Here We Stand (Book 1): Infected (Surviving The Evacuation)

by Frank Tayell

  Resting the shovel over his shoulder, he walked toward the zombie. Male, he thought. Wearing a hat, a scarf, but only one glove. The other hand was missing two fingers. Was that how he’d become infected? It didn’t matter.

  He gripped the shovel two-handed. When it was eight feet away, he swung, smashing the flat of the blade into its face. The force of the blow knocked it from its feet. He twisted the shovel and brought it down edge-first onto the zombie’s face. Skin broke, and red-brown fluid oozed out, but its arms still thrashed. He swung again, this time breaking through bone, the shovel biting deep into its brain. It was still. Leaving the shovel there, he went back to the motel.

  Helena hadn’t moved from the balcony, but she wasn’t watching him. A man stood in the doorway of a room on the opposite side of the motel. He was around Tom’s age, though with a few less inches in height and a few extra in girth. In his hands was a rifle. Tom reached for the pistol he’d stuck in his belt, but forced his hand down by his side. Despite the weapon, there was something not immediately threatening about the man. Tom walked toward him, stopping thirty feet away, and two feet from the cover of a brand-new, high-end silver town car.

  “Hi,” Tom said.

  “We heard shooting,” the man replied.

  Tom couldn’t see anyone else behind the man. “You saw the man and woman come to our room?” he asked. “They wanted to rob and kill us. That was their plan for everyone in the motel. It looks like they were halfway done. You can check those room if you want.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  The man didn’t turn to look. “You killed them?” he asked.

  “The woman was killed in self-defense,” Tom said. “The man? That was justice.”

  The man nodded, but Tom couldn’t tell if he disapproved or not.

  “Where are you from?” Tom asked.

  “Cleveland. You?”

  “New York,” Tom said.

  “You were there when this began?” the man asked.

  “We got out of Manhattan before it was cut off.”

  The man nodded again.

  Tom had had enough. “So,” he said, “ how do you want to do this?”

  The man blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “You saw the zombie? More are going to come. If you want to leave, go. If you want to stay, you’ve got to help.”

  “We’re out of gas,” the man said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t’ve stopped.”

  “There’s probably some in these cars,” Tom said. “You can take what you want.”

  “But you’re staying?”

  “Until tomorrow,” Tom said. He was growing increasingly frustrated. There just wasn’t time for them to stand around trying to decide if they could trust one another.

  He heard footsteps. It was Helena.

  “Hi,” she said. “My name’s Helena. What’s yours?” She wasn’t speaking to the man, but to a child Tom hadn’t noticed standing just inside the room. The boy slid around the door and grabbed hold of the man’s jacket.

  “I’m Lawrence,” the man finally said. “This is Noah.”

  “Hi, Noah,” Helena said. “I teach boys who are about your age.”

  Tom wondered how old that was. The child was about three feet tall, but Tom’s limited experience with children only narrowed that to somewhere between five and ten years old.

  “I know you’re scared,” Helena continued. “I am too. But if we help one another, we’ll all be okay.” She looked at Lawrence.

  “Help each other how?” Lawrence asked.

  “There’s a—” Helena began. Guessing what she was going to say, Tom interrupted.

  “Check all the ground-floor windows are closed,” he said. “Then block off the parking lot with the vehicles we don’t need.”

  “And split the fuel in the tanks?” Lawrence asked.

  “Sure. And the food. Then take turns to stand sentry through the night.”

  “Agreed.”

  Chapter 25 - Here We Stand

  Clearfield County, Pennsylvania

  There were twelve vehicles in the lot. Five matched the keys found in the killers’ room. Of the others, one car belonged to a murdered couple, found in a room three doors down from the one Helena had claimed. The pair had been dead for at least two days. Tom had found no more victims in the motel, though there was still one room that he was sure was occupied. Lawrence owned a mid-sized minivan, but that still left five other vehicles. Four had local license plates, and nothing inside. The fifth was the luxury silver four-door that even Tom would have thought twice before buying.

  As he was sizing up the cars’ windows, debating which one to break, the door to the other occupied motel room opened. Two women came out. Both carried long kitchen knives. In their early twenties, on the unkempt side of fashionably dressed, each was pushing the other as if neither wanted to be in the lead.

  “Is this your car?” Tom asked trying to disarm the situation before it escalated.

  “Yeah. It’s ours. Leave it,” the one on the left said, taking a step back as she spoke.

  “We’re putting up a barrier to stop the undead,” he said. “If you plan on leaving, you should move it onto the road.”

  He turned away from them, and went to a smaller family car, pausing to throw a glance toward the room where that dead family now lay. He tried not to look at the toys in the backseat as he shunted it into place. When he got out, the two women were standing nervously by their car.

  “I’m Tom,” he said.

  “Monique,” the taller of the two said.

  “Amy,” the other said.

  Tom smiled. “I’m trying to work out what to say now. The usual small talk doesn’t seem appropriate.”

  “You’re going to wall us in here?” Amy asked.

  “Not exactly,” Tom said. “We want a barrier in case the zombies turn up. Though it’s more likely to be when, not if.”

  “And then what?” Monique asked.

  “Kill them, I suppose,” Tom said. “If you want to leave, now would be the best time. Where were you going?”

  “Home,” Amy said.

  “New York,” Monique added.

  “Ah. We came from Manhattan. You won’t make it there.”

  “We wanted to get to Brooklyn,” Amy said.

  Tom shook his head. There wasn’t time for this. He tried to keep his tone polite. “If you’re not sure of your plans, move the car onto the road while you work them out.”

  Five of the sturdier vehicles joined the silver sedan, so there were three pointing in each direction. The keys were left in the ignition in case of an escape he hoped wouldn’t be necessary. The other six were shunted, bumper-to-bumper, across the entrance to the motel. They didn’t quite stretch across. The gap at the northern end was filled with mattress frames and other furniture from the rooms.

  Leaving Lawrence, Amy, and Monique to add more furniture on top of and around the cars, he and Helena walked the perimeter of the motel to check that the windows and doors were closed.

  “Do you trust them?” Helena asked.

  “I don’t think they were involved in the murders,” Tom said. “That’s not the same thing, but it’s enough for tonight. Lawrence will protect Noah. As long as we’re assisting him with that, he’ll be reliable. As for Monique and Amy, I think they can be trusted, but I don’t know if I’d want to rely on them.”

  “They’re beauticians,” Helena said. “Not that they call themselves that. They say they focus on inner beauty rather than conforming to someone else’s ideal, but it’s still more about clothes, hair, and makeup than about diet and exercise.”

  Tom grunted, noncommittally.

  “I think they knew what those two… murderers were doing,” Helena said. “They weren’t surprised when I told them. I was… angry. Not sure why, I mean, what was I expecting them to have done, call 911?”

  “I tried,” Tom said, pushing at a fire door. It didn’t move. “Do you think we should upend the beds in these rooms so they cover
these windows?”

  She rapped her hand against it. “Seems solid. It’s probably a waste of time. Did you really call 911?”

  “Yeah. I thought someone should report what had happened. Not sure what I expected. I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “No answer?”

  “No, just a recorded message saying that I should listen to local television and radio broadcasts. Obey the civil authority. Instructions would follow. That’s what it said. Instructions. Not help.”

  She tried another door. “Noon can’t come soon enough.”

  “You don’t want any of this fuel?” Lawrence asked, as he pulled the tube out of the dented hybrid’s now empty gas tank.

  “No. Won’t need it,” Tom said without thinking. In his mind’s eye, he could see a clock counting down until noon. He was debating whether, if the undead came in too great a number, it would be better to wait for the helicopter on the roof of the filling station rather than risk driving off into the unknown.

  “Why don’t you go and help the nice ladies sort the food,” Lawrence said to Noah. The boy had been the man’s dogged shadow for the last two hours. “It’s all right, go on,” Lawrence said. Reluctantly, the boy left. The man turned to Tom. “What happens tomorrow?” he asked.

  Tom had sensed the question was coming. He thought of lying, but his life had been full of too many lies. Telling the truth, or most of it, seemed beguiling.

  “There’s a helicopter coming at noon,” he said. “A government extraction.”

  “For you? You some kind of scientist or something?” Lawrence asked.

  “Something, yes.”

  “You’ve a cure for all this?”

  “I doubt there is one, but no. I do have some information I’m trying to get to the president.”

  “Ah.” Lawrence screwed the cap on the bourbon bottle in which they’d syphoned the fuel. The only empty and sealable containers they’d been able to find were the bottles littering the absent manager’s apartment. “How big a helicopter?”

  What he was really asking was obvious. “I don’t know. I imagine there’ll be room for your son.”

  “But you can’t promise anything?”

  “I can’t even get in contact with them.” He kept trying every time his hands were free. The number wasn’t connecting. There could be many reasons for that, but he couldn’t help but think it was something sinister.

  “Hmm.” Lawrence looked north, and then south, not at the road, but at the miles of land either side.

  “Where were you heading?” Tom asked.

  “Originally?” Lawrence sighed. “Noah’s my nephew. His parents were… they’re going through a rough patch. Noah was staying with me while they tried to sort things out. I was trying to take him back there when all this happened. Became clear I wasn’t going to get him home and wasn’t going to get us back to mine. Hard to know what to do, or where to go. I’ve a friend who has a place in Montana. Doubt we’d get there now. Taken us a week to travel two hundred miles. And where are we? Nowhere. Kind o’ hoped I’d meet someone who knew where safety lay.”

  “I’ll take him with me,” Tom said. “I can’t offer more than that.”

  “I understand. Trust to the kindness of strangers? What a world. How much ammo do we have?”

  “Eighteen rounds for the 9mm, twelve for the shotgun, seventy-eight for the .357.” Despite finding some ammunition in the killer’s stash, the revolver was the only firearm. That explained, at least in part, the murderers’ actions. The other, evil part was best left unexplored. “How many do you have for your rifle?”

  “Seventeen. It was a lot more five days ago.” Lawrence raised a hand, rubbing thoughtfully at his stubble. “The zombies will come,” he said. “If we stay.”

  “And if we leave, the helicopter won’t find us,” Tom said.

  “Hmm.” Lawrence stared off into the distance again. “This isn’t a great place for a siege. If the helicopter comes, there won’t be room for all of us.”

  “Probably not,” Tom said.

  “At which point, we’ll have to flee. Seems a shame to waste a day.” The cogs clicking into place were almost audible. “But Noah might get out, and there really is no refuge to which we can flee. Fine. But we’ll need more weapons.”

  The motel had few to offer. Other than the Amy and Monique’s knives, three more shovels, and a rusting pickaxe too cumbersome to contemplate, the closest they found was a fire axe.

  “We’ll need something heavy,” Helena suggested. “Like the metal railings for the balcony?”

  It was make-work, and Tom left them to it. He climbed to the roof of the filling station so he could survey the countryside. When he’d last checked the television, it was still broadcasting the same variation on stay inside and stay tuned for more information. It wasn’t comforting. Nor was the lack of traffic. Compared to what he’d seen in the last week, there should have been a steady steam of refugees traveling past. The internet was collapsing, but the radio stations were still broadcasting. That there were still people out there had offered some comfort, even if their messages were full of desperate hope and fearful despair. So why had they seen no vehicles?

  It was possible that they were so remote that little traffic passed this way. That idea was dispelled as soon as he considered that they were in a motel, not something likely to have been built off a completely beaten track. The logical alternative was that the roads to the north and south were now blocked somewhere out of sight. He could take a car and check, but what would he do if he found them blocked? What if he found the undead? Knowing would do no good unless they had to escape, in which case they would have little choice in the direction they went. His eyes fell on the track leading into the woods. There was no way of knowing if it led out again, and with less than an hour until sunset there wasn’t time to check. That didn’t mean there was nothing he could do. They’d parked six vehicles on the road. They didn’t need one for each of their odd partnerships. Nor, realistically, if they had to flee, was it likely that all six of them would be alive to escape. Wishing he’d not had that last thought, he climbed down from the filling station, and headed for the road.

  “Where are you going?” Helena asked, as he climbed into the cab of a pickup truck.

  “I’m going to move the two trucks to the track. If the zombies come down this road that’ll be our way out.”

  Helena glanced up and down the road. “You think that’s likely?”

  “Probably not,” he lied.

  He was maneuvering the second truck into place when there was a shout from the motel. It was one word. “Zombie!”

  Tom was halfway back to the motel when he heard the crack of the rifle. The second came as he was letting himself in the backdoor of the manager’s office. He heard the third as he ran out into the parking lot. Lawrence stood, legs braced, in the middle of the road. Amy had tight hold of Noah, though it looked as if it was as much for her comfort as his. Monique was by her side. Helena stood on the roof of a car, her eyes on the road, her fingers curling around the stock of the shotgun.

  “Wait!” Tom yelled, as the man fired again. “Stop!”

  Lawrence ignored him, chambering another round.

  Tom pushed the barrel down. “Wait.”

  “Look,” Lawrence replied.

  Four zombies were down – all with headshots. The nearest was forty yards away. There was no time to be impressed with the man’s skill. Behind them, another fourteen staggered along the road toward the motel.

  “Wait,” Tom said again.

  “What for?” Lawrence raised his gun. “The rifle will be useless when it gets dark.” He fired. A zombie fell.

  “And in the morning?” Tom asked.

  “Got to survive the night to worry about that,” Lawrence said.

  The mass of arguments against wasting ammunition died when they met the logic of his reply. Tom raised the fire axe, and backed off a pace, letting the man work. He was a good shot, but when he fired his
last round, there was still one zombie left.

  “He’s all yours,” Lawrence said.

  Tom walked slowly toward his foe. It wasn’t a he, but a she. A woman in a green skirt and jacket, a white blouse stained red, and jet black hair on the right-hand side of her head. On the left was nothing but an oozing scab where her scalp had been ripped away.

  He tested the weight of the axe, mentally rehearsing the blow, but his eyes kept going back to the woman. Who was she? Where had she come from? It didn’t matter. She’d turned. She was dead. She wasn’t a woman. It was a zombie, a monster from nightmares, in which no humanity remained.

  Ten feet. He raised the axe to his shoulder. He couldn’t pity the dead, not now, perhaps never. It was the living with whom he had to be concerned. The zombie snarled. He swung the axe. The blade sang through the air, chopping through the creature’s knee, slicing through bone and tendon, muscle and flesh. As the zombie toppled forward, he skipped back two paces, and was already bringing the axe up as it hit the ground, face first. He was grateful for that. It meant he didn’t have to look into its eyes as he swung the axe down onto its skull.

  He wiped the blade clean on the zombie’s coat. Was it a uniform? None of the other bodies were similarly dressed. The next nearest wore a padded jacket, the one behind, nothing but a T-shirt. He could check them for I.D., but to what end? Knowing where they’d once called home wasn’t going to help him survive the night.

  “Tom!”

  He glanced behind and saw Helena pointing down the road. He could guess why, though the dip in the road meant he couldn’t see the creatures coming.

  “How many?” he called back.

  “Two.”

  He raised the axe and waited for them to come.

  Chapter 26 - A Long Night

  Clearfield County, Pennsylvania

  He punched the axe-head forward. Bone broke, and wood cracked as the axe shaft split. He dropped it and drew the revolver.