Zombies! (Book 6): Hold The Line

by Merritt, R. S.

  Confident Kyler and the older girls would be keeping the littles safe Randy and Kelly entered the run-down singlewide to clear it. The inside smelled of must, mildew and mold. The three ‘m’s of the apocalypse. The first half of the trailer they cleared with no problem. Judging by the furniture and pictures on the wall the trailer had belonged to a couple of old women. Kyler was excited to see an array of canned foods in the cabinets. There was boxed food as well, but the mice had already gotten into that based on the holes in the sides of the boxes. The mouse droppings scattered all over the floor and cabinets further evidence backing up that observation.

  The other side of the trailer turned out to be where the freakshow resided. Randy led the way pointing his pistol into each space they passed. He took the time to poke around and make sure no Zombies were hidden anywhere in the rooms. He’d much rather find the Zombies when he was standing there ready to unleash some lead rather than in the middle of the night when he was stumbling around trying to figure out a good place to pee. He absolutely didn’t want the kids being the ones who found any Zombies playing a long game of hide and eat.

  The last door in the trailer looked like it might open to what would count as the master bedroom in this meth mansion. Behind them Kyler had entered the trailer and was directing the girls to have a seat on the couch. Kyler left the door open for now anticipating there might be a need for a fast getaway. The girls were all dripping wet from the torrential rain pouring down. When the rain started coming in sideways Kyler went ahead and shoved the sliding glass door loosely back into place as well as he could. Kelly and Randy had really done a number on the track.

  At the end of the hallway Randy was pushing on the hollow aluminum door he assumed opened up into the master bedroom. Kelly was standing behind him gripping her pistol tightly in her hand. She’d been looking behind her to make sure Kyler and Caitlyn had the brains to come in out of the rain. Randy gave up on trying to finagle the lock. He took a step back and then just kicked the door really hard.

  The door swung inwards then swung back towards them with the momentum of the two Zombies on the other side of the door slamming into it. Pale sore covered arms stuck out of the crack in the door waving around frantically. Kelly and Randy skipped backwards about five feet down the hall before coming to a stop and aiming their weapons at the door. The Zombies finally figured out how to pull on the door to open it and charged into a volley of pistol bullets courtesy of Kelly and Randy.

  In the rush of defending themselves they didn’t notice the small oozing mess of an infected baby crawling towards them. Kelly looked down to see the blood and sore covered pathetic mess mewling excitedly as it clawed its way in their direction. She pointed her pistol at it but couldn’t make herself pull the trigger. A second later two shots rang out as Randy ended the things miserable existence. Looking back over her shoulder Kelly saw Kyler and the kids standing by the sliding glass door staring in her direction. She told Randy to stay where he was so they could block the sight of the dead baby from the kids.

  “We’re going to shove this mess back in the bedroom and clear it, but I think we’re good here for the night.” Kelly said over her shoulder to Caitlyn and Kyler. “Go ahead and doublecheck the other rooms for us and start getting everyone settled in. I say we stay on the other end of the trailer away from the blood down here. We also want to be away from that broken door. The living room is going to be flooded by morning if this keeps up.”

  “Got you.” Kyler said. He understood she was trying to keep the kids from seeing whatever it was they’d killed on the other side of the trailer. He started working with Caitlyn to herd the rest of the children to the other end of the mobile home.

  “Let’s get this over with.” Kelly said taking a tentative step forward.

  “I’ve got this.” Randy said putting his arm in front of her to block her from moving forward.

  “You sure?” Kelly asked.

  “Absolutely babe. No reason for both of us to have to deal with it. You go take care of getting everyone settled and see if we can’t get that sliding door back on its track better. I’m thinking we may have been a little over enthusiastic when we broke in.”

  Kelly gave Randy a quick kiss of gratitude and walked back down the hall away from the mess. She cast one last sad glance at the pathetically small corpse of the infected baby as she was leaving. Randy stuck his pistol and flashlight in front of him and went into the back bedroom to make sure there wasn’t anything else waiting to surprise them. The tiny master had a small bathroom off it and one big window on each side. The windows were covered with heavy drapes to keep the light out. Randy imagined sticking your head in a well-used port a potty at the height of summer would provide a similar aroma to what he was currently enjoying in the confined space.

  Why the Zombies hadn’t broken out the windows was a mystery. Maybe the heavy drapes confused them. Randy couldn’t remember seeing a single picture of a baby in the trailer either. Just multiple pictures of the two older ladies and some old pictures of their family. Another mystery that would never be solved. Randy tried to imagine how the family had ended up stuck in this back bedroom in the middle of nowhere while the original occupants had long ago wandered off.

  The game he liked to play in his head was a survival mechanism. It kept him preoccupied just enough that he didn’t focus too much on the baby’s face when he scooped it up in the small wastebasket he took from the bathroom. Preoccupied or not he couldn’t help but notice the basket weighed practically nothing additional after he slid the corpse of the dead baby into it. He set the dead infant filled waste basket down in the bathtub and covered it with a towel from the towel rack. Rather than sit there and give himself time to dwell on what he’d just done he hurried out in the hall to deal with the other two bodies.

  Neither of the other two bodies had landed too far out in the hallway. Kelly and Randy had waited until the Zombies figured out how to open the door then filled them full of lead. Given all that time to prep for the fight and the short distance between them and the Zombies head shots had been plentiful. The results were gross and messy but mostly contained within the bedroom side of the doorframe. Using an incredibly musty pillow speckled with spots of mold Randy nudged the pieces and parts he needed to until he could shut the door on the whole mess. Hoping the baby wouldn’t make an encore appearance in his nightmares Randy went down the hall to check on how everyone else was doing.

  Kyler was squatting on the other side of the broken slider frantically waving at Randy. Not knowing what Kyler was so excited about but figuring turning off his flashlight and getting down low were a good response to the wild waving he did so. He duckwalked his way through the musty trailer towards the sliding glass doors. Kyler had moved back into the shadows once Randy had turned off his light. Randy got on his belly and slid up next to the doors. He angled himself so he wouldn’t be easily seen from the outside and stared out into the pitch-dark open area between the trailers.

  He didn’t know if it’d gotten so dark due to the intense thunderstorm or if the sun had just finally gone down. He’d lost track of the time at this point. He started to check the phone he had in his pocket but realized at the last second that the glow from the phone might be visible from outside the trailer so refrained. He couldn’t see anything outside in the dark, but he started hearing occasional screeches over the howling of the wind and the machine gun staccato of the pounding rain striking the trailer.

  A flash of lightning revealed several humanoid shapes moving around out in the open area. All Randy could think of was it must be the ones with the hypersensitive hearing that Kyler had warned them about. Randy hadn’t even been worried about pulling the trigger on the Zombies in the bedroom since he’d figured the raging storm outside would cover up any noise they made. There was no way the sound of the pistols shooting should’ve been audible through the storm on the road where the Zombies had been trudging along.

  Possible or not it looked like that’s what’d
happened. Luckily the Zombies seemed confused now as to what to do. Randy really hoped none of them decided to try and break into the trailer they were in. With the broken slider it’d be super easy for the monsters to come in and nest down. Even if they all hid in the back bedroom with the door closed and tried not to make any noise there was no telling if they’d be safe given the extraordinary hearing some of the monsters had developed. A single sneeze and they could end up fighting for their lives against a dozen adrenalized infected.

  The infected outside were just the front runners. Where the adrenalized led the regular Zombies followed. By the time another lightning strike lit up the outside area it may be crawling with them. Worried that if he didn’t act fast, he may end up stuck hiding out in the bedroom filled with the corpses of the infected they’d just killed Randy began sliding on his stomach around the interior of the living room. He kept furniture between himself and the slider as much as possible. He was halfway around the room when the slider was thrown into the trailer by a freakishly large Zombie whose nude body was covered in massive muscles.

  Multiple lightning strikes lit up the sky outside momentarily turning the inside of the trailer as bright as day. Randy had been confident he was basically invisible behind the couch. He hadn’t realized the couch was actually a chair. The bottom half of his body was completely exposed in the sudden light. The hulk like Zombie zeroed in on him and let out a long screech before jumping towards him.

  Kyler watched all these events unfold from down the hall where he’d thrown a blanket over his body and was poking his head out of the small laundry room. The appearance of the naked hulk like infected had momentarily set him back. He saw the monster leap in the direction he assumed Randy was hiding in then the room went back to being pitch black. Night vision completely screwed Kyler stood up and ran into the living room to help Randy. Over the sound of the hail that was now striking the roof he heard answering screeches from the Zombies outside. He frantically searched for Randy while willing his eyesight to come back or another lightning flash to reveal what the hell was going on in the claustrophobic space.

  Randy had kicked the crawling into high gear as soon as he saw the massive beast leaping for him. The super-sized Zombie stuck his hands behind the chair where Randy had been less than a second prior. Screaming with rage it whipped the chair backwards over its head and hit its knees feeling around for the person it’d just seen moving back there. The chair it’d casually tossed over its head struck Kyler in the chest knocking him out of the open slider onto the tilted porch. Randy crawled out of the living room faster than a baby on crank. He didn’t stop freaking out until he slid into the room with an anxious Kelly.

  No one said a word. No one could see anything. None of them had the slightest idea Kyler was missing. Kelly assumed he was still positioned out in the laundry room where he’d been hiding waiting for Randy to make it back. When Randy had been in the room for a few minutes and Kyler still hadn’t made an appearance, she started getting a bad feeling.

  On the porch outside a stunned Kyler was being pelted with softball sized chunks of ice. Like a hulk Zombie wasn’t bad enough to ruin his day. He heard screeches near him and looked out into the darkness. A lightning strike lit up the sky and he saw there were now about a hundred Zombies milling around outside in the open space. The most sphincter tightening thing he noticed was they were all moving towards him. He went to pull his pistol and couldn’t find it. He’d had it in his hand when he got hit in the face by a flying recliner so that was probably a lost cause.

  Not seeing where he had much of a choice if he wanted to live, he unstrapped his M-16 and swung that in front of him as the light from the most recent lightning strike faded away. He turned away from the Zombies coming towards him and crawled up the broken porch towards the open slider. He was hallway towards the opening when a sudden inspiration struck him. Without spending a ton of time thinking about it he ran away from the trailer towards the other side of the clearing.

  He was being struck by hail. Every time he got hit in the head it made him swoon and a few times he dropped down to one knee before being able to continue. One piece hit his hand so hard he felt his pinky snap. Hoping that was something he could fix later he ignored the extreme pain from all the hits he was taking and kept blindly running through the dark. The wind was howling. It sounded like a freight train at this point. He bumped into a Zombie and spun away from it before continuing to jog across the clearing.

  When he felt like he was far enough he dropped down to one knee and waited for a lightning strike to show him his targets. As soon as the sky lit up again, he picked out a few Zombies close to him and shot them. When the light faded, he ran in the direction of the trailer. He tripped over a Zombie laying on the ground and landed with his gut on the butt of his rifle. Breath knocked out of him he lay there staring into the sky. Lightning ripped across the sky again and he saw a massive funnel cloud ripping through the woods. It dawned on him that the freight train noise he was hearing was a tornado.

  Shooting on the other side of the clearing had the desired effect. When he made it back into the trailer the hulk was nowhere to be seen. He stomped his way to the back room where he knew Kelly and Randy should be. He really hoped Randy had made it. He was whispering silent prayers the hulk hadn’t gone into the back bedroom after trashing the living room furniture. He had his rifle out. He wasn’t worried about noise at this point. You couldn’t hear anything anymore with the tornado bearing down on them. It wasn’t lost on him that there was a tornado coming and he was trying hard to get into a mobile home.

  He beat on the door and yelled his name until it was jerked open and he was pulled inside. Kelly hugged him. Randy patted him on the back hard enough to make him feel like he was getting the Heimlich. Kyler was trying to yell that a tornado was coming but felt like that may be redundant at this point. The whole trailer was bouncing around. There were two twin beds in the room. Randy and Kyler pulled the mattresses down to the floor and shoved the girls underneath them. The trailer started shifting around like crazy. Everything was vibrating. One of the windows in the room blew out and one of the mattresses covering the kids got sucked against the window hard. A second later the mattress got thrown back at them.

  A feeling of weightlessness and then the trailer was tumbling. Everyone inside getting a free carnival ride in the process. Kyler got hit in the head by the dresser while he was trying to pin the mattress down across the kids. Randy got knocked out trying to use his own body to protect the kids. Kelly held onto Zoey and Doreen as hard as she could wrapping her body around them while Caitlyn and Myriah struggled to keep Ali inside the trailer. A surge of noise and a feeling of weightlessness engulfed them all

  The wild ride ended in darkness, pain and the coppery taste of blood.

  Chapter 5: Leap of Faith

  Pounding rain striking his face woke Kyler up. Every part of his body hurt. He felt like he’d only been out for a couple of seconds but for all he knew it could’ve been hours. A flash of lightning revealed a section of the roof was ripped off. Unable to figure out why the roof looked so weird Kyler fumbled around for his flashlight. He knew it was probably a horrible idea with the Zombies running around all over the place, but he had a gut feeling that something was very off.

  He played the beam of light around the interior of the room. It took him a minute to figure out that he was actually sitting on the wall. The hole the rain was coming through was from a missing window. He continued to play the light around until he saw the mattress the kids had all been holding onto. An assortment of arms and legs were sticking out from under it. As he stared worriedly at the mattress willing the kids to be alright the arms and legs started to shift around. A few more seconds and Zoey emerged followed by Kelly dragging Doreen out. Doreen was whimpering and holding her arm.

  Kelly saw Kyler across the room shining the flashlight and shot him a thumbs up. Kyler walked slowly across the trailer and helped dig the rest of the kids out of the
pile of cheap furniture they’d ended up in. Randy was bleeding from a long gash on his leg. Other than Randy’s leg and Doreen’s screwed up arm everyone seemed to have survived the trailer being turned into the inside of a giant washing machine. Kyler crawled towards the window again killing his light. The window on the top of the trailer still letting rain pour in. The bottom of the trailer, the part that used to be the wall, was starting to accumulate a standing puddle of water.

  Kyler tried looking down through the window but couldn’t see anything. He was wondering if there was enough room for them to crawl out the window if they needed to. He was still trying to see out of it when Randy crawled up next to him. They both stared at the window as if the harder they stared the more likely they’d be able to see through the solid wall of darkness.

  The trailer shifted. There was a groaning sound of tortured metal loud enough to be heard over the pounding rain on the outside of the trailer.

  “We must be leaning on something. The water’s filling up the trailer and making us heavier so we’ll settle the rest of the way to the ground. Let’s crack the window open so the water runs out. Maybe that’ll slow us down. At least it’ll help us see what’s going on underneath us. I’m hoping we have room to crawl out if we need to.” Randy said.

  Randy and Kyler worked their fingers around the edge of the window to figure out how to get it unlocked. Once they had it unlocked, they applied some brute strength and got it to slide up about a foot. The water in the trailer rushed out the opening and cascaded down to the ground below. Completely confused by the sound the water was making Kyler held up his flashlight and looked at Randy. Randy considered it for a second then nodded his head. The risk of shining the light and being seen was worth figuring out what was going on with the trailer.