Bleeders

by Max Boone

  Then, I watched as a few of the bodies started to move. More bodies poured from the side of the truck like spilling gasoline, falling over each other, fumbling to their feet, squinting red eyes into the sunlight.

  Those psychos had loaded up a truck with Bleeders.

  Before I had a chance to wonder why the fuck anyone would want to do that, Jeremiah took a sharp right too fast and I felt the passenger side of the garbage truck come up. I saw the wheels raise under me and felt myself lifting into the air.

  The last thing I heard before I was tossed like a used condom was the panicked shouts of men and women, and then the terrible crash of metal and concrete coming together.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I woke up to screaming. Again.

  Sitting up was like deja vu. Trying to figure out where the hell I was with the smell of blood in the air was becoming an all-too-familiar pastime. But then I saw the garbage truck laying on its side, with bikers crawling out of it like ants from a dirt hill, and it all came crashing back to me- pun intended.

  My gun was gone. I looked around me but didn't see it. After a quick check, finding only scrapes and soon-to-be-bruises, I got on my feet, shook the buzzing out of my ears and took in the scene. Rat was pinned under the truck. The last time I'd seen him he had been on the truck's roof. When it tipped over it had landed on him, crushing his bottom half until it basically didn't exist. He was in shock by the look of him, his stare distant. One of his buddies took him by the arm and tried to pull him free, but he screamed out in pain. He wasn't going anywhere.

  Nkosi had a few cuts and scrapes like me but otherwise he seemed to be in one piece. He approached Rat and his buddy. "Get the other arm," the buddy said.

  Nkosi took one of the pistols from his belt and put a bullet in Rat's forehead without hesitating. Everyone jumped. The buddy shoved Nkosi back. "You are welcome," Nkosi said to him before walking off to help someone else.

  At the front of the truck, Jeremiah kneeled on the passenger side door and reached down into the sideways window. There was blood on his pant leg, but it didn't seem to be anything serious.

  "Is she alright," I called up to him, but he didn't answer. His head was in the open window and he probably didn't hear me, but I repeated myself just to be sure.

  "I'm fine," Alison said, emerging from the window as Jeremiah pulled her free. She had a bloody ear and her arm looked a bit banged up, but I didn't see anything seriously injured on her. I felt more relief in seeing her alive than I expected. She climbed down the undercarriage of the garbage truck and I helped her to the street as Jeremiah climbed down to join us.

  Silas and Spanish Blood were at the back, looking back the way we'd come. A block down, about twenty of the Bleeders from the Smiley truck were stumbling and growling their way toward us. One was missing an arm. Another was gushing blood from a huge gash in her chest. Beyond them the Smileys were fighting off a handful of their own, the ones who had turned and attacked instead of following us. A few of them were on fire and still attacking.

  "Do we fight," Spanish Blood asked.

  "No," Silas said, "we run."

  On foot, and hurt feet at that, roughly ten of us headed west, continuing toward the water with hungry Bleeders gaining on us. "We're too banged up to run the rest of the way," Jeremiah said. "We need to find somewhere safe to wait these bastards out."

  As we limped up the enclosed street, we tried every door we found. Most of the long block consisted of industrial buildings and storage facilities, with sliding, metal doors and the kind of doors someone on the other side needed to buzz you through. With every second the Bleeders behind us got a little closer, and a little louder, until they were worked up into a frenzy.

  "Fuck this," one of the bikers said, turning to face our pursuers. He was one of the older guys, with grayish-blonde hair and a red bandana tied around his bleeding leg. He took the safety off his handgun and started to open fire on the Bleeders.

  Another guy did the same, and then another. Spanish Blood went to stop them, but Silas held him back and let them do it. They couldn't aim for shit, but they managed to take a few Bleeders down before they were dragged screaming to the street, Bleeders tearing their faces open with their teeth.

  Silas turned to Spanish Blood and said, "That'll buy us a minute." Spanish Blood nodded, and they turned to continue our search for shelter.

  "So much for brotherhood, huh," I said to Silas as he passed me by.

  "They made their choice," he replied.

  With the Bleeders feeding on Silas' former friends, we checked door after door for any place that might hold us up for a bit, but between the crash, the attacks and the door-pulling, all the noise seemed to be drawing attention to us. More infected started coming out of the woodwork, including ahead of us where we were coming to an elevated train track. Nkosi and two bikers picked them off from a distance, but they kept coming, and the group behind us were starting to get bored of their current meal.

  "Found one," Alison yelled. She was at the bottom of a fenced-in delivery ramp where someone had left the door unlocked. I ran down the ramp and past a small fleet of tractor trailers to join her. The rest of the group trailed behind me, fighting off the Bleeders who were growing crazed, desperately throwing themselves at the men. I ran through the open door and inside while Jeremiah and Spanish Blood stood on either side and provided cover.

  The last image I saw of the outside before they shut the door and barricaded us inside was a group of Bleeders forty strong, running down the ramp at us at full speed, their bleeding eyes bulging in their hot skulls.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  "What the fuck were those smiley-faced fucks doing with a truck full of fucking Bleeders," I shouted.

  "Calm down," Alison said. She had her hands up, trying to pull down my animated gestures.

  "No, I'm not going to calm down. Did you see the rope on those handles? It looked like they were trying to trap us in there and feed us to them. What the fuck good would that even do?"

  "I know, trust me, I know. It's like the inmates have taken over the asylum out there, but you have to keep your voice down."

  "What is this, a fucking library?"

  "Hey." She put her finger to her lips and shushed, then pointed to the three loading doors. Once I stopped yelling, I could hear the pounding of metal from the Bleeders outside. They were beating on the doors with fevered aggression.

  I took a deep breath. "We should be back at the food bank, eating canned yams and picking our noses, instead of dying in whatever this place is."

  "Pick your nose on your own time," Jeremiah said as he joined us. "We need to figure out a plan as soon as possible, and as quietly as possible. Those things have to calm way down before we even think of getting out of here."

  Silas came over as well. I couldn't help but roll my eyes at the sight of his goateed face. "It's still a ways to go to the docks, folks. Doesn't look good."

  "Nobody asked the Hell's Angels for their assessment," I spit.

  "We're 86ers, not Hell's Angels," one of the biker chicks spoke up.

  I scoffed. "Like I give a squirt."

  The biker chick started to raise her voice to me. "Enough," Jeremiah said. He got in my face for the first time since I'd met him. "Walk it off," he growled. When I didn't cower he shoved me back. He looked like he wanted to pull my pelvis out my dickhole.

  Christ. If the virus could make an even-tempered guy like Jeremiah like this, the rest of us didn't stand a chance.

  "Whatever. Way to talk finally, by the way," I said to the chick as I passed her. The group started to discuss what to do about our lovely predicament, so I decided to get a good look at the warehouse. The area we were in was nothing more than an over-sized garage with packing equipment against the walls, a few loaders in the middle and spotlights hanging way above. At the far end I found a huge doorway with plastic swinging doors, like a much bigger version of what you'd see employees going through at supermarkets to get to the backroom
. The small window panels were too dark to see anything through, so I pushed through the doors and stepped through into the main part of the warehouse.

  The sheer size of the building was impressive. The loading area was less than a third of its total size, apparently, the rest of it a few offices and one, long stockroom taken up by rows of metal shelving units. I couldn't tell what the hell they sold, only that it came in boxes and that I didn't give a shit about it.

  I heard the footsteps of someone following me down the row of shelves. Jeremiah must have come to his senses and wanted to kiss and make up. "I just need a minute, alright," I said, not quite ready for a formal apology. He just grunted, not even answering in words.

  I spun to face him, and possibly give him the second round he came looking for, but instead of Jeremiah I found a Bleeder in a yellow hard hat coming at me, his broken-toothed mouth wide open.

  He grabbed for my throat with torn-up fingernails. His hands looked like he'd been scratching the fingers down to the bone. I grabbed his arms and wrestled him away. Each time I shoved him away he came right back at me. If only I still had a gun I'd shoot him in his red eye and let the bullet rattle around inside that hard hat.

  As he lunged for me again, I used his momentum to shove him into the shelving unit. He bounced off it, spun and fell, knocking the hard hat off his head and sending it spinning down the aisle. He came at me again, crawling on his hands and knees surprisingly fast, which I guess is possible when you don't care how much it hurts. I stomped down on his shoulder, pushing him into the ground and holding him there. He struggled against me and grabbed at my feet. I grabbed the closest box off the shelf, nearly dropping it from the weight, and smashed it down on his unprotected head.

  His face crunched into the floor. I heard footsteps running toward us from the loading dock and hoped it was the group coming to help me and not more Bleeders come to join the fun. The guy on the floor was still moving. I lifted the box up over my head, then brought it down again. And again. And again. This time there was a loud crack that echoed through the wide stock room. The Bleeder went limp.

  The contents of the box had spilled all over the floor, partly covering the corpse. "Paper?" The spreading pool of blood started to soak into the sheets of blank paper. I looked up, and with a smile. "Guess he just got the worst papercut of his life," I said, feeling pretty good about myself.

  Spanish Blood had his gun on me. Only a few people from the group had reached me from the loading dock, and every single one of them was a so-called 86er. "Ahh, shit," I groaned, realizing what was about to happen. With no witnesses he could make up whatever story he wanted about why he shot me. Struggle. Self-defense. Anything. He tightened his grip, his finger brushing the trigger.

  "What happened," Jeremiah said, running through the swinging doors. I exhaled. Spanish Blood took his finger from the trigger and brought the gun down to his side. Behind Jeremiah, Alison, Nkosi, Silas and the rest of them filed through the doors to see the excitement. It wasn't a good time to start a brawl.

  "It's alright," I said, staring down Spanish Blood. "I got it under control."

  Jeremiah inspected the body, not happy with what he saw. "This is our own fault. We need to search this place and make sure it's secure. It's time to get smart, people, or we won't last long enough to reach that boat."

  Silas nodded. "Everyone spread out, make sure there's no one hanging around. Kill anyone you find."

  "You mean Bleeders," I said.

  "Of course," he lied.

  "Look for anything useful while you're at it," Alison said. As everyone broke off to search the building, Nkosi approached me with something to say.

  "Papercut," he said. "I get it. That was funny."

  "Thanks."

  "Not very funny, just a little," he added.

  "You know what, you should have just stopped after the first part."

  His face wrinkled. "Why is this?"

  "Never mind," I waved him off. He walked away looking confused. Stepping over the corpse and the papers soaking up its blood, I picked up the hard hat from where it had slid and put it on.

  "It suits you," Alison said as she walked over to join me. We walked together down the aisle, looking for something good among all the useless reams of paper.

  "I should have been a blue collar worker. The white ones always choked me."

  "I meant you should have been wearing a helmet your whole life."

  "Oh, shit. Be careful, doc, that was almost a joke."

  She flashed her I'm-not-smiling smile. We reached the end of the long row with nothing to show for it and continued on across an open space and to a darkened room. I carefully reached into the darkness and searched for a light switch. With a click a fluorescent light buzzed to life and lit up a large room, a table at the center and desks around the sides, along with a few doors leading to more rooms. At least the power was still on in the city. There was no way of knowing how long that would last, so we might as well enjoy it while it did. The room was a mess, half office and half storage. It smelled like coffee stains and mildew.

  As we each took a side of the room to search, I glanced back at the door to make sure no one was close enough to hear us talk. "So be honest, do you like these 86ers," I asked in a low voice.

  "I don't see that I have to." She rifled through a set of filing cabinets. "They're a means to an end, the same as we are for them."

  "Okay, better question- do you trust them? And don't tell me you don't have to, because that's pretty fucking important." I was easing into telling her about what Spanish Blood had pulled- namely a gun- when he thought we were alone.

  "Brody," she said, suddenly serious. I dropped what I was doing and rushed over to her. She stood in front an open door, looking into a closet.

  "What? What is it?"

  She bent down into the closet and came up with something big enough to hold in both hands. "Look," she said, and held a long cardboard box up for me to see. Written on the side in red marker, it simply said, '4th of July.'

  I smiled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Bleeders pounded and smashed at the loading dock doors, not as worked up as they'd been before but still impatient, still hungry, their cries and moans occasionally raising up. At the opposite end of the building, not far from the office Alison and I had searched, was a small hallway area that led to a metal door. Jeremiah checked all the surrounding rooms for unwanted guests while I took stock of the explosive beauties.

  "It was not very smart keeping fireworks in a paper factory," Nkosi said.

  "Yeah, well thank God for idiots."

  About chin high, the metal door was thick with what looked like reddish-black paint that had been brushed on so thick it had thick chunks in it. There were drips that went all the way down to the floor. As I got closer, I realized it wasn't paint, and I remembered the Bleeder back in the stock room with the fingers worn down to the bloody bone.

  Those chunks were skin. A few of them looked like fingernails.

  Trying not to throw up, I pulled the door open, checked both ways and closed it again. Right then, if everything was as it should have been, Silas and Alison had the group gathered in the loading dock, ready and waiting by the door where we'd come into the warehouse. "Are you ready?"

  Nkosi held his pistols up, their safeties off, and said, "I will die ready."

  "That's not how that- you know what, never mind, let's go."

  I threw the door open and we ran down the small set of concrete steps, me clutching two armfuls of fireworks to my chest and nearly dropping them the whole way. Jeremiah covered us from the door as I set everything down in the middle of the street and got to work. Nkosi stood over me, scanning the street for trouble with his pistols ready.

  "Should we not spend the night and rest," Nkosi asked.

  "Now you're asking this? Look, this isn't my plan, but the longer we wait, the less chance we have that that boat is still anchored out there."

  I continued to set u
p the fireworks. Nkosi was quiet for a moment. Then: "What if the fuse does not work?"

  "Hey. I'm gonna be honest with you for a second here- nobody likes a Negative Nancy."

  "Negative Nancy?"

  "You're the guy with the boat that gets us to the other boat. Stick to that guy. People like that guy."

  I finished setting the fuses and stood to check out my work. If my so-called misspent youth was correct, we had about twenty seconds from the time the main fuse was lit before phase one started. I took out the lighter I borrowed from one of the bikers and lit the fuse. It immediately began to burn down toward the splits I'd set up.

  "That is fairly impressive," Nkosi said.

  "See?" I slapped him on the chest. "I like you better already."

  We ran back inside and Jeremiah slammed the door shut behind us. There was no point in being quiet about it now.

  As we booked it from one end of the sprawling warehouse to the other, I silently prayed Nkosi's stupid questions didn't jinx the whole thing. But my doubts were put to rest when I heard phase one kick in with the pop of firecrackers outside, loud enough to hear through the brick walls. "See," I said to Nkosi, "never a doubt."

  We ran the entire length of the building, from the offices, down the long stockroom through the swinging doors and to the loading dock where the group was crowded around the door. There weren't any windows to see what the Bleeders were doing, but the incessant pounding on the sliding metal doors had finally stopped. Alison had her ear to the door we had come through, and were about to leave through, listening to their movements.

  "It's working," she said. Sure enough, we could hear the moans and screams start to move away from the doors and around the building. Right then phase two started with a series of booms followed by a crackling far up in the air.