“What’s so funny?” Mary said as she put down her cup and wrapped her arms around him.
He shook his head. “Shiny vampires who can walk in the day.”
Mary looked back to Alex then to Cole. She grabbed his ass and said, “That what turns you on these days?”
“I think you know what turns me on.”
Mary smacked her lips as Cole squeezed her ass.
“Morning, Mrs. Hamley,” he heard Alex say.
He and Mary freed their hands just as Anna entered the kitchen. She stopped and stared the two for a moment.
“Hey, Anna,” Mary said, doing her best to hide her smile. “Care for some coffee?”
Cole watched a faint smile play on her face—it looked forced.
“That sounds good,” Anna said. The softness in her voice was gone, replaced with a hoarse whisper.
“Everything okay?” Cole noted the sags under her eyes.
“As good as they’re ever gonna be,” Anna replied, taking the steamy cup Mary offered her.
“Sugar?” Mary asked. “Milk?”
“Black’s fine.” Anna made her way back to the living room and up the stairs.
Cole looked to Mary. “What was that all about?”
“You got me,” she answered.
Cole looked back out the window and saw that Kristin and Matt were taking a break. “All right, babe,” he said. “I guess we should get ready and help those two out.”
“What about Anna?”
Cole shrugged.
PART TWO: FAC-SIX
CHAPTER 12
November 7, 2013
Snow was falling for the first time this season; it appeared to be sticking to the ground already. Everywhere Cole looked was topped-off with a thin blanket of the stuff: the ground, the roof, the tree line. Peaceful, it appeared, but that thought had yet to warm up Cole. The heat in the van still hadn’t kicked on, and he shivered as he rolled up a joint.
“Damn, it’s cold,” he said.
Matt glanced back to the pit, which had been finished the day before. It circled the entire property except for the driveway. They’d traced all the utility lines and left those areas untouched as well, at least until they were of no use. The house was boarded up on the first floor, and the windows to the basement had a barrier of plywood on the exterior. He felt confident that they could endure quite the horde. Hell, Cole even trimmed down the remaining scraps of wood and placed them randomly about the pit to serve as stakes. It was far from perfect, but it was a start.
Not too shabby, Matt thought, and then focused on the immediate future while watching the breaths escape his mouth.
Today was the day: The Big Raid. Most everything had been taken out of the back of the van, including the shelving. They were going to take all that they could salvage, in hopes that this would be the last raid for a while. Cole had filled the weapons cache, which was centered directly behind the two. In the plastic bin were a .30-06, two shotguns, and a pair of Beretta nine millimeters. The ammunition was stored in the bin as well. Matt carried his P226 and Cole his Glock; both kept their swords resting beside them.
The plan was to head deeper into Gloucester, where they would rummage through the remains of what this dead world offered, like starving rats in a decayed city.
“Here.” Cole passed the joint to Matt.
“Nice.”
Fifteen minutes and a joint later, the van came to a stop at Route 17. They instinctively looked both ways, not so much for cars—though it would be somewhat of a relief to see more life out there—but for zombies. Especially screamers.
Matt hit the new joint for the third time and passed it back to Cole. He held in the breath, savoring the way the smoke struck his lungs, waking him up and relieving just a bit of the edge at the same time. The screamer is a real fucking piece of work, he thought, fighting the urge to laugh out loud. Probably some madman’s dream come to life. Or unlife, that is.
His body went on autopilot, as one often does behind the wheel, while his mind went into overdrive, driven by vitamin THC. He could now see a room, as if he were just a fly on the wall. The only light came from a dimming bulb above a man wearing a lab coat. Only his back could be seen from this viewpoint.
Matt blinked.
He could see the man more clearly, the view having changed, bringing him much closer. He could even hear laughter as the bulb flickered above. In the brief slits of darkness, Matt thought he saw a pair of glowing eyes staring at him. His conscious-self felt his heart rate pick up. The light came back on, and with it came the sight of several strange devices with blinking lights and all sorts of buttons and screens.
Matt blinked again. The room was fully illuminated now. He was in a morgue. On randomly placed stretchers were bodies of men, women, and children. All dead. The man was hunched over a corpse. Matt could only see the cadaver’s arm over the side of the gurney and its leg, which the man was in the process of injecting with a yellow-red substance.
A few moments later the corpse’s finger twitched…
“WATCH OUT!”
Matt opened his eyes to the real world, where he was about to crash right into a parked minivan on the side of the road. He slammed on the brakes, swerving out of the vehicle’s path. He barely missed it, nearly losing control in the inclement weather.
“No more weed for you,” Cole said. “I said your name like five times, man.”
Matt shook his and refocused on the road in front of him. “Sorry. Just thinking.”
“Well, less thinkie, more drivie.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Matt waved him off.
He wondered, though. Maybe that was how all this madness started. Some nutcase playing with the dead.
The road was beginning to fill with abandoned and wrecked vehicles, and it was only a matter of time before they came to an impasse. Many a road on which they’d driven had been clogged with abandoned vehicles, and this one was no exception.
“Shit.” Cole slapped his knee and sighed.
He took the word right out of Matt’s mouth. A few hundred feet up was a sea of dead automobiles. An overturned big rig blocked all three lanes on their side of the road. Across the divide, things weren’t looking much better. In the panic of things, it seemed, people hadn’t been able to drive in an orderly fashion. Each person had felt they were more important than those ahead and behind them. The route would have to be traversed by foot, if at all.
“We’ll take a look,” Matt said. “There are a few stores not that much farther up the road. If the path’s clear enough, we’ll try to give it a go.”
“If not, we’ll have to head to Yorktown.”
“Least we know our way around those parts.” Matt brought the van to a halt, killed the engine, and stepped out after swiping the joint from Cole. He swept the perimeter, waiting for a zombie or two or two hundred to pop out and say hello. None did. Every corpse in a vehicle appeared motionless, and that was a comforting sight.
Cole grabbed the .30 .06 and made a run for the tallest vehicle he could find: a school bus. He climbed atop, Matt watching the surrounding area, and peered to the other side of the wreckage through the scope. “Phew.” He turned to Matt. “Yorktown it is. You should come and take a look at this.”
“Seen one and you’ve seen ‘em all, Cole,” Matt said, tossing the joint.
“Nah, not like this. I wouldn’t even know where to begin counting, man.” Cole looked down with a serious, possibly intimidated expression. “We really need more ammunition.”
Matt gestured to the van.
“Hold on.” Cole peered through the scope, moving it slightly to the right.
Matt took another cursory glance at the vehicular graveyard and looked back up to Cole, who was already on his way down.
“Let’s go, before they find out we’re here.”
Minutes later, the two were well on their way to the Coleman Bridge, which connected Gloucester to Yorktown. They passed the remains of the gas station and the collapsed house wher
e Matt had nearly died days earlier before arriving at the bridge. Though they’d both scanned and scanned, neither could find any evidence of that monstrous thing—other than a few overturned automobiles.
The outgoing lanes to the bridge were swamped with motionless vehicles as well. Oncoming lanes, however, were as clear as a sunny day. Not even one car was in their way. At first there had been roadblocks to prevent others from entering or leaving; they couldn’t be sure of which. When they initially crossed the bridge, entering Gloucester, Matt and Cole had to push three stalled police cruisers out of the way. Not one of the officers anywhere in sight.
Things happened so fast, Matt surmised, that organizing proper evacuation procedures was as unattainable as breathing in outer space without a spacesuit. Judging by the dead bodies littering the road, there had been one huge battle here.
“Didn’t even stand a chance,” he muttered as the continued down the bridge.
George Washington Memorial Highway had been clear for the first quarter-mile past the bridge. Then, just like everywhere else, signs of the outbreak made themselves evident: bodies, automobiles, discarded luggage strewn about in haphazard fashion. Seeing a trail of shirts and pants wasn’t uncommon.
It truly is amazing just how long a person would hold on to their possessions in times of crisis, as if they even matter anymore, Matt thought. Then he remembered a picture Mary had taken of him and Shelley after their third date. They were holding hands, facing each other, noses almost touching. That image captured the first time Matt knew real love, and now he realized how much he missed it.
Farther on, they spotted a BMW sedan and an old Jeep Grand Cherokee which had been headed toward Gloucester. The BMW’s doors were open, the trunk ajar. Matt drove over the grass divider and parked next to the Grand Cherokee, hoping to find survivors.
A woman up front, two children in the back. When Matt put the vehicle in park to take a closer look, he grimaced. The woman turned her head so that her glazed eyes met his.
“Man,” Cole said, “that is one ugly chick.”
“Preach on, Brother Cole.”
Her face was riddled with moles, and Matt noticed encrusted blood where her ear had once been. One eye socket seemed bigger than the other—All the better to see them with, Matt guessed. When she opened her mouth to let out an inaudible moan, she exposed brown gums. Her dentures, if she had even owned a pair, must have fallen out.
The children weren’t moving at all. They were dressed in their Sunday finest, decaying as normal corpses should. Matt and Cole stepped out to get a closer look and saw no signs of bite marks on the kids and, hauntingly enough, no evidence of struggle.
Probably dehydrated, Matt thought, wondering how they could just sit there and wait to die, especially with a zombie up front; it must have been one horrid scene out in these streets when they were alive. Maybe it was the ugly zombie up front that had condemned these children not to leave the vehicle. None of this explained the BMW behind, though. Were they traveling together? If so, what happened to the rest of them? And why would they have just abandoned these kids?
Matt shook his head.
“We should take care of her first,” Cole said.
“Be my guest.”
Matt watched Cole drive the handle of his sword into the window that Dead Mama had covered with slime. The glass shattering wasn’t as loud as he thought it was going to be. Cole maneuvered around her slashing hand and unlocked the door. After opening it, he disengaged the seatbelt with the tip of his sword. Dead Mama swiped one more time and fell out of the car with a thud. She stank, all right, but not as bad as most. She couldn’t have been dead for more than a few days.
Cole positioned his sword, waiting for the right moment to strike. Though this dead thing in front of him had likely never infected anyone, he imagined the ones who’d ravaged his parents. Dead Mama staggered as she rose, and out the corner of his eye, he could see Matt scanning the area. Cole closed his eyes and said a silent farewell to his parents, opened them with soft exhale, and cut clean through Dead Mama’s neck. Her head dropped beside her body, rolling off to the side. The blow couldn’t have been more satisfying.
“That was for—”
“Hold on.” Matt walked past the headless body, moving in between the two vehicles. There was a trail of clothing leading to a newly formed path of broken twigs and brush.
“What is it?”
“Blood.” Matt pointed to pool of the stuff in front of a broken branch. He heard again what had gained his attention in the first place: crunching leaves and the snapping of dead tree limbs under someone’s or something’s running feet. “There’s something out there.”
Matt searched the woods, but they were so vast beyond the highway that he might be hearing only the echoes in the still November air. Now, it seemed that Mother Nature saw fit to make it snow even harder, the flakes twice the size they had been when the two left the house. Matt cast his eyes left, then right, then left again. As each moment passed, the footfalls grew louder, closer.
Cole came up to his side with his pistol drawn, training the sights on mere ghosts of random noises. “Think we should bail? Could be a shitload of zombies waitin’ in there for us, ya know.”
“What if there’s someone being chased?”
“Don’t you think they’d be screaming or something?”
Matt shook his head and took a few steps forward. “Not if they’re trying to avoid attracting more attention. Don’t you think we’d be hearing or smelling the zombies if there were that many?”
“I guess.” Cole shrugged. “Better we kill ‘em now than die by their bite later, right?”
Matt nodded and returned his focus to the woods. He could only hear the aftermath of each step. On a “normal” day, he reckoned he wouldn’t have heard this even if he were right next to the one—or ones—running, but when there weren’t ambient noises such as horns, radios, running engines, sound was much more clear and crisp, almost amplified.
“Saw it,” Cole said quickly. He was looking to his right, and Matt followed the barrel of the man’s pistol.
“You sure?” he whispered.
“Yep.” Cole moved forward.
Matt saw a shadowed figure darting through the woods in front of him and Cole, about twenty yards out. Then there was another shadowy outline chasing it.
Matt knew they had two choices. Either let the victim die and use the distraction as a chance to skate away without being noticed, or do what no one would have done for either of them if the roles were reversed. He looked to Cole, who nodded in agreement, and chose the latter. If mankind were to survive then they’d have to start banding together and forgoing selfishness—something with which the Matt from a month ago wouldn’t have agreed. “People get people killed,” he would have said. Post-apocalypse Matt now said that sometimes there was strength in numbers.
A woman’s scream pulled him back to the situation at hand.
“Get to the highway,” Matt yelled, able to at last discern the silhouette of the survivor. She turned to him in mid-run and cried out for help.
Cole went back to the van, pulled out the rifle, and positioned himself on the roof once more. If shit was going to go to Hell, he was going to make damn sure he was ready for it.
Matt, on the other hand, followed the woman, careful not to slip on the patches of snow. He ran a total of about thirty yards before the survivor broke free from the woods.
Hello, Matt thought as she came into view.
“Help me,” cried the woman.
She appeared to be Latina; her shirt had been torn open, revealing a pair of the most beautiful breasts Matt had ever seen. He did his best not get distracted as he brought his pistol up, aligning the sights on the runner as it dashed out behind her. His finger caressed the trigger and squeezed at the perfect moment. The air behind the runner lit up with crimson, tainting the falling snow as its body dropped forward, head snapping back from the impact. Matt waited a moment to see if any other zo
mbies lay in wait. When he was satisfied that there weren’t, he went to meet the new survivor.
“Here.” Cole undid his jacket as he walked up and handed it to the shaky woman.
“Thank… thank you,” she said between heavy breaths.
“What’s your name?”
“Maria Gomez.” She pointed to the runner. “That was my husband, Guillermo.”
Matt walked up beside Cole. “Sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be. That bastard attacked me this morning. He bit me before I got away.” The way she said it was so passive it was as if she didn’t know it was a death sentence. She shook her head in frustration.
The two friends glanced at each other before looking back at the condemned woman.
“When did he bite you?” Cole inquired.
“About an hour ago.” She pointed down the highway. “We were staying… somewhere, I don’t know where, exactly, and we were attacked by los muertos vivientes last night. Guillermo was hurt badly, and he died in my arms. I just sat there, holding my baby, and then he came back. I thought it was a miracle, that God gave me my love back, but then,” she began crying, “he attacked me—like those things attacked us last night.” Maria extended her left leg, turning it so that her calf was in plain sight.
“Is that your car over there?” Matt tried changing the subject, pointing toward the BMW, desperately searching for the best way to handle this. He knew the right thing to do was to just shoot her and get over it, but this woman had done him no wrong. It wasn’t as easy as pulling the trigger and leaving. Was it?
“No,” she answered, regaining a little composure.
Matt looked back at the sedan, trying to put the pieces together, avoiding what he knew he was about to do.
Cole placed his gun at the small of his back and knelt down. “You feel like you got a fever, Mrs. Gomez?”
She nodded and wiped away a fresh tear. “Yeah, I feel a little sick.”
“Did Guillermo feel that way before…?” Cole stole a glance at Guillermo’s corpse.
“Yes. He complained that his head and stomach hurt.”
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