by J. Thorn
“They will question what we are carrying in the back of this truck and how we obtained it.”
“So we ditch the truck nearby and run for it!”
“I’ll set you close to one, but I’m not changing my plans.”
“Because of those stupid movies?” Teresa asked.
I thought it over. Was I being just a bit paranoid? I mean, our government has dropped the ball at times. But it has come through at others. Plus, I had Thalia to think of. She was sitting quietly, and I’m not sure she really understood what was being said. Bottom line, she trusts me to do what was right.
“Shit!”
***
“Are any of you bitten or injured in any way?” the soldier asked. Actually, the kid didn’t look much older than Teresa. Plus, he looked absolutely terrified.
“Nobody is hurt,” I assured.
“Take this card and fill it out,” the soldier said, handing me a piece of yellow cardboard that looked like it had been cut from manila folders. “Follow the signs to the cafeteria and give it to the door sentry.”
I felt Thalia tighten her grip on my hand, and looked in the direction I saw her head turned. Coming up the hastily fenced in walkway were four young boys wearing football jerseys. They were carrying another teenaged boy in a makeshift stretcher that looked like nothing more than a blanket stretched between two metal poles. The boy on the stretcher was bleeding from his arms and legs. I could see actual chunks missing.
“Let’s go,” I said, tugging Thalia and nudging Teresa with my elbow.
We walked down the hallway, passing at least a half dozen people on cots against the wall with an assortment of injuries. Not all of them looked like bites. Some were burned, others looked like they’d been in a car crash with bruised up faces, bloody noses, and busted lips.
It took us a while, but eventually we were assigned to a small space in the gymnasium with hundreds of other people. I was regretting this decision something terrible. Between the noise, the smell, and the nervous soldiers and a smattering of law enforcement patrolling like guards in a prison—half looking confused, the other half looking pissed—this was not the place to be right now.
A couple sat on a cot right next to me. The man was so black that his skin almost looked blue under the lights. His clean shaven head was shiny with sweat. The woman next to him had a look on her face that could almost let her pass for one of those creatures. She wasn’t seeing anything.
“Is she okay?” I asked, trying to make polite conversation.
“No,” the man whispered. “No, she’s not.”
I stiffened. Instinctually, I moved Thalia to the far side of me away from the couple. The man looked up and his face darkened with frustration or anger; I didn’t know him well enough to say which.
“She isn’t hurt,” the man explained, “at least not physically.” His expression changed again and I saw tears in his eyes. He faced me and continued. “She saw our child torn apart by those things in our own yard.” His voice seemed to hitch with every word. I could tell he was doing everything possible not to break down and cry.
“My name is Steve,” I said, trying to take his thoughts away from what he was obviously seeing in his mind’s eye. “This is Thalia and Teresa.” I made a nod to each girl during introductions.
“I’m Barry Jenkins, and this is my wife, Randi.”
“I don’t think saying that I’m pleased to meet you is the protocol here.” I shook the man’s offered hand.
Barry went on to tell me a little of what they’d been through and seen since this whole unthinkable event had begun. It seems that they’d been picked up by a military transport vehicle that had rolled through their neighborhood late last night.
While we talked, Teresa took Thalia by the hand and wandered off. It took me a few minutes to realize that I probably should have asked where they were going. After all, I was sorta responsible.
It didn’t take long before the only other open cot near us was assigned. A balding man arrived while Barry I were making awkward small talk.
“The soldiers pointed this way,” the man said in a shaky voice that sounded way too close to hysterics for my liking. “Is this bed taken?” he asked, pointing to the empty cot.
I shook my head and gestured for him to have a seat. His name was David Ellis and he was a doctor of mathematics. I didn’t know that there was such a thing. He had been on the light rail train when a bunch of those things wandered on to the tracks. It seems that the train had jumped the tracks and stranded the passengers in a bad place where packs of zombies were making short work of anybody and everybody they came across. The best I could gather, Dave had been able to slip out an emergency window. The blood on his clothes told me he had been real close to somebody not as fortunate.
Eventually the conversations died out and we sat quietly. The noise seemed to be growing by the minute as more survivors were being packed into the place. At some point, Teresa returned with Thalia and I gave her what I considered a proper scolding for just going off without saying anything. I don’t think she cared.
As for Thalia, she was getting tired. I tucked her in and was completely caught off guard when she folded her hands under her chin.
“I need to say my prayers,” she informed me.
“Okay.” I was at a loss. I might have said my prayers as a kid, but I sure couldn’t remember any of them.
“Do you know, Now I lay me?” Teresa scooted in beside me on her knees. Thalia nodded. Together the two began in voices barely audible above the racket of the screams, yells, and crying going on all around us.
“Now I lay me, down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take,” they prayed.
Really? I thought. Is that really the prayer to be saying right now?
“God bless my mama and Steve and Teresa…and the sad lady on the bed next to me and the man holding her who looks like he is crying,” Thalia continued by herself. I was more than a little impressed at how observant she was to what went on around her.
In a matter of minutes the little girl was sleeping peaceful despite the insanity on every side. I pulled my own cot closer and laid down, hoping to catch just a few minutes at least. The moment my head touched the hard plastic pad that I guess was supposed to be a pillow, I felt all the stress of the past several hours flood over me.
I was so very tired…
***
A scream pierced my brain like an ice pick. I sat up so fast that my cot tipped over. Struggling to get out from the blanket that had seemed so small when I had first covered myself with it now seemed like an endless supply of wool as I tried to pull it off of my head.
Moving towards where I assumed Thalia to be, my hand found a wet spot and I sprawled on my stomach. That impact seemed to clear the audio log jam. My ears rang with shouts, screams, and gunfire.
Gunfire? Crap!
Finally free of the cursed blanket, I looked around and realized that the overhead lights had gone out. Now, everything was in eerie yellow from an unknown number of emergency lights. I looked around frantically for Thalia and felt my heart strain in my chest when I saw her cot was empty.
“Steve!” a voice screamed in my ear as a hand slapped me on the side of the head.
I spun, not sure what to expect. A teenaged girl—it took me a second to recall that her name was Teresa—stood with Thalia at her side.
“What the hell is going on?” I shouted over the cacophony.
“They’re inside!”
“They?”
“Those things!” Teresa yanked me around in time for me to see a young boy no older than Thalia go down under three of the moaning undead. I don’t know how, but one of them looked familiar. My brain was more on the ball than I would have believed because the mental image of a woman lying down on a dirty blanket in one of the high school corridors flashed in my head.
“Just like the movies,” I thought out loud.
“What?” Teresa l
ooked at me like she thought I might be going just a little bit crazy.
“The bite turns people just like in the movies,” I explained. The look on Teresa’s face told me that I hadn’t made a lick of sense.
“Whatever,” she said, dismissing my ravings for the time being. “So what are we gonna do?”
The explosive sounds of several guns being fired rapidly drowned out my first attempt at an answer. I saw two zombies go down…as well as several people who were definitely not zombies.
“The truck!” I yelled.
Scooping Thalia in my arms, I felt a wash of guilt when I realized that she had been crying and shrieking in terror the entire time. How had that failed to register? I was responsible for her. She relied on me and the first time things got crazy, it was like she wasn’t even there.
There was a loud explosion, and in an instant, we were all plunged into pitch black. Now I could unquestionably hear Thalia wailing. Of course her mouth was about an inch from my left ear. A hand grabbed my shoulder and squeezed. I lashed out and heard an audible grunt.
“It’s me, Steve,” a shaky female voice said.
“Sorry, Teresa,” I apologized.
“My fault,” she wheezed.
I felt bad, but at the same time, I was too scared to let the fact that I’d just backhanded a teenaged girl get in the way of my desire to survive and ensure Thalia’s safety. I waited for Teresa to get a grip on my elbow before I started in the general direction that I recall the doors being.
“Hey, guys!” a timid voice called out. “Please don’t leave me.”
It was the math guy…Dave something. “Over here…dude.” That was my catch-all when I couldn’t really recall somebody’s name.
A small light cut the darkness like a laser. Thankfully, he had the sense to have the thing pointed at the floor. He almost fell on his face stepping across my tipped over cot, but Teresa caught him.
All around us I could hear the moans and groans of the undead competing with the screams and cries of the living. From every direction, the pleas for “help” or the commands to “stop” or “get down” came in a slurry of noise. Through it all came one simple request:
“Please help me get my wife on her feet.”
It was that man, Barry. Dave’s little flashlight swung around and caught the man in the face. His eyes squeezed shut, but the tears sparkled on his cheeks like black pearls.
“Is she okay?” Dave blurted.
“I gave her a couple of sleeping pills,” Barry explained.
How was that my problem? was my first thought. I’m embarrassed to say it, but it’s true. Instead, I reached over, effectively slinging Teresa around and practically right on top of the couple. To her credit, she sprung into action, leaning down and helping to hoist the tall, slender woman to her feet.
I grabbed Dave by the collar and brought him to the front of our little group. I rationalized it in my mind by pointing out to my conscience that he had the damn flashlight. We crept forward as fast as possible, which seemed very, very, very slow.
I think we might have moved about twenty feet when we came face-to-face with a zombie. He looked hideous. Half his face was just flat out gone. It made his mouth seem five times larger. It…he…whatever…the zombie was just getting to his feet, an elderly lady lay on the floor, a huge rip laying open her flabby, wrinkled stomach where the Big Mouth zombie had been feasting.
Instinctively—at least I like to think it was instinct—I shoved Thalia’s face in my chest so she couldn’t/wouldn’t see. That was also the moment that I realized I wasn’t holding a weapon.
It’s funny, how things around you can seem to slow down when you are faced with a life-or-death situation. Perhaps it is just the way the mind works to process something so horrific, but I could see that thing reaching for me in vivid detail. My eyes couldn’t tear themselves away from the gore-slimed tongue that wagged around in that gaping maw. I knew without a doubt that I would be bitten. It was over.
A baseball bat came down hard, leaving a rounded dent in the top of the zombie’s skull. A second swing crushed the head, sending bits splattering in every direction.
Four boys wearing football jerseys stepped into the shivering beam of light, each holding an aluminum baseball bat. One of the boys reached for me and grabbed the elbow Teresa still clutched.
“Don’t go out the main exit, the soldiers and cops are shooting anything that moves,” the boy shouted above the symphony of slaughter happening all around us.
“There is a hallway on the back side of the gym that runs along until it comes to the cafeteria. From there we can slip out a side door and cut across the football field at the bottom of the hill,” another one of the boys offered.
It sounded like as good a plan as any. I had no idea where I was, and in the dark, the corridors of the high school were going to be worse than any maze. Throw in who knows how many zombies that were probably walking around and it was almost certain that we weren’t getting out of here alive.
The boy that had grabbed for my elbow—or so I thought—took Teresa by the hand and led the way across the chaos-filled gymnasium. Two of the others moved in and helped Barry with his wife. Along the way, the foursome swung their bats at anything that popped into the beam of Dave’s flashlight. I shifted Thalia to my left hip and drew my pistol. I’d been shocked when nobody had thought to frisk me or even ask if I were carrying any weapons when we’d arrived at the so-called rescue center.
Eventually, though I still really don’t know how, we made it to a single metal door. The young man in front opened it and ushered everybody through. When he closed it behind him, it was a nearly instant relief. We could still hear the screams, moans, and shooting, but it was drastically muffled.
Slipping down one hall then another, descending a set of stairs, we were blessed with intermittent light from the moonlit sky that came through the huge windows along the way. We reached a four-way intersection and the young man in front skidded to a halt.
I’d come so tuned into Thalia and her sobbing that I’d failed to hear the young woman ahead who was sitting in the middle of the huge junction. That was also when I realized how bunched up we had all been as we made our way out of this place. Everybody sort of drifted apart and surrounded this poor young lady.
I felt my warning bells go off a second later. The girl was covered in blood. Her hands looked black in the dim light we had to see by from an enormous window that was just behind us at the top of the landing of the stairs we’d just come down. In fact, she had large dark stains all over her body. Her clothes were actually dripping with blood that was forming a small puddle around where she sat.
It was Teresa who pulled away from the boy who had been leading us on our escape that approached the young woman first. She knelt down, and all I could think was that this woman was going to lunge up and take a bite out of Teresa’s face before any of us could do a damn thing to stop it. Apparently the young man she’d pulled away from had the same thoughts, because he cranked back with his bat and stepped forward.
“Don’t!” Dave held up his hands and stepped in front of the boy. “She’s crying…can’t you hear her? That means that she’s still alive.”
“If she’s been bitten, she will be one of those things before long…I’m doing her a favor,” the boy retorted.
“Do it and let’s get the hell out of here,” I hissed. I was certain that I could hear moans drifting down the stairs. Those things were coming, and I didn’t want to be here when they arrived.
“She’s coming with us,” Teresa insisted.
With the exception of Dave, who was still standing with his arms out in front of him as if to shield the girl, every head snapped around in Teresa’s direction. A chorus of “What!” echoed in the locker-lined hall.
“She is coming with us,” Teresa repeated, pulling the whimpering figure to her feet.
The boy who had been leading the way cast a look my direction as if he were seeking my verdict. My prima
ry goal was to get out of this place and hope to God that the truck was still where we’d hidden it when we’d arrived. If it came to it, I’d put a bullet in the woman’s head, but for now, I just wanted us to resume moving. I nodded.
We made our way to a set of double doors that opened up on the back side of the high school. I could see a tiered set of concrete stairs that eventually led to a football stadium surrounded by a runner’s track. There were a few dozen of those things wandering around, and worse, a few groups huddled around something on the ground.
“My truck is on the other side of here, I think,” I whispered as loud as I dared for fear of bringing us any undue attention.
“You think?” Dave whined.
“Hey,” I spun the guy around to face me, “I ain’t from around here. And you can walk if you have any problems.”
He seemed to visibly shrink at the confrontation. I looked around for anything that might act as a landmark, but it was night, the lights were out in this neighborhood, and I had no clue where I was or where I’d parked.
“There was a donut place around the corner if that helps,” Teresa offered.
There was?
“Okay,” the boy leading us nodded, “that is helpful. Did you cross the four lane road, or were you on this side of the strip?”
“We didn’t cross any big streets, just three blocks up and five blocks over,” Teresa rattled off.
I couldn’t help but stare at her. I remembered a house with a boat in the side yard and a willow tree in the front yard. Oh yeah, and the house was either brown, or yellow. I better start getting my act together. This teenager was making me look like an idiot.
Our group set out once more. Now that we were outside, Dave moved to help Barry with his wife and the boys fanned out around our group to deal with any zombie that came our way. I kept my pistol in my hand in case any got close.
We headed down a side street, the one that Teresa said she was certain we’d come from. The neighborhood was eerie. We smelled before we saw the first house that was on fire. It was only a small fire, barely visible through the upstairs window as we passed, but without any emergency services, it was going to get bad in a hurry. It was the first, but it wasn’t the last one that we passed as we hurried down the middle of the street of this dark neighborhood. I counted at least two more houses where we could see what looked like the beginnings of a house fire casting a glow inside.
