yanked backwards, and the truck spun hard to the left and accelerated, her foot still mashed down on the gas.
Billy lifted his gun and shot the zombie in the face. It seemed slow motion at first, the face exploded as it fell away into the back of the pickup, Pearl drew a deep breath and tried to grab the wheel, but it was too late. Everything sped up to real time and the truck roared forward and slammed into the side of a house. Her foot had slammed down on the brake and the truck finally stopped several feet past the house in head high grass.
Billy scrambled up from the floorboards. He looked over at Pearl, but she seemed dazed, her eyes unfocused, a trickle of blood running from somewhere under her hairline. Billy levered his door open and jumped to the ground. His left leg refused his weight, collapsing under him, the knee sprung, or maybe just hurt from ramming into the dashboard as they clipped the side of the house on their way into the field.
One headlight showed head high grass directly ahead, the other was dead. An amber signal light flicked on and off on the dead side of the truck, illuminating the grass and then dying away just as quickly. Something moved behind him, he watched the tops of the grasses swaying, and quickly dragged his attention back fully to the truck and where they were right now. Why was Pearl still in the truck? He wondered. Panic gripped him as he forced himself to his feet, ignored the pain from his knee and lunged back inside the truck.
The smell of death came to him on the air, along with the smells of gas and hot motor. The dead were close by, he had little time. Pearl was slumped over the steering wheel, the airbag a corona around her. Blood slicked what he could see of her face, and she appeared to be dead. For a split second he was sure she was dead. He slammed his door to shut it with only partial success. Pearl's door was bent inward, no way would they be going out that. The glass was shattered and he wondered if that was what the blood was from. He forced his mind to slow down, stop the never ending questions. He remembered reading once that the mind did that when it was confused. Normally the mind didn't need to ask anything. It interpreted far quicker than words could. He grabbed one wrist to feel for a pulse, but gave up after a few seconds. His own heartbeat had been all he had been able to feel. It was slamming so hard in his chest that it was all he could feel. He took several deep breaths, fixed his fingers loosely on her wrist, and immediately felt a steady, slow pulse. There, but was it too slow? He forced the questions away in his head. He tapped her face lightly with one hand.
“Jesus, Pearl. Jesus. We've got to go,” Billy said loudly. He reached down, gabbed Pearl's rifle where it had fallen to the floor and then shoved his own gun into his holster. He was surprised he had the presence of mind to actually pull the strap over the hammer and snap it in place to hold the gun in. He could feel the weight of his own rifle on his back. Pearl had said nothing. He forced himself to slow down, although he was panicked, and checked her over.
He couldn't find the head wound, but he could see that her leg was badly injured. Blood was soaking into the fabric of her jeans. He used his own shirt, ripped quickly from his body and tied around her thigh to slow the bleeding. There was nothing more he could do here. He had to get out of the truck: Get them moving.
He reached over and pulled her to him, she came willingly. A second later he was limping thorough the tall grass in the moonlight.
The dead were all around them, he could hear them moving, searching, he knew he had the briefest of minutes, no more. He stopped and shifted Pearl to one shoulder, and then sped up, limping faster through the overgrown field. Behind him a soft whump sounded in the night, and he felt the heat against his back as the truck burst into flame behind him, flames shot up into the night. Billy shifted Pearl's weight more fully onto his shoulder, and lifted the gun, searching for the dead, but the flames were keeping them at bay. One thing they were still afraid of. Before he could turn fully back to the building just a few feet away now, the truck blew up behind him and he felt himself pushed by the blast up onto the concrete of the driveway, where he struggled to stay on his feet.
He got his feet moving, skirted the closed garage doors, and barreled into a steel door set into the breezeway that connected the building, a house he realized, to the garage. A second of fumbling, breathing hard, panicked completely, and the door swung inward. Warm, stale air rushed out to meet him. He stumbled inside, kicked the door shut and collapsed to the floor. A few minutes of stillness and his eyes began to adjust to the sparse light. Moonlight leaked in from windows in the garage. Most of that light was blocked.
A few seconds later as he laid Pearl out flat on the floor in the near darkness, he heard the door handle rattle. He was on his feet fast, turning the deadbolt to the locked position, locking the handle-set, but the dead on the other side of the door had heard and they knew he was there. A snarl came to him as he backed away from the door. The door shook as it was tested again and again, and then silence descended. Silence in the near absolute darkness. A bad place to be.
The dead made an odd clicking sound on the other side of the door along with the occasional snarl, a sort of strangled scream, which, Billy supposed was all they could do with no air to move their lungs. He pulled a lighter from his pocket and clicked it on, holding it high as he turned and looked over the garage. An SUV loomed out of the darkness, illuminated by the flickering flame and the moonlight through the dusty windows. A second later Billy had the door open and Pearl tumbled inside onto the passenger seat. He worked the seat belt around her body, really beginning to panic now. She was covered in blood. Her entire face and the front of her shirt. He loosened the shirt he had made into a tourniquet for her leg and allowed the blood flow to return. He carefully cut her jeans away from the wound, a long nasty gash, that was, fortunately, shallow. The bleeding had stoppe
d, the tourniquet had done the job, the wound was starting to close.
She didn't move or speak. He forced himself to stay calm, belted her in and moved around to the drivers side of the SUV. He watched a shadow pause by one dusty window as he made the drivers side and jumped inside. He heard the breaking glass as he slammed the door on the dusty garage and shot his hand toward the ignition. Nothing. He slammed one hand against the visor, driving it down. Again nothing. His eyes swept around the garage and fell instantly on a board with several sets of keys by the inside doorway near the breezeway.
The shadow at the window was forcing itself through the opening piece by piece, snarling, the garage wall shook from the exerted force. More behind it, he supposed. It seemed hopeless.
He decided, flung the door open and slammed it shut. He ran straight at the zombie, a woman, or she had been. Her breasts were shredded green-black flesh in the sparse light from forcing herself through the too small opening. Her face lifted to his, gray-black, gold eyes, almost iridescent, animal like in the semi darkness. He shot her once in the head and watched her relax, half in, half out of the window: Blocking it momentarily. He didn't wait to see how long she would remain blocking the window, he sprinted for the board, gathered all the keys and ran back to the truck. A moment later he was inside. His breath a ragged, tearing pain in his chest. He glanced at the window and watched as more dead ripped the body from the opening and began shoving themselves through. A split second later another pane of glass broke, then the divider that had held the glass panes apart, and a second after that the opening was large enough for them to crawl through.
He dropped the keys on the seat top and pushed them apart, the SUV key was not there. A Chevy key was what he needed, and there were none there. He looked again, nothing but old keys. His eyes wandered off the edge of the seat to the floorboards. The key was there, one mixed with a half dozen others on a worn leather fob. Had they been there all along? Had they fallen as he had dumped the others on the seat top? Was it the right key? A second later it was in the ignition switch. He hesitated, scared. He closed his eyes to say a small prayer and one of the dead slammed into the side of the SUV. He sucked a hard breath in, twisted the key, and the motor began to turn over slowly. He stopped, his eyes swiveled to the glass. A man stared back, inches away. Lips curled over yellow-black teeth. Gray-green skin stretched over too prominent cheekbones in the dash light. Eyes gold flecked orange. Billy slammed his fists against the steering wheel just as the zombie smashed its own hands against the glass. The window shattered, Billy twisted the switch, the motor roared to life and just as the zombies hands reached for his throat he slammed the truck in reverse and roared out of the garage, the hands clutching against his t-shirt, ripping part of it away.
The SUV hit the aluminum door and just the edge of the small wood trim at the far edge next to the breezeway. The door itself crumpled, wood splinters flew, the SUV bounced hard, tires screaming, and flew across the pavement heading into the street. Scattering the debris before it as it went.
Billy managed to lock up the brakes, shift into drive and tore away down the street. A few minutes later he made a hard right onto the main road, and drove the broken pavement fast, lights dead, running hard in the moonlight.
EIGHT
Watertown New York
Billy and Pearl
The road grew worse as he drove away from the city and he had to slow the truck down. It wasn't a question of driving away from Watertown and leaving: They had a job to do. It was a question of safety. Get Pearl far enough away so that she could be safe, but where was that place.
His eyes scanned the sides of the road as he drove. He caught sight of a small weeded blacktop surface off to his left leading into the forest and took it. The blacktop was only a suggestion. It hadn't taken the world long to break it down and turn it to mostly earth. The earthquakes, the rains, the unchecked growth of vegetation. He had no idea what it had been before, but now it was barely recognizable as a road. He slowed to a near crawl as he entered the woods and the darkness dropped down heavily. The road went away, or at least the pretense of a road went away. What was left was a bare pine needle covered lane that twisted away into the woods. No weeds, no growth, probably much as it had been left a few months before.
Nothing moved in the tress. The light swept by, white and cleansing and found nothing at all. Ten minutes of driving bought him to the top of a rise and a small metal building perched there, nearly on the edge. The star light had assumed its place in the sky once the trees had opened up to this clearing atop the hill, and Billy switched off the headlamps and coasted to a stop on idle at the top of the rise just past the small, metal building.
Below him a valley stretched out, running east to west, or what had been east to west. In the darkness there were no landmarks to tell him what he was looking at, but glimpses of silver through the trees cover told him a river flowed far below, the Black, he was sure, and farther to the west the opens waters of a lake: Ontario.
He drove in a tight circle around the building, looking it over. His eyes tried to watch everything at once. The trees, the building, the dark valley below, all of it. In everything he saw nothing that suggested life, danger, it seemed to be as desolate as it looked.
He stopped at the front of the building that faced the worn out road. Two garage doors were set into the metal sides. A metal entrance door off to one side. A few black windows along each side, one in the front. He circled once more. Two more windows in the back. All intact, all whole and unbroken. And why was his mind simply repeating things he knew again? Rephrasing them? Nervousness. Stalling tactic. He drove back to the front of the building, switched off the motor and lifted Pearl's rifle from the seat top. He checked it over. A full clip. Safety off.
He took several calming breaths and then laid two fingers against the side of her throat. A strong, steady pulse beat there. It made him worry less, but for the steady pulse he would be convinced she was dead. Her eyes were shut, no movement behind them. Her breathing shallow, quiet, he couldn't hear it over the rumble of the exhaust and he couldn't hear it now that the truck was silent. He didn't like it at all. He bent closer, brushed his lips against her own, and then left the tuck before he could change his mind.
The night was graveyard silent: Back within the trees the darkness seemed to be thicker. A living thing. Out here at the top of the valley it seemed less so, but every bit as worrisome. There could be dead inside the building. Inside the tree line. On the sides of the valley waiting to climb the slopes and find him, waiting only for him to settle in. He looked back through the glass at Pearl and then forced his feet to move once more.
The back door was locked, the windows gave away nothing as he walked close enough to cup his hands and look inside. He thought of another place very much like this place in Arizona where he and Beth had been holed up for several days as she had healed from an attack. That place had been fine. Dead, but dead that had been and would remain dead. In fact they had known almost nothing about the dead at that point. They weren't a concern, not really. That building and this building had nothing in common at all, and that one being okay didn't mean this one would be. He continued back around to the front and scouted the area carefully. Nothing.
He walked to the front door, twisted the knob and pushed the door inward. A dry, dusty smell wafted out. There were no dead here. From the inside there was plenty of light to see by once his eyes adjusted. The windows flooded the inside with moonlight. He closed the door behind and checked the rest of the garage and a small office. Empty, nothing at all. No vehicles, some tools and benches, grease stains on the concrete here and there, but little else. Whatever this had been it didn't appear to have seen any use since March, maybe long before that. He levered one wide garage door up, trotted to the truck and drove it inside.
He lowered the door, locked the place up tight and then turned his attention to Pearl.
Bluechip
Bear and Beth
The way i
nto the base had not been hard to find. They had found several places where the pipe had been broken into and not repaired.
“Maybe broken out of,” Beth said in a whisper as she looked over the jagged edges of the huge hole. “The metal is curled out, away from the inside, like it was opened from inside the pipe... Explosives?”
Bear examined it briefly and then nodded. The whole area around the pipe had been flooded too. There were no footprints, the ripped metal was corroded: It looked as if this damage had been done a long time ago and never repaired. “Makes me wonder if there's anyone down there at all,” Bear said. “This looks old.”
Beth eased her head into the duct work and looked around. A small puddle of stagnant water covered the floor. There was nothing else as far as she could see. She shined her flashlight up and down the duct work into the darkness, but the beam of light showed nothing at all on the floor except the still puddle of water and what looked like cameras mounted within small boxes in the ceiling. One was close by, the other a few hundred yards in the opposite direction. She flicked off her light and waited, staring into the darkness. She was just about to turn back to Bear when a small red flash came from the darkness. She turned in the other direction and waited for the flash from the second camera.
“What?” Bear asked.
“Cameras,” Beth told him. She stepped back away from the duct work. “Two that I can see and both have power... Saw a flash from each... Doesn't mean they're working, but it does mean they have power.”
“Could be bad if they see us,” Bear said.”
“If they're working they probably already have... If they're working... If they're being monitored,” Beth said. She looked up at Bear. “In for a penny,” she said.
Bear nodded. “Might as well, if they know we're here then they know. They'll know eventually anyway. This looks old though. This looks like maybe some of them left... A long time back too. Maybe the cameras are on and there's no one home to watch them. This place has its own power supply.” He hesitated briefly. “Go?”
