Dead Man's Party

by Nathan Robert Brown

  “Let me out!” Lily yelled and kicked the metal door. She paused just long enough to listen for steps or yelling.

  “Christ! That bitch picked a bad time to wake up,” said a husky voice. Lily listened as the man approached the door, boot heels clicking against hardwood.

  “Bitch, knock it the fuck off!”

  Lily kept kicking on the door, counting on the man to do open the door. The space was too tight to effectively swing the pole, so she kicked as hard as she could at his shin, then his knee, and finally, a solid heel straight to his crotch. Her attacker doubled over with a curse. Lily brought her knee up into his face, breaking his nose with a crunch. His head snapped up and back, arching toward the floor, followed by the rest of his body.

  She tried to run at the second man, who had until then been looking intently out of a boarded up window. Husky voice came around at the last second and snatched her by the ankle, bringing her to the floor with a hard, painful thud.

  “Dan!” Husky voice yelled.

  Lily rolled onto her back and kicked wildly at his hands. Dan thundered toward the struggling pair. She still had the hanger rod in her hand, stretched out above her head. Lily swung the dowel, aiming for the approaching man’s crotch and was surprised when the rod connected with his chin. Dan's jaw snapped shut with a sharp clack, and he spit out shards of his teeth. His eyes rolled back as his body went limp. All Lily saw, however—all she cared about—was Dan landing on his back.

  She looked back at the half conscious man grabbing at her ankles, his stubby, dirty fingers closed around her ankle. Lily kicked as hard as she could. Her heel caught his thumb, and she felt something snap. The broken nosed attacker wailed in pain and let go of her ankle.

  He rolled on the floor, streaming profanity as he cradled his hand against his chest. Lily's back arched as she swung her weapon overhead with both hands and kept swinging even after he stopped moving.

  She staggered, bleary-eyed, to a hallway bathroom, and heaved into the toilet what little remained in her stomach. Her knees shook as she pulled herself to the sink and cupped her shaking hands under a thin stream. She drank. Blood tinged water splashed to the floor as Lily shoved her hands back under the faucet, scrubbing them furiously.

  Bile burned at the back of her mouth and threatened to make her puke again. Lily took a drink of water to rinse her mouth and another to steady herself. She looked at her face in the mirror. The whole side of her head was a series of cuts, lumps and bruises. Her head hurt more for seeing it. Calmer, but still vaguely nauseous, she went back to the bedroom to survey her handiwork. The man closest to the closet was definitely dead. Nobody's head should ever resemble a watermelon knocked off a picnic table. Lily found her lack of guilt for killing him surprising.

  Dan lay flat on his back, clearly unconscious but breathing. She patted him down and found a pistol, a spare magazine, a butterfly knife and a wallet. Lily looked around and found the jar of zip ties. She rolled Dan over and zip-tied his hands behind his back, cinching them down to cutoff the circulation to his hands. Then she strapped his feet to the ends of the blood soaked hanger rod.

  Lily froze when she noticed the moaning outside. From the volume, there weren't too many deads. And since she couldn’t hear pounding against the walls, Lily assumed they hadn't figured out where she was. She had some time to look around and think. Thankfully, neither of her assailants had managed to get a shot off, or who knew how many of the dead would be beating the walls down.

  She calmly picked up the pistol and the knife, then crept through the house, to find something to wear and something for her headache. Lily found her clothes neatly folded next to her backpack on the kitchen table. Her backpack seemed untouched. She set her weapons down just long enough to dress. Time to figure out how bad the situation really was.

  From the poorly boarded living room window, she saw a sleek, blue, late 60’s model Corvette in the driveway, and her old truck next to it. Three or four zombies milled between the front door and the truck. More zombies were guaranteed to be stumbling around the neighborhood. Guns were out of the question as shooting would just sound the dinner bell.

  What I need is a distraction.

  Lily went through the other rooms in order to understand as much about her surroundings as possible. Someone had haphazardly boarded up the windows. Flimsy curtains barely obscured any light pouring through the gaps in the boards. A solid wood door led from the kitchen into the open backyard. Fortunately, it appeared to be clear of zombies for the moment. Open drawers and scattered junk told her Dan and his former partner-in-crime already ransacked the house.

  She went through the dead man's pockets and found her truck keys.

  The man behind her stirred and started protesting a bit too loudly.

  That's not gonna fly.

  “Shut up,” Lily hissed at him, shoving her hand over his mouth and the gun against his forehead, making sure that he could see and feel it. She wanted to be certain that the message processed, even through the concussion she’d given him.

  “You assholes were going to rape me,” She growled. Lily knew this; she just wanted to hear him admit it.

  Dan just looked at her. “About a dozen zombies are right outside, so answer me quietly.” Lily moved her hand away from his face, and dragged the barrel to his temple. He shook his head. Lily pressed harder. “Don’t lie to me, fucker.”

  The man squeaked. “All these deads showed up 'fore we could. Phil was gonna keep ya around for fun. I couldn't tell him no. I... I wanted you too.”

  Lily went cold. “Did you take anything from my truck?”

  “No,” the man squeaked again. “Nothin’ worth takin’ I swear. I fuckin’ swear!”

  Lily stood up and looked out the window once again. A momentary look at her truck was all it took to make the decision, one she’d never in a million years expected she could make. She dragged the trussed up man to the kitchen door. Dan begged. Pleaded. Squealed for mercy. And maybe in another life, Lily would have considered it. But this wasn't vengeance or even justice; it was about reaching her truck, and getting home.

  Right now, getting back home is all that matters.

  “What are you doing? I’m tied up! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”

  Lily didn’t say a word. The more the guy yelled, the better she felt. Lily yanked the kitchen door open and dragged the bawling rapist a few feet from the house. Zombies nearby turned toward the sound of screams. After dropping Dan, she kicked him in the arm and felt the steel toe of her recovered boot bounce off the bone. She also kicked him in the crotch for good measure. He screamed.

  “You wanted to use my body. I’m using yours. Guess what? We’re even.” Lily stalked back into the house. Dan screamed like a frightened toddler. Lily couldn’t have cared less.

  “You bitch! You can’t leave me out here like this.”

  “Yes. Yes, I most certainly can,” she said over her shoulder and shut the kitchen door behind her.

  Lily crept back to the living room and watched the zombies stagger toward the backyard. The cries of the man drew them in with a promise of warm flesh.

  “Don’t leave me out here, please” the rapist continued squealing. “I’m sorry, for what we did. Shit! I said we was sorry! They’re coming! Help me, please! Oh Fuck! Oh God! I’m sorry, lady. Help meeeeeeeeeee!”

  His final plea turned to screams. That was Lily’s signal to make a beeline for the truck. She eased the front door open and peeked outside. The coast was clear, thanks to the human buffet in the backyard. Lily bailed for the truck. She saddled up and prayed. These days she wasn’t all that sure who she should be praying to. If there was a God, she wasn’t too confident about whether he was even listening anymore.

  The truck started without a problem, and the tank was still mostly full.

  Chapter 2

  Waiting Game

  Joseph opened his eyes. He rolled over to look at the red LED clock on the nightstand of the room. 11:00 am. He’d slept for four solid hours a
fter hitting the sack around dawn. Despite being physically and mentally exhausted, four hours was about all he could manage since they’d arrived at New Mexico Military Institute.

  Thick plywood hung securely over the outside of the single three-by-two foot window, just like all the ground floor rooms. A sliver of light from the hallway slid through the gaped door. The cadets adopted a “no closed doors policy” after one flesh eater had forced its way in and munched on a sleeping cadet. They’d gotten to the room in time to secure the window, but not to save their friend.

  Joseph slid his right hand up to the butt of his pistol, which still hung securely under his left arm — a common accessory of his new life. Like Linus with his blanket, Joseph could barely stand being without his pistol. He lay unmoving for a few minutes, listening intently for any telltale signs of trouble before finally sitting up and stretching.

  This morning they were being quieter — only a few dull moans could be heard from within the walls of their sanctuary. Joseph wasn’t sure how to feel about that. It somehow made him uneasy, since the only time he knew the walking dead shut up was when they shoveled human flesh into their rotting faces.

  He and Walter waited four days so far for Mike to recover from the injuries he’d sustained saving a handful of the military cadets from the walking cadavers that had surrounded them. The final tally? A dislocated left shoulder (Joseph had been strangely relieved that Mike had been unconscious when they’d popped it back into place), a concussion, and an ugly patch of road rash for good measure.

  When the doomed jeep catapulted Mike from the hood of the big rig, Joseph had acted without really thinking. In that moment, he hadn’t considered anything besides getting Mike back to the safety — well, relative safety — of the Blazer. He’d made road kill out of two zombies, pulled a moonshiner’s turn so tight he’d impressed himself, side-swiping two more zombies dangerously close to Mike in the process, and stopped the SUV in near perfect position for Walter to cover him with the shotgun as he dragged Mike’s limp and bloody frame into the backseat.

  It had been nothing short of a miracle that they’d made it back to the military school’s compound without losing anyone else. Roswell had been nothing short of bedlam. The cadets lost four during the expedition, and some of them had taken the loss of their friends pretty hard. Most of them were just kids, after all; a fact Joseph constantly had to remind himself about.

  “The Box,” as the cadets referred to their home, wasn’t an impregnable fortress, but it was pretty damn close. By the time Joseph had accepted a room in the Box (a room which, he later learned, had originally belonged to one of the recently fallen), the cadets had already secured all the windows on the ground floor with everything from plywood and two-by-fours to sheet metal. Pairs of heavy, steel doors embedded in the walls of the old fort secured the central courtyard of the complex, which now served as the cadets’ parking lot. Cadet buddy teams manned the doors all times. They cadets stood four hour shifts on the “Duty Desk.” In the last forty-eight hours, the courtyard parking lot also served as Joseph’s working garage.

  All else aside, Joseph and Walter had chosen to stay mainly because neither of them had a clue where to go next. They knew Mike had them headed for Hanse’s place. However, judging by some of what he said about his old Marine buddy, Joseph figured showing up, unannounced and without Mike would be about as smart as taking a walk outside the compound walls with no weapons — The walk would probably be safer.

  Joseph scratched his head and thought about Stacy for the umpteen-millionth time. Her condition remained a total mystery to him. Ryan Sheller, his, now dead again, former fellow intern, had expired and reanimated within eighteen hours of being bitten, according to what Ryan had told him, by some homeless guy in the streets of Dallas. Stacy, however, continued hanging on almost four days after being bitten, and, aside from looking like death warmed over, she was still alive.

  Ryan was older and seriously stressed; maybe his immune system just wasn’t as good.

  Stacy’s body temperature frequently fluctuated, from as high as 107 degrees (since anything over 106 is often fatal, there was some debate on whether or not the thermometer was right when her fever briefly spiked to 107) to as low as 93, but she wasn’t dead yet. And, more importantly, she wasn’t undead yet, either.

  Joseph had never wished Mike was around more than he had when trying to explain to the cadets that they could not shoot her even though she was infected. It was like trying to argue that the earth was flat after all. This had been the tensest moment in the history of Joseph’s young life — something straight out of a John Woo flick, with everyone pointing guns at everyone else. The cadets enforced a strict policy of immediately executing anyone who was bitten or showed signs of infection. For several minutes, Joseph had feared that the boys were going to pull a Lord of the Flies by killing him and doing what they wanted. Joseph, in desperation, pointed out that without his party's help the cadets would have lost another four of their friends and never would have secured the supplies in the big rig sitting in the yard. He suggested Stacy be placed under watch, and he took the first twenty-four hours. They agreed to forego her execution to pay their debt. Baby-faced as they looked, the cadets held a sense of honor that put most kids their age—adults for that matter—to shame.

  A pair of cadets on hall patrol pushed his door open to wake him for his watch. Seeing that he was awake, they walked off without a word. There was nothing for them to say, of course. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before the girl’s body finally gave out. Some of the cadets, Joseph recently learned, had even created a betting pool, each putting down guesses on when she would die or when she would turn. Or both. Joseph, perhaps to give himself some hope, had put down his last twenty bucks to place his own bet, which he wrote on the pool list in very large, very bold, and very capital letters — NEVER. No one joined him in it, but no one had challenged it.

  Joseph dragged himself off the bed, stretched and moved to the chair near the inner wall to pull on his boots. He walked wordlessly to the end of the brightly lit central hall to the isolated rooms where Walter and Stacey slept. The cadet in charge emptied the rooms immediately around the sick girl’s room as a safety precaution. Of course, none of the others wanted to sleep that close to someone who was bitten. Joseph didn’t blame them.

  He knocked on the door and waited a second before entering. The cadet on watch was stretching his arms and legs as Joseph entered.

  “No change,” he grunted as he marched past Joseph and off to find his bed.

  Stacey lay, pale and sweat soaked, under several green wool blankets. She breathed so shallowly it was hardly noticeable. Joseph leaned against the wall across from the bed. The door, two steps to his left, was closed, the only exception to the closed door policy. He rested his right hand on the butt of his gun and left it there.

  After his “Living Dead Girl Watch,” as the cadets started calling it, Joseph planned to spend another couple of hours trying to salvage the battered Blazer. Attempting to repair their crippled vehicle felt a lot like ice-skating uphill. Nothing short of a miracle would make it travel worthy again.

  The Blazer looked almost worse than Stacy. Almost. Dents and scarred paint ran the length of the passenger side where Joseph had sideswiped another truck as they’d blasted their way out of Post, Texas. Fortunately, all the doors still opened, closed and, perhaps most importantly, locked correctly. Running over more than a few zombies on their way through the chaos of Roswell to the Box mangled the front end, to put it lightly. One or more of the impacts had shoved finger-sized bits of metal as well as, much to his astonishment, a human arm bone through the grill and into the radiator. As stab wounds tend to do, the various lodged bits kept the radiator from bleeding out its anti-freeze, right up until they had to be removed.

  A roll of duct tape and creative uses of epoxy and gasket seals later, Joseph had managed to “seal” most of the leaks as well as could be expected. Though he wasn’t going to
bet a penny they’d hold under the pressure and heat of a running engine. Yesterday he'd noticed a steady oil leak when he dared idle the Blazer for a few minutes. Now all his work with the radiator seemed utterly pointless. In a fit of frustration, he’d drawn his pistol and seriously considered shooting the SUV like a lame horse. Joseph couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so angry.

  He hated to admit it, but the truth was that, without an overhaul, the Blazer wasn’t going much farther, let alone all the way to the badlands of Arizona. Joseph felt bad for the SUV; it had served them admirably this far, but he had neither the tools nor the time to piece his vehicular Humpty-Dumpty back together again. And it appeared that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were out to lunch at the moment, or more likely, they were lunch.

  Joseph’s three hours of standing watch over Stacy passed quickly, and utterly without incident. She had barely moved at all.

  At least she’s finally quit making that gross rasping noise every time she breathes.

  Medically speaking, Joseph wasn’t entirely sure if the absence of Stacy’s rasping was a good thing or not. He wasn’t a doctor, though he often wished he were these days. Good or bad, her quiet slumber did make standing watch alone slightly less creepy. Creepy or not, his nerves stayed on edge every second he spent in that room. Her lack of motion convinced him she wasn’t going to die any day but any second.

  Joseph’s shoulder went numb from keeping his right hand on the butt of his pistol, just in case. Totally worth it; the metal in his palm made him feel better. Every now and again it crossed his mind that there was nothing to stop him from drawing his piece, pressing it to her temple, pulling the trigger, and saving everyone a lot of agony. It’s not like anyone would question it if he told them she turned.