Odium II: The Dead Saga

by Claire C. Riley

  I take my stance like Mikey has been teaching me, take a breath, and swing. Her head comes clean off, making her body drop to the ground instantly. Her mouth continues to snap away and I head over—snigger—and stab the samurai through her brain, putting an end to her torment.

  I look up in time to see another deader shambling my way—a male, for all intents and purposes. Maybe he’s not chasing me, but chasing blondie? I jog around it until it’s at a comfortable distance and then I do the same maneuver I just did on Miss Perfect Tits and slice his head straight off. His head rolls away much the way Perfect Tits’ did, but his snapping head lands in a dirty puddle, and every time he opens his jaw, water flushes into it. It’s like he’s drowning, but not. I shake my head in disgust and stab through his brain, giving it a little twist as I do.

  Nova woops like only she can and I look up at her with a smile. Michael’s still scowling like a jackass, but I can see the hint of approval in his eyes. I didn’t give a shit about his approval, but I like the fact that he and the others will know I can take care of myself.

  We regroup with Rachel now that the area is secure, and head to the main doors. We’re all pretty tired now, and really need to crash for the night, but we still have this place to clear before we get any respite. Life only ever hands me damn lemons.

  Michael turns to look at us as a crack of lightning flashes through the sky. “Everyone ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” I say.

  “If you’re not up to this…” he starts.

  “Shut the fuck up and open the damn door,” I bite out.

  He huffs and turns away, and I swear I hear him mutter ‘women’ under his breath.

  Chapter 31

  The warehouse is made up of huge sheets of corrugated metal that form a rectangular shape, with two small windows by the main double door entryway; both have long been boarded over. I’m guessing this wasn’t made to be pretty.

  Inside it’s dark, and creepy as hell if I’m being honest. The sound of water dripping is coming from somewhere deep within the building, but it’s too dark to see anything properly. Nova pulls out a flashlight and shines it ahead of us, illuminating the path for us.

  It doesn’t matter how many times you see an abandoned building—chairs toppled over, blood smeared along the walls, and decomposing corpses by your feet—it’s still depressing. It’s not the sort of thing you get used to in any way. You don’t suddenly wake up and decide it doesn’t bother you anymore. The death, the destruction—it’s still a bitter pill to swallow, no matter how long goes by.

  A bang of something falling over makes us all jump. That’s another thing that you don’t get used to: shit making you jump. It’s not like in the movies where you suddenly turn into this bad-ass woman warrior who has no fear of the boogeyman anymore. You still get scared and you still get worried, but you learn to get on with it and live with it.

  A moan comes from the left and Nova quickly shines her flashlight toward the noise. It takes a second before we see it: a lone deader glares at us—yeah, it fucking glares, don’t judge me—and heads in our direction. It bumps into tables and chairs in its eagerness to get to us. I guess starving for a couple of years will do that to you.

  “I got it,” Rachel says and limps towards it. She grabs the military knife from her belt, and after a small tussle with the deader over the top of a table she slams its head down on the tabletop and pushes her blade through its skull, effectively pinning it in place until she removes her knife.

  The room falls silent again, barring the dripping of water and the sound of cracking thunder coming from outside.

  “It’s going to be a long night,” Rachel says and limps back over. “I didn’t realize that it would be so dark inside. I need to get my flashlight too.”

  Michael huffs and I can almost hear him roll his eyes. I roll mine right back at him. Not that he can see me do that, but you know, a woman likes to get the last word in and I feel like I won that battle, so fuck you Michael.

  “Fine, let’s go back and get some shit together before we go any further.” He turns and heads back to the door. “A little light, please,” he says and snaps his fingers like he’s Michael fucking Soprano.

  Nova giggles. “Let’s go get some shit. Whose shit exactly?” she chuckles again. “I don’t need a shit right now. Rachel? How about you?”

  “That’s disgusting,” Rachel laughs back.

  “Knock it off, Nova. I need you to have your game face on right now. Anything could be in here, and anything could happen. And I’m still waiting for the fucking light!” Michael yells as he finally reaches the door.

  He grabs the handle and begins to pull it open, but it suddenly flies back and smacks him in the face. He cries out as blood explodes from his nose and a deader topples in and lands on top of him. It’s completely unfazed by its abrupt entrance and leans straight over to take a chunk out of his shoulder as a souvenir.

  “Michael!” Nova shouts and runs over to him. She jumps up on one of the tables and down the other side for a quick shortcut. Her foot flies into the side of the deader with a bone-crunching crack and it tumbles off him, still snapping angrily.

  Another deader makes its way through the open doorway as Nova rams her knife into the side of the first deader’s head. She yanks it back out, sending a gush of dark brown congealed deader blood spraying around her—mainly over Michael—then turns and rams her knife into the second deader. As it falls to the floor, she kicks it back outside.

  “Disgusting fuckbag, did I invite you in? No, I fucking didn’t.” Its arm is still inside the doorway and she slams it repeatedly against the rotten ligament until it makes a loud cracking sound and the door shuts, too, leaving half the arm inside the warehouse and the rest of the body out.

  Michael is back up on his feet and dusting himself off. I say dusting—he’s covered in deader gore from face to foot. He looks like he just escaped from an old school slasher movie.

  Nova turns back around to him. “Well?” she says with a lift of her eyebrow and a flick of her long red ponytail.

  “Well?” he retorts, pulling out a scrap of material from his pocket and wiping it across his face.

  “Don’t worry about it.” She pushes past him. “I forgot, douchebags never say thank you.” She walks back to where Rachel stands and takes her flashlight from her. “Sisters before misters, right, babes?”

  I laugh at Michael’s pinched expression. I don’t think he means to be such a dick; he’s just a little uptight. Dude really needs to let go a little.

  “Come on, let’s get this over and done with.” I stand beside Michael, my samurai in hand. He looks at me skeptically. “Flashlight,” I state blankly to remind him of what we were doing before he got the shit scared out of him—whether he admits that last part or not is not a mystery to anyone.

  Together we head back outside, with no more surprises, thankfully—just the rain and the flash of lightning in the distance. I’m glad that the worst of the storm has passed over quickly, since we’re basically locking ourselves in a metal box. We retrieve a couple of flashlights from our supply bags in the back of the truck and meet up with Nova and Rachel back inside. They’re sitting on a table smoking again, legs swinging down like twelve-year-old girls without a care in the world. You sure as hell wouldn’t think we just nearly got eaten—again. With the light coming in from the open doorway, we get a full look at the foyer of the warehouse.

  “It looks like a fucking bomb went off in here,” I say, my eyes gazing around us at the destruction.

  Nova shrugs and jumps down from the table, and then lifts Rachel down too. “Same as everywhere else in this world. It’s all either broken, empty, or someone else’s.” She drops her cigarette butt to the floor and stamps it out. “Same old, same old, darlin’, now let’s get moving. I’m feeling hungry.” She pats her stomach, licks her lips, and gives a rotting limb by the table leg a hard kick. “Shame we can’t roast these things. I used to grill a mean stea
k.”

  She pulls out her sword with one hand, holds her flashlight in the other, and leads the way, further into the building. I grimace at the thought of barbequed deader. The smell of rancid flesh burning is one I’ve experienced, and it was not a good smell by any standard.

  Michael shuts the door behind him, and it takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. Even with three groups of fake daylight streaming, this place still seems to suck the very life out of everything. I give myself a mental kick for my shitty choice of thoughts. I do not want the life sucked, chewed, or in any other way taken out of me.

  Double doors with a broom handle threaded through them seal off the rest of the building. Nova stands on one side of the door and nods as she readies herself to withdraw the makeshift lock. She pulls it free and we all wait with bated breath for the sudden surge of dead to shamble out, ravenous with hunger; but instead there’s nothing—no sounds, no stumbling footsteps.

  Nova shrugs and grips the handle of the door, and still keeping to one side, she swings it wide open. Michael flashes his light inside and then gestures for us to follow him. We do and Nova wedges something under the door to keep it open. Michael has taken lead with me second, Rachel behind, and Nova last. I’ve somehow managed to grab myself the lucky spot right in the middle, and while I wouldn’t admit it to anyone else, there’s no place I’d rather be in this kind of situation than being the baloney-and-cheese filling to the Nova and Michael sandwich I’ve found myself in. Seems like the safest damn place to be, for sure.

  We look around, shining lights into all areas, but everything seems relatively quiet on the whole deader-in-the-dark front. Unfortunately, the finding food, drink, and equipment situation seems less lucky. This place was offices, by the looks of it. Who the hell would want to work in this type of office, I don’t know, and what the hell they could have been typing up is anyone’s guess. There’s row after row of small desks, each one with its own laptop on it. Well, I’m guessing the general gist of it, anyway, since a lot of the desks are toppled over, laptops smashed, power cords dangling. But the real kicker is the dried blood that’s everywhere. Even in the dim lighting, it’s evident that it was a massacre in here at one point. The floor looks like it was literally swimming in blood. My heart plummets to the floor as my eyes fall on bones—lots and lots of bones.

  “Hey, did anyone ever read those Funny Bones books when you were a kid?” Nova whispers.

  “What?” I ask automatically, my eyes still taking in the death around us.

  “You know, ‘in a dark dark town, on a dark dark street,’ blah blah.”

  I turn to stare at her after dragging my eyes away from the carnage. “Are you cracking a joke?” I ask, though I’m ninety-nine percent sure she is. “Because that’s not funny.”

  “If we can’t laugh about it, we’re already dead,” she says flatly.

  Michael steps next to me. “This is the sort of shit I have to put up with on a daily basis,” he says confidentially to me.

  “Oh shut up, you’re just a grumpy asshole. But seriously, Nova, that’s not funny, that’s cruel. These people died. I mean, not just died, but they were fucking devoured, limb from limb. They were doing their job, and,” I gesture around us, “this happened. They never expected to not get to go home ever again, they just came to work.”

  “She doesn’t mean anything by it,” Rachel says from the other side of me.

  “Yeah I do, actually,” Nova bites back out. “After what I’ve seen, nothing can faze me anymore. So if I want to crack a joke about it, I fucking will. You don’t find it funny? That’s too damn bad.”

  “Be bothered!” I yell at her, losing my cool, though I’m not sure I ever actually had any cool to lose. But still, shouting in an enclosed dark area with unknown X amount of deaders close by is seriously very uncool. So if I had any cool to lose—I just fucking lost it.

  Nova laughs. It’s not humorous, it’s not funny; it’s dark and nasty. “No. Looks like you got that covered for both of us, darlin’.”

  I grind my teeth, and yeah, I want to stamp my foot, too, but then I think about what she said, the ‘after what I’ve seen,’ and I think, shit, if it’s that much worse than this, who the hell am I to judge? I turn away from her and decide to keep my trap shut.

  We move as a unit, weaving through the desks. I grit my teeth and try to not think about the piles of bones, the half-eaten limbs, and the occasional headless corpse. It’s not true what the movies say: zombies never seem to give a shit about brains. They will gladly eat any part of you—brains, legs, arms, face. They really don’t care which part of you they get to sink their teeth into. If anything, the brain’s one of the toughest places for them to get to.

  At the other side of the weird office room is another set of doors. These ones are sealed, too, but from the other side, and it takes a lot of noise and a lot of effort for us all to crash through them. We wait again, listening intently into the dark for any sign of movement. And there is some: faintly, in the distance, there’s movement. We take a cursory look at our close vicinity, seeing box after box stacked high on shelving, all labeled with little white cardboard signs.

  The shuffling gets closer, and we all shine our flashlights down the center path between the rows of shelving, and gasp.

  Hundreds of the dead are lurching toward us, cold, dead eyes going wide in excitement at the sight of us—fresh meat. Or maybe not hundreds; that’s just stupid. But there’s certainly enough to make us all take a deep, panicked breath, and in the darkness there seems to be even more.

  Michael, Rachel, and Nova pull out their guns—I guess it seems pointless trying to be cautionary and quiet now that we’ve been spotted by the living-dead army. I grab for the gun at my waist and pull it out, but it’s a pointless task. The deaders are at around ninety yards away, and there’s not a chance in hell I can shoot anything at that range. I make a mental note to brush up on my shooting skills when we get back to base—if we get back to base.

  Michael fires his pistol and I shine my flashlight as best I can to help him aim into the approaching horde. Nova copies my idea and does the same for Rachel. One after another, the dead go down. Some are dead-dead, others are pulled to the ground by their dead companions and continue to slink toward us with the grace of a cat with no legs as their dead friends continue to clamber over their backs to get to us.

  Michael and Rachel are excellent shots; I’d be impressed and applaud if there wasn’t the whole issue of imminent death. Their shots get more accurate the closer the dead get, yet the closer the dead get, the more worried I get. Maybe it’s because I’m going to have to start shooting at some point and I know I’m useless at that, or maybe it’s because the closer the deaders get, the more there appears to be—despite the fact that Rachel and Michael have already taken down so many.

  “Fifty feet, reloading,” Michael yells. He grabs more ammo from his waist and slams it in as quick as he can, and takes back up his position in less than a minute. “Forty-five feet and closing,” he shouts. He doesn’t sound panicked in any way, but incredibly calm, which is unnerving to me.

  The sound of the gunfire echoes loudly around us, reverberating against the steel walls and high ceilings, with a nice backdrop of deader moans just for shits and giggles. It’s at times like these that I wonder why I don’t learn to keep my big fucking mouth shut. I wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for trying to prove a point to Mikey that I’m some bad-ass woman who can take care of herself. Well done, Nina, real fucking splendid job.

  “Forty feet, reloading.” Rachel shouts next to me.

  My heart beats against my breastplate so hard I think that it’s going to explode out of my chest any minute. And really, what’s the fucking point in shooting these things? Shouldn’t we hightail it out of here? After all, it doesn’t seem like this place has food or any other useful supplies. Aren’t we wasting ammo? Or is that the coward in me talking?

  Rachel’s gunfire starts back up again,
and I think my brain is about ready to melt from the noise. Her gun seems louder now than it did before, and I take a quick glance and see that Nova has started to fire into the horde now too. I panic. Shit, should I be shooting now too? I look at the approaching dead, the mob somewhat thinned out by my bad-ass zombie killing team, but there’s still a lot of them and it only takes one to chew your face off and kill you, and I don’t have the skillset to hit them, even from this distance. I’m not stupid—one thing I learned early on in the apocalypse is that you have to know your skillset, and I know mine isn’t with a gun.

  “We need to go!” I shout out, hoping that someone will hear me. I don’t care who, anyone will do.

  None of them listen, though; they all continue to shoot, the bullets popping as they are expelled from their guns, and making a thwacking sound as they hit their targets. Some are headshots, and of course those deaders fall to the ground only to be trampled on by another set of feet. Others are chest shots, which have no effect on them.

  “Thirty feet, re-loading,” Michael shouts, and pulls out more ammo. He slams it in place and takes his position back up before glancing at me. “You can do this. Shoot them, Nina.”

  “Let’s just go!” I retort back, trying not to sound desperate and pathetic.

  “We have to take them down, now shoot.” He aims and fires with total ease. The bullet lands in the forehead of one of the dead, and then he looks at me again. “Now!” he barks, and turns back and continues shooting.

  I grab my gun from my waist again and take aim. I think about things that I had overheard: don’t be tense, loosen your shoulders, don’t grip it too hard, and aim directly above your target. I do all those things and squeeze the trigger, but the bullet goes off somewhere else instead of into the forehead of the deader I was aiming for.