The sight answered her every question: this wasn't an accident. For a full minute she stared, until the last of the lab emptied. Only then did she turned on the spot and run up the four floors to her apartment.
"Eve!" she cried, feeling a terror inside her. "We're leaving."
The baby seemed to understand there was something wrong. With great seriousness, she tipped her bottle back and eyed her mommy as she rushed about gathering clothes and what food she could carry in two large backpacks. There would be no boxes for Sarah, and no extra trips. There wouldn't even be a car; they owned a Honda but Neil had siphoned the last of its gas to use on his scavenging trip.
Now, with killer germs in the air, there was only one thing for Sarah to do: run away.
But to where? And what about Neil and Sadie? What if they came back? Sarah paused, thinking about the death-trap they would be coming home to. "But what if they don't come back? What if they were already dead?"
So many questions without answers spun her head. She found she could only focus on one thing: Eve. Protecting her baby came first above all else. Sarah set Eve in her baby-sling that snuggled to her chest, she then set the heavier pack on her back counterbalancing the baby, and finally shouldered the second pack offsetting her balance once again.
It would have to do. She then left, never seeing the little apartment again.
Chapter 16
Neil
New Eden, Georgia
The ditch, their last chance for salvation, was filled with the successive waves of undead. Grey, scabby bodies writhed and scrambled over each other in their mindless desire to get at the pair. Neil choked at the sight.
"Can you stand?" he asked Sadie. It should’ve been a question for himself as well; his lungs were fiery billows, while his leg muscles trembled in exhaustion.
Sadie tried and collapsed, tried again with Neil's help and was able to stand, barely and only as long as he held her upright. Running was out of the question; limping was all she could hope for and they both knew what that would mean. In misery at what was surely to be her fate, she began to shake her head and her mouth came open...Neil didn't want to hear whatever she was going to say.
"No!" he barked, cutting her off before she began. "We're going to make it. Here bend over." Reluctantly, Sadie bent at the waist and he went up under, picking her up fireman style. She was surprisingly light. At first.
Turning from the ditch and the dead. He saw his goal, a single tree casting its shade over a field of turned dirt. It was two-hundred yards away across open land. Were Neil fresh and strong, running unburdened...he would've still lost the race. Maybe he would have made it to the tree just ahead of the zombies, but there was still the trunk to climb and as he was no longer twelve-years old, he wasn’t much of a tree climbing specialist.
But all that was moot; he was not unburdened and he was far from fresh. With the late afternoon sun blazing to his right, looking prettier than it had any right to, Neil took off in weary shamble with the girl across his back. It didn't take long before Sadie went from surprisingly light to monstrously heavy. And the field he ran upon only made things worse. A tractor from the summer before had cut it up in rows three feet apart, preparing it for cultivation that would never happen. The dirt was loose and the humped intervals frequently caught his feet as he stepped over them.
"They're coming," Sadie whispered, her words, flavored with resignation, were flat, emotionless. Neil took a glance back. The first of many zombies had climbed over his brothers and came charging. Neil had a twenty-six foot head start. It could've been a hundred yards and it wouldn't have mattered. "Drop me," she said. "Please, Neil."
"No," he gasped. Step, step, step, big step. Step, step, step, big step. It became a rhythm that he made his body dance to and he vowed he would continue to do it until he was pulled down from behind.
"Please," she begged, her words going up and down as he jostled her. "If you don’t, we’ll both die…and if you die it will be my fault. Don't make me a murderer."
Step, step, step, big step, big breath. "Your life...will be...my fault." Just saying those words slowed him down and he nearly tripped going over the next ten inch tall hump of dirt. He forced himself on as sweat ran like acid into his eyes and his breath burned. It was as though his chest cavity was on fire. And it wasn’t just his chest; everything hurt. Neil went on until he began to think that death would be a relief from the pain.
Soon he began to stagger and each of the humps became momentous hurdles that had to be considered and climbed rather than simply stepped over.
"Neil..." Sadie began again.
He cut her off with a rasped out angry, "No!"
Surprisingly she didn't argue. "Keep going," she urged and now there was, if not excitement in her voice, at least a modicum of hope.
"Huh?" He turned to look back and exhausted as he was, the effort unbalanced him and sent him sprawling. Still the brief glimpse gave him hope and that hope gave him the strength to at least try to stand again. The zombies, with their diminished spatial capacity and poor depth perception were having just as hard a time navigating the tilled field as he was. They didn't trip over every hump, nor even every third hump, but every fourth or so they would stumble and fall in heap of flailing body parts. And when one went down it was certain to trip up those just behind.
It was like watching an army of extremely drunk men and women attempting to march and, from a place of safety, the ludicrous view would've been comical. Still the creatures gained quickly with the pair of humans on the ground, staring.
"Come on, Neil!" Sadie cried. She rolled off of him and then held out her arms. "Just support me. Like a three legged race."
When they were both standing, she slung an arm over his shoulder, while he grabbed her around the waist, taking a firm hold of her jeans and then they started an ungainly hop/walk. At first they barely kept out of reach of the lead zombies, but eventually one went face first into the dirt and the others followed like dominos. This gave the pair breathing room in which to form a cadence that carried them on to the tree where another surprise was waiting for them.
From further away, the tree's trunk, which was shorn of low jutting limbs, looked too wide to shimmy up and Neil had feared that he would have to sacrifice himself to boost Sadie up high enough to make it to safety. Now he saw that not only had someone nailed a ladder of wood planks into the trunk, they had also made a platform of sorts in the branches high up. It was like an unfinished tree-fort. Despite its rough nature it was a thing of beauty to them.
"Go first," Neil ordered in a voice that could not be argued with. He pushed her at the ladder and, disregarding her gender completely, shoved his hand into the crack of her ass and heaved upwards, lifting her in a display of strength that was quite unlike him. With only one leg to assist her, she was a slow climber. Agonizingly slow. Even with his continual help she had barely cleared ten feet before the first of the zombies arrived.
Neil didn't wait to be eaten. He climbed up as high as he could and it was again an awkward thing; she practically sat on top of his head as she adjusted her hands.
"Sorry," she said every time. Save for the kink in his neck he didn't care—he was saving his adopted daughter and for that he would've accepted far more pain.
Finally they made it to the platform and both simply threw themselves on the planks and stared up at the greening spring canopy as they gasped for air.
"I love you," Sadie said after a time. Having been carried half way across, what felt like a battlefield, she had the strength to speak. Neil did not. He could only nod a little. She laughed as she always did when danger had been narrowly averted. "And you love me," she went on. "Like a dad. A real dad…or more than like a real dad. My own dad wouldn't have done that. He left me once before and there wasn't even a zombie army after him as an excuse."
"I'm sure..." Here Neil swallowed what felt like an even mixture of dirt and saliva..."I'm sure he would have stayed."
"No. He was a ba
re minimum kind of guy, when he was around. He only acknowledged my existence on my birthday or Christmas. Or if I did something he didn't approve of. Like this haircut."
Neil smiled. "I don't approve of your haircut. Girls should have long hair." He sobered suddenly as he remembered something else he didn't like. "And your choice of boyfriends..." he left off with a look.
Sadie caught her breath suddenly. "What? Is Mark ok? Did something happen to him?"
"No...at least I don't think so. We saw all the zombies and saw that you were trapped. I yelled something like come on, but I don't think he did. He stayed in the car." Neil could tell this news pained her worse than her ankle. And quickly he added, "Maybe there were too many of them on his side. That was probably what happened. I just had a few so it was no big deal. He's probably trapped right now."
In his mind he could picture Mark cowering under a sheet, safe and sound. Perhaps he was even then nibbling on the cookies they had found at the last place or drinking some of their water. Thinking about the water just then had his ire growing. Neil forced it away.
"I'm sure he's fine," he said. "Probably he's worried sick."
"Or he thinks we're dead," Sadie moaned. "I can't imagine what he's going through."
Again Neil pictured Mark under a sheet, hiding, drinking, and relaxing until the stiffs all wandered back into the corn. "Yeah, the poor guy."
Sadie missed the veiled sarcasm. She rolled to her stomach and inched her way to the edge of the platform and peeked down at the zombies before pulling back. In a whisper she said, "They're all over the place, damn it."
Neil took his own look. A few hundred zombies were in the field, still tripping over the mounded dirt, though now they had begun to wander mindlessly. Another fifty or sixty were beneath the shading tree and would likely stay as long as they kept hearing human voices.
"If we keep quiet they'll leave soon," Neil said, pitching his voice so low he had to practically speak into Sadie's ear.
"Then you'll go rescue Mark?" she asked.
With an effort Neil kept a straight face, and nodded. He would make an attempt to get back to the Range Rover, not for Mark, but because the two of them would likely die if he didn't. They had no food or water, nor any shelter; they didn't even have coats, and the spring nights could still get cold enough to kill.
The pair settled back down on the platform and waited a long, dreary hour until the night was upon them and the zombies moaned their way elsewhere.
Neil turned onto his stomach and stared down, looking for any sign of the monsters. When he was satisfied, he whispered to Sadie, "When you see my head lights, start coming down. Take it slow, but not too slow. I want to be able to pull right up, get you in and then go. You understand?"
“Yeah. Don’t forget these,” she said and then pushed the keys to the Range Rover into his hand. He grinned at them and she did as well, but suddenly she grew serious. “Good luck."
He would need all the good luck he could get. There was no telling what the zombies were doing in the corn. Were they just standing there, waiting patiently for the next human to happen by? Were they wandering through it in their mindless way? Or were they chasing each other thinking that each was a human meal? No matter what, each scenario made it highly unlikely that Neil would be able to get to the Rover unnoticed.
What scared him the most, and there was a whole list of things that scared him, was getting lost in the corn. It could go for miles for all he knew and once he was in it, everything would look the same.
"I'll be back," he said, pocketing the keys. After taking a shaky breath, Neil gave Sadie a toothy, fake smile and then slid over the edge of the platform. Down the ladder he went, gripping the boards with sweaty, desperate hands.
It was a dark night, but in this case it worked to his favor. He was just a shadow moving slowly through other shadows. He was invisible...or so he told himself so that he wouldn’t shake to pieces with his fear.
While in the field he decided to go at a cautious walk, conserving his strength and limiting his chances at turning an ankle. For some reason he kept his hands pulled into his chest as he went. It was as if he was afraid that there were zombies only feet away that would take a nip if he wasn't careful.
This was, of course, absurd while he was in the tilled field. With the bright stars overhead, he could see well enough to know he was alone. In the corn it was another story.
An old corn field, especially one that was improperly set fallow was as dry and dusty as a pharaoh’s tomb, and like one had a long dead smell. This particular field was different in that the dead smell wasn’t old. It was ripe and sickly, like maggot covered road kill on a summer day. He hadn’t noticed the stench on his race through the corn earlier. Now it could not be overlooked.
As bad as the smell was, it wasn’t the worst sensation to grip him. The shadows that slunk up and down every row captured his imagination and filled him with stark terror. In the dark the zombies had become nightmare creatures hunting him—and that wasn’t the worst either.
It was the sound that filled the corn field which had him frozen in place not twenty feet in.
The air was thick with the moans of the dead. It was the haunting melody of ultimate misery. It was the song of a thousand tortured souls in hell. And it came from all around the small man. What little strength he had, left him and he cowered, afraid to move forward and even more afraid to go back. Somehow he was sure that a wild flight across the open field behind him wouldn’t end as well as it had earlier. They would catch him this time. In his mind the zombies had grown into shadow-creatures that were far stronger and faster.
A new sound that was worse than all the moaning grew in the dark night. Angled on his left, something moved closer to him. It crunched the old husks beneath its feet and whispered past the crow-pitted ears. It was large enough to fill the space between the rows and that meant it was far larger than Neil.
Closer…closer.
Neil became very aware of his bladder. He couldn’t remember the last time he had relieved himself, but he knew when the next time was going to be—any second. It was a pain in his gut that expanded with each of the slow steps that approached. If he knew where he could run that would be safe, he would have booked it right then, only nowhere was safe. Now, more steps approached, crackling the ground on his right. Behind him the corn parted with the snapping of the short-armed stalks.
And the moaning was louder, excited, and the smell became suffocating.
Panic had a good hold of him, torqueing his mind and his senses so that when the first of the zombies wandered up to him, he didn’t see that it was missing an arm and was as thin as the corn stalks it was having trouble pushing through. To Neil it was nothing less than a demon.
He fled mindlessly. Direction and intent went out the window, only speed mattered. His feet took him at right angles to where he really needed to go and so with every passing second he went further from the barn and the Range Rover, and closer to death.
By ill luck he managed to flee from a somewhat harmless zombie into the arms of one that was truly dangerous. Right in Neil’s path it stood. It had been a soldier once and with the helmet on its head, the zombie stood six and half feet tall. Across its back, the tattered remains of a poncho flared in the light wind so that it seemed just as wide.
Too late Neil saw it. They came together in a crash and as the lighter of the two, Neil ping-ponged away.
“Oh, God!” he cried. Turning on a dime he headed straight back the way he came, with the hulking beast charging right down on top of him. It was well fed for its kind and dreadfully fast. What’s more, the earth was parade-ground flat between the rows of corn, which meant the beast would not slow and would not fall.
Neil ended up doing both.
After the day he’d had, his stamina began to fail him quickly. His legs tired and within thirty seconds the zombie’s long arms were within inches of him. A scream built within Neil’s lungs and only needed a catalyst to release
it. In midstride the man turned to see the zombie grinning in anticipation of its coming meal. That was enough.
The scream had the all the manliness and machismo of a six-year-old girls’ scream. It ripped the night air and would have gone on and on until the zombie tore out his throat had not Neil tripped over his own feet. With hands extended he went down in a rolling heap.
Now, the zombie, regardless of its size and speed was still mindless. Its reaction time was measured in seconds rather than fractions of a second and thus it tripped square over Neil, going face first into the dirt. This gave Neil just enough time to hop up and stumble into the corn where he was swallowed up by the night and the forest of stalks. There he wandered panting like a dog, not realizing he was close to his destination until he stumbled out into the barren dirt yard that surrounded the barn.
Where once the corn held every fear he could imagine, now the open air was worse. It seemed like a hundred eyes were full on him; in a flash he ducked back into the screen of corn and crouched, listening. Below the endless wailing of the dead he heard movement, but the sounds seemed to be going away from him.
“Thank God,” he whispered. Trying for stealth, he circled around to the Range Rover and once there, felt his relief turn to anger. It was just as he pictured it: Mark was just a dim lump beneath one of their sheets. He was even snoring!
Despite the rage that began to boil his insides, Neil slipped into the car quietly, and with a yank, ripped the sheet from Mark’s face.
It was somewhat comical to watch the big man come awake spluttering in incoherent fear. Neil wasn’t in the mood for comedy however. He yanked the Taurus Raging Bull from Mark’s hand before the man was fully alert and pointed it square into his face.
“What the hell happened to you?” Neil demanded. “You left us out there to die!”
The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors Page 14
