She responded with another moan and if anything, it seemed even higher pitched than the one before, as if his voice excited her. Teddy’s gut clenched as he got to his feet and inched backward. He was afraid he was going to throw up, imagining this horny old bag wanting to screw him, ripped up cheek and all, right here on the gravel road that ran in front of her house. It was insane, but no more so than any of the other thoughts running through his mind at the moment.
Teddy continued to move backward and repeated “Missus Chilton?” one more time, then spied something out of the corner of his eye.
There were several other people moving toward him. The same ones who’d been stumbling around their yards like Missus Chilton.
They were walking just as slowly as the woman who was now only about ten feet from where the teenager stood. He looked a bit closer at the one nearest, two houses down, and recognized Phil Gomez, one of the few people who Teddy liked in his father’s neighborhood. He drank like all the rest, and yet never acted drunk. While he hung out with the other folks when they got together, he seemed to be the only one with a level head. He always had something nice to say to the boy and didn’t mock him for playing soccer like his father encouraged everyone to do.
Phil looked just as screwed up as Marge. Even more so. There was a big chunk of meat missing from his right arm and a great deal of dried blood around the wound. Teddy couldn’t see Phil’s eyes all that well but he thought they looked more cloudy than usual. But what really stood out about the man was the fact that his midsection was a ragged mess.
Phil’s t-shirt was shredded, as if someone had tried to tear it off him like he was some sort of rock star. The collar and sleeves were still intact, but the lower half was completely gone. So were most of his internal organs below the rib cage. Bits of gristle and whatever dark tubing that was supposed to be inside him were dangling down to his jeans. Thankfully the denim was holding up, along with his spine.
When he moaned like the woman closing in on Teddy, the boy nearly fell again. He felt woozy, but managed to stay on his feet. His knees were weak, though the pain from where he’d fallen on them was already forgotten. Behind Phil were at least three other people who looked as messed up as him.
Marge was getting closer.
Teddy panicked, not sure what to do. He turned to face the direction he had been running, figuring he was faster than any of these people even when they had been… been what? Normal?
What the hell is wrong with these people? What did this to them?
It still didn’t occur to Teddy that the things he heard on the television somehow correlated to this. That was the kind of crap you saw in the one of those sensational magazines his mother got a kick out of at the checkout stands in supermarkets. This was real. It was here and now. This was happening to people he knew.
When he turned back to the road, Teddy realized what a predicament he was in. There were even more of them coming.
He didn’t bother counting. There were more slumping toward him that he could count. If he didn’t move soon, he would be surrounded.
The teen took off running.
He didn’t remember the rest of the roughly three-quarters of a mile to his father’s house, except when dodging a few grasping hands. Teddy thought he had felt some fingers swipe the back of his shirt, but wasn’t quite sure. He didn’t bother trying to speak to anyone after Missus Chilton, although he thought he saw Rodney Williams, the African American guy who lived two doors down from his dad. Teddy always remembered that Rodney seemed blacker than black, his skin almost charcoal in color. All his father would ever say about the man was something nonsensical like “he sure as hell ain’t high yella,” before laughing like a loon. Teddy had no idea what it meant, but was sure it was offensive.
Rodney was the only black man in the area and some of the other neighbors didn’t seem to like him all that much for that reason, but Joe Schmidts had no issues with anyone as long as they brought beer with them when they visited, and Rodney always did. He was as much of a lush as the rest of them.
Teddy got to the door without a scratch, although he was drenched in sweat and panting. He opened the front door and slammed it shut behind him, locking it.
Teddy saw that the couch situated next to the front door was empty before he even got the door locked. Screaming for his father, Teddy’s heart nearly exploded when Joe stumbled out of the kitchen.
He didn’t look as bad as the others outside, but it was clear that whatever had gotten a hold of them had gotten to him as well. Joe’s skin had a grayish hue to it, and his eyes looked strange in the thin slivers of light trickling through the broken blinds on the front window. But it was the sound emanating from Joe’s mouth that confirmed it for Teddy. It was the same haunted, keening noise that he’d heard outside; as if some great sadness had gripped his father.
“Dad?” was all that Teddy managed to ask before Joe lunged at him. Perhaps it was the adrenaline, or the realization that it was pointless trying to break through whatever fever had gripped his father’s mind, but Teddy managed to dodge the sloppy attack and make a run for the bedroom before Joe could do much more than growl in frustration.
Teddy rushed into his father’s bedroom and locked the door. It didn’t take long for him to hear banging on the front door over the sound of his own heavy breathing. But it wasn’t until his father’s fists slammed into the bedroom door that a startled yelp burst from Teddy’s lips.
Looking around the room, Teddy moved to the small window that faced the backside of the house. He could see several people moving toward the house across the acre-sized back lawn. It took only a moment to confirm that they were in the same shape as the others. Tugging on the pull cord, Teddy let the blinds drop across the window so they wouldn’t spot him.
Hearing glass shatter from across the house, Teddy knew that it was the back door being broken into. The pounding on the front door continued, but he could already hear footsteps moving through the kitchen. It didn’t take much to deduce that whichever neighbors were inside the house would be joining his father at the bedroom door within seconds.
Teddy rushed to the beat up dresser near the door and pushed against it. It didn’t budge at first, but as he let out a grunt of frustration, he felt it slide an inch or two across the ratty carpet. The sound of the effort acted as an incentive to his father, who increased his pounding on the door. The cheap wood of the door wouldn’t hold up long and that was all the motivation Teddy needed to continue straining until he managed to slide the dresser in front of it. The frame continued to rattle, but the heavy piece of furniture would at least give him a few minutes to think of an escape plan.
Scanning the sparsely decorated room, Teddy stepped to his father’s closet. That was where the rifles were kept. When Joe and Vicky were still married, he had a nice display case in the basement for all his weapons. It was locked, but had a glass front. All the rifles had trigger locks as well, which was something Teddy’s mom had insisted on. Since he’d moved, Joe was forced to sell the display case to a friend and had taken each rifle and blasted the trigger locks to pieces. Teddy supposed it was his father’s way of getting back at his mother for everything she had ever done to him.
Now the few rifles that remained in his collection were buried on the bottom of the closet. The only admonishment that Joe ever gave his son anymore was “don’t touch them or I’ll break your neck.” Teddy never had, until now. He sifted through the pile of dirty clothes on the floor and grabbed the Springfield Model 70. It was his father’s favorite. He had been forced to sell most of the others to pay child support and alimony. He couldn’t find steady work in construction so the collection, which had originally consisted of upwards of thirty different weapons, had diminished to about five rifles. He’d handed over the shotguns and other rifles to some dealers and collectors, but held on to the old Springfield, even though it was probably was worth more than any of the other weapons he had. It was Joe’s baby and when he’d bought it at a gun
auction ten years before he swore up and down he would never part with it. His father, Teddy’s grandfather, had one just like it and Joe grew up using it.
Teddy held the rifle awkwardly. He had never fired it and had never really wanted to. Guns held no fascination for him.
He grabbed a box of .30 caliber rounds and noticed that several other boxes said 7.62mm on them and knew that he could grab them as well—his father had taught him that much, at least. He loaded the rifle as he had seen his dad do and poured as many bullets as he could into his pockets without feeling weighed down. Moving out of the closet, Teddy glanced over at the dresser and opened one of the drawers. He grabbed a pair of balled up socks and poured more of the stray cartridges into one of them. He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, but filled it about half way up and then tied the opening of the sock off into a thick knot. Swinging it around a couple of times to test its weight, he hoped it would do the job of knocking someone silly if they got too close.
Staring at the dresser, Teddy watched it vibrate as several fists pounded on the door behind it. There were at least three people out there with his father now, and he was sure more would be joining them.
What the hell is wrong with everyone?
Teddy’s stood stunned and panting inside his father’s bedroom. They were in varied states of messed up, with his own father the least so. He remembered his father saying that someone had bitten him and that was starting to make more sense. Perhaps that was what caused this. Someone with rabies or hepatitis was out there attacking everyone, turning them into homicidal maniacs.
The more his mind raced, the stranger Teddy thought it was that no one out there appeared to be attacking anyone else. They were all bloodied and messed up from some type of assault, but they were all after him, not one another. Watching the door, Teddy held the rifle in front of him as he glanced furtively over to the window. No one had attacked his dad—he couldn’t hear any brawling going on outside the bedroom door, and yet they all wanted to get at him. Why?
Taking one last look around the room, Teddy cursed. No phone. His father had one phone and it was next to the couch. The man refused to get a cell phone and it damn near took a court order to get him to buy an answering machine. There weren’t too many people that Joe was interested in talking to anyway, and that left Teddy in a bind. What the hell was he going to do? In answer to his silent query, the sound of the bedroom door cracking made Teddy take a step back deeper into the room.
The truck! His father’s truck was parked next to the house. The beat up old shack didn’t have a garage. Just a cheap sheet metal cover that counted as a carport. The old beat up Chevy S-10 was underneath it with the boat attached behind. Teddy had always shaken his head at the amazing luck his father displayed in driving back from the small lake where he fished. They were out in the country, so he was almost always able to avoid the cops on his drunken returns home. He was not quite as good with trees and fence posts though. The truck had suffered some pretty nice dings and dents and Joe spent plenty of his free time fixing a few neighbor’s split rail fences. Fortunately for him, they were as apt to get ripped and do the exact same thing, so they were more or less forgiving of his indiscretions.
But where were the keys?
He thought back to his father’s return. The old man didn’t carry the damn things in his pocket like a normal person. If Joe remembered to get them out of the truck, he would usually toss them on a counter somewhere or underneath a pile of trash he had not cleaned up in months. “My cleaning lady will get to it, but this is her year off.” Some lame joke like that was always his excuse. When Teddy tried to clean up once, his father told him to leave it. He’d left the boy’s mother so he could get away from dealing with crap like that.
As the bedroom door splintered and the dresser shuddered, Teddy thought hard. He couldn’t remember his father doing much more than throwing up and passing out when he got home. That and talking about getting bitten. No keys. Were they still in the truck?
The question was rendered moot as the dresser moved and the door behind it gave way. The moaning outside grew louder and it sounded like a lot more fists were pounding on the front door as well.
Teddy moved to the window and peeked through the blinds outside. Nothing. Just the weedy back yard that seemed to stretch for a mile. No more shambling forms. Anyone moving toward the house were probably already inside and trying to get at him through the bedroom door.
The window was fairly small and was at chest height. Outside of the dresser and the bed there was not much to climb on in the room. It would take too long to move the bed underneath the window. Being short sometimes was a real disadvantage. Teddy couldn’t remember how he managed, but he was able to slide the window open and pull himself up just as the dresser toppled over and crashed to the floor. He tossed the rifle outside as the sock full of cartridges swung like a pendulum from where he had tied it to his sweatpants.
Before sliding through the window, Teddy took one last glance back into the room, which was a big mistake. He froze halfway out the window as he stared into his father’s eyes.
The man was dead. Looking at Marge Chilton had not convinced Teddy of that, nor had seeing Phil, even with his guts ripped out. But looking into his father’s eyes as the man climbed over the toppled dresser made Teddy realize they were dead. Every last one of them.
Teddy almost died alongside them right then and there. He continued staring at his father, stunned by his revelation. His father was dead, but somehow moving toward him. The teen was frozen in place as his father crept closer, just a couple of feet away. Joe would grab him by the legs and pull his son back inside where everyone in the neighborhood would do unspeakable things to him. Then he would become one of them.
That was when Teddy felt the hand yanking him out the window.
He screamed as he fell to the ground, knocking down whoever had pulled him outside. His legs had been scraped up in the fall and the bag of bullets had landed on his back, knocking the air out of him and leaving some nice gouges there as well.
Teddy rolled away, trying hard to catch his breath as the other person climbed to their feet. He rolled to his back so he could see what was going on. He looked up, only to discover that his savior was one of them.
He didn’t recognize this person. It was a man dressed in denim overalls with one of the straps missing. So was the man’s right arm.
Teddy gaped at the man and once again felt as if he couldn’t move. The rifle was behind the ghoul, out of the reach. Not that he could manage his first shot with the weapon anyway. There was no way in hell. The only thing he could do was run.
Teddy tried to scoot backwards, but the man was moving faster than he could scoot. When he did, he heard the bag of bullets making noise as the cartridges clicked together in the sock. He reached and tugged at it. He had tied it to the pull string of his sweats and it had tried to break loose when he fell, but remained where he’d put it. Teddy had tied it tight, wanting it to remain snug to his body. Now he cursed, struggling to get it loose.
The memory of how long it took to fumble the sock free played over and over in Teddy’s dreams for days. In reality, it took less than a couple of seconds and then he was able to launch the makeshift sling at the man well before he could lunge for him. But in his dreams, it was always one second too late…
Teddy watched as the weighted sock traveled upward and smacked the stiffening corpse in the nose. It caused the man to stumble. After a moment the monster regained control of his erstwhile feet and moved toward Teddy again. By then the boy had snapped out of his trance and was on his feet, slipping backwards, away from the man. The truck was on the side of the house, past the pus bag in front of him. But that wasn’t the only problem: someone was stepping out the back door of his dad’s house and others were following.
A voice inside Teddy’s head managed to cut through all the static and noise racing around in there. It whispered that he already knew that he was faster than any of these pe
ople. All he had to do was move, and move quickly and there was no way in hell they could catch him.
He took the voice at its word and decided to run straight at the man. This seemed to take the slug off guard a bit and it nearly toppled over. Teddy feigned another move and the klutz did fall over this time. Moving past the wriggling form, he snatched up his father’s rifle and then darted around the other dead figures pouring from the house as he ran to the truck.
The keys weren’t in the ignition.
Teddy slammed his fist against the window and was tempted to shoot the damn thing out of frustration. Then he saw the keys. They were on the floorboard beside a discarded fast food bag. Yelping with glee, Teddy tugged on the door handle and got into the truck. He crammed the key in the ignition and tried to start it. The engine wouldn’t turn over.
The wretched thing was fifteen years old and holding on for dear life. It had some hard miles on it and had been a good truck for many years, but it was well past its expiration date. Teddy, who had never driven before, was winging it. Thankfully it was not a standard transmission or he would have been forced to run instead. He was reasonably sure he could handle an automatic.
When the first fist slammed against the glass, Teddy nearly wet himself. He stomped on the gas pedal and twisted the key again. Nothing. He remembered his father cursing the old beast a time or two and bitching about having flooded it, about how temperamental she was, almost as bad as his mother. Teddy cursed himself and brought the rifle up. There were more monsters coming.
He saw the first one moving its fist down toward the door handle and he locked it, wondering in amazement why he hadn’t done that in the first place. After another few moments of staring at the man close up, he blinked and leaned over to click the passenger side lock down as well.
For the next few minutes, Teddy Schmidts felt like he had been condemned to hell as punishment for not playing football as his father wished. Joe Schmidts had become a drunken loser because his son was a great disappointment, but that wasn’t punishment enough for Teddy. No, he was going to be surrounded by his father’s disgusting neighbors so they could drag him down to the fiery pits, kicking and screaming.
The Dark Trilogy 02 - Into the Dark Page 23
