Dead Man's Party

by Nathan Robert Brown

  He silently chided himself.

  How big of a douche bag would that make me, huh? Putting a bullet in the brainpan of a girl I almost got shot trying to save? Put that shit away, Joe. Who died and made you the Angel of Death?

  Joseph wouldn’t kill another person; a zombie, sure, but not another living human being. Too few of those these days. He planned to give Walter every second he could with his little girl. Joseph would put his life on the line again, if he had to, in order to ensure that they had it.

  One of the cadets knocked softly on the door and stepped into the room. Joseph whipped his gun out of its holster and leveled it at opening the door, a new instinct he wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable with. Almost before the cadet realized it was aimed at his head, Joseph put the weapon away.

  “Sorry, kid. Wasn’t expecting you,” Joseph said groggily, sliding past the young man.

  “I suppose we’re all jumpy,” he said with a thick northern accent. “Don’t know I woulda minded all that much if ya’d shot me, ta be honest witcha.”

  “She hasn’t moved, but she’s still hanging in there,” Joseph told him, ignoring the teenager’s boohoo attitude as he left the room.

  Things are tough all over, kid. Life sucks. Get a helmet.

  It took about a minute for Joseph to walk from Stacy’s room to the courtyard where the Blazer sat on jacks. Joseph plopped down cross-legged on the ground and stared at the crippled SUV. With a proper lift, just a few working replacement parts, and two days — with that he could have the thing running like new. However he had to make do with floor jacks and no replacement parts, unless he wanted to attempt a time-trial removal from one of the wrecks on the road. Without the Blazer, he, Mike, Walter and Stacey were stuck. Joseph buried his face in his hands and groaned loudly.

  “What the HELL?” He growled to no one in particular. “I’m as good at jury-rigging stuff as the next grease monkey. But I can’t bet our lives on my gum-and-wire-rigging.”

  Joseph shoved his right thumb against the bridge of his nose and tried to think of a way through the problem. The thumb didn’t help. He stood up and slammed his fist on the hood with a loud grunt of frustration.

  A shadow passed over the hood. He looked up and saw a cadet patrolling on the roof.

  ***

  Not like this! Get off me! Not like this!!!

  Mike shot awake in his bed, arms flailing to fight off grabbing hands. The small, white-walled room smelled and looked like a military barracks. Mike worried the last few days had been nothing more than a dream and he was he still in the Marines?

  Oh, hell no. Whose ass should I be kickin’ for this dream? I thought I was out of the Corps. I thought I was HOME.

  Mike heard a hand at the door, and memories of two days fighting and fleeing the undead flooded back to him, shoving a swell of sorrow into his throat. He shook it off.

  ***

  Chris Taylor stepped away from his floor-to-ceiling office window on the forty-seventh floor of the Bank of America Tower. He stared absently at the New York City street below for the last twenty minutes. Even leaning against the window, he couldn’t see much detail, but he could see enough to know things certainly weren’t getting any better. Ant-sized people swarmed around and scrambled over an obstacle course of abandoned Matchbox cars, box-trucks, and buses. The red blotches dotting the black pavement between vehicles and the flat gray sidewalks had grown since yesterday. Chris wondered if one day soon he would look outside and see nothing but blood.

  The police, the National Guard and even the Marines had deployed all over the city some two or three days earlier in a combined attempt to nip the riots in the bud. It wasn’t long before their job changed into a full-scale evacuation of the uninfected. Bravado filled cameramen from every news outlet trooped along behind the soldiers, endangering their lives in order to provide live coverage to the masses. Chris was one of a relative handful of New Yorkers who’d been watching when one of the live feeds showed the impossible: U.S. soldiers firing on unarmed civilians outside one of the Evac Stations. Panic ensued when the bullet riddled people kept coming and started eating everyone.

  Chris turned and looked at Gary's body face up on the floor behind him. Gary’s suit jacket lay draped over his head and shoulders. The day before yesterday, he'd attacked three people and managed to bite chunks out of two of them. Chris, the third person Gary attacked, had killed the deranged man by beating his head in with a light-duty, metal, three-hole punch he’d managed to snatch from a nearby cubical in a moment of panic and instinct.

  Once Gary quit moving, Chris had tried to tend to the two who’d been bitten, Linda and George, who he almost considered friends, but they shoved him away. Shortly after the attack, they threw themselves from a broken window up on fifty.

  Seeing the bloodied body hanging half on a toppled chair had bothered Cathy. She worked (and now slept) in the cubical across from where Gary's body had originally fallen. Chris had dragged the corpse into the corner office and closed the door only to get Cathy to shut up (she would burst into tears every time she saw the body, which seemed to happen every few minutes). Someone else had covered Gary’s head later.

  The ten survivors on floor forty-seven looked at Chris differently since yesterday, when he’d shoved two desperate and seemingly uninfected people back into the stairwell as they tried to get in, forcing them back into the handful of zombies chasing them. He’d let go of the door as soon as he heard their screams, knowing that he had a moment while the zombies ate. In that moment, he jerked a piece of fire sprinkler piping from its moorings and shoved it through the push lever, allowing the door frame to create enough tension to lock the pipe and lever into place.

  Jim Elliot had tried to stop Chris from blocking the stairwell and sealing the fate of the two unfortunate business people on the other side. Chris had beaten the fellow, rather savagely, with a second length of pipe.

  “Who are you to decide my fate?” Chris had asked as he kicked the downed man in the ribs.

  “Who are you,” Jim replied, coughing blood, “to decide theirs?”

  “I’m already safe,” Chris had said, kicking him in the gut. “Try to endanger my safety, and you won’t be.” Chris had stepped on Jim’s back to emphasize his point before he walked off and left the others to tend the wounds he’d inflicted.

  Chris walked around the desk and back out to the cubical maze. The work spaces became living spaces when it was obvious that it wasn’t safe to leave. Chris had taken it upon himself to take up residence in his former supervisor’s windowless office. He figured that it would have been his one day, anyway. Later he’d moved across the hall to the big boss’s office, where he spent hours each day staring at Gary’s body or at the street below. This office would have been his too eventually, so he thought.

  The other survivors of floor forty-seven sat clustered around the forty-inch flat panel TV hanging at the front of cubical row. Until the nightmare had begun, the TV stayed on CNBC for news and stock updates or the weather channel. Now no matter what channel you watched, it showed coverage of the end of the world. That’s not entirely accurate; a couple of the major news agencies fell dark for all intents and purposes. One of them broadcast a view of a mostly empty and blood soaked newsroom; another showed a small stretch of sidewalk and a car tire from a camera dropped on its side.

  Chris looked at the group and scoffed. He’d quit watching the news. Hearing the news casters talk gave him a throbbing headache. Yesterday he’d tried to play nice and watch TV not long after the stairwell incident. He vaguely remembered yelling at an intern, whose name he’d never bothered to learn, who put his hand on his shoulder.

  Chris watched them from the side so he couldn’t see the TV. There were ten of them—six men: Johnny Lawson, Casey Lauder, Jim Elliott, the intern, Lou Alexander, and Anthony Ruby; and four women: Nicole Hansen, Cathy Fowler, Kate Gemsmith, and Melissa McAlpine. The other twenty or so who worked on forty-seven either left early on or never made it to w
ork the day the world began to die. Everyone still wore the same suits they’d worn to work when it started. Five days of wear more than rumpled, creased, and wrinkled the expensive business wear. They all stank; though for the most part, no one really noticed or cared.

  Have we really been here so long? Is that really all the time that’s passed?

  They were fortunate that the power was still on and the bathrooms still worked. Food was a problem. The few snacks people had brought with them didn’t stretch very far. Unfortunately it just wasn’t safe to leave their floor to raid snack machines. Zombies owned the north stairwell for sure, and the two people he’d locked out had been running up, so zombies were on at least a few of the lower floors. Not to mention swarming in the streets. In his time staring out the window, Chris saw more than a couple bodies plummeting toward the street, which he took to mean there were zombies above as well. The fire department locked the elevators when they ordered everyone to stay in the building.

  Chris uncrossed his arms, which he didn’t remember crossing in the first place. Already the TV started giving him a headache. With a derisive snort he walked back to the corner office, where he could enjoy the end of the world in silence.

  He jerked the jacket off Gary's body and stared at the collapsed skull, the dull, vacant eyes and the bloodless skin.

  “You’re stronger than they are,” the voice came from everywhere and no where. Chris stiffened and looked around the room. He was alone, but he couldn’t be because the voice he heard wasn’t the voice in his head. The voice he heard was low, flat, and cold.

  “You have the will to survive. You’re strong enough to impose your will.”

  “Where are you?” Chris asked.

  “Keep your voice down.”

  Chris considered the body for a moment, still holding the jacket limply by his right side. Drying gore coated Gary's teeth, lips and shirt front. The side of his head was a nasty mess of coagulated blood, floating bone fragments and protruding gray matter.

  “No one else had the strength to kill Gary. They would have let the people in the stairwell lead the zombies here.

  “You are your own survival. You’re their survival. They’re yours. All of them.”

  “No. There are laws. They’re people to,” Chris protested in a hushed voice.

  “Laws? Look around you. Chaos is the law now. Survival and might are the laws now.”

  “Shut the fuck up. Fuck you,” Chris said, kicking Gary’s corpse in the ribs.

  “That’s the attitude.”

  Chris sat on the balls of his feet and considered the corpse, oblivious to all else, for a long time.

  ***

  Joseph decided to stop beating his dead horse and went back to his room to get Mike’s Winchester. Originally, he to return and shoot the crippled Blazer. But by the time he got to his room, he’d cooled off and decided that wasting ammo to vent some frustration was ridiculous. With the rifle slung over his shoulder, he went to check on his injured friend. He barely pushed the door open when Mike growled at him like he had a massive hangover.

  “Joe? Man, where the hell are we?”

  “Hey welcome back to the land of the living. We’re safe for the moment,” Joseph said, stepping into the room. “How do you feel?”

  “Like I was hit a truck.”

  “Not too far from the truth,” Joseph hesitated a split second. “You were thrown from one.”

  “Great. Where’s my stuff?”

  “It’s all here.” Joseph kicked Mike’s bags with his left foot and left the room. “Let me know when you’re done changing.”

  A couple minutes later Mike stepped into the hall wearing clean BDU pants and a clean black T-shirt, the roughly rigged holster strapped to his right thigh. He looked Joseph in the eye and held out his hand.

  “Thanks for gettin’ me outta that shit, Joe.”

  Joseph took Mike’s hand. The former Marine pulled Joe into a one-armed hug and gave him two solid pats on the shoulder.

  “No shittin’. I mean it. Thank you.”

  “I know you do, Mike. Let’s get you something to eat.”

  “I’m alive and there’s food? Now, that’s some good news,” Mike said, giving Joseph a slap on the shoulder. “Seriously, though … where the hell are we?”

  ***

  Joseph and Mike dragged a pair of bagged lawn chairs to the southeast corner of the roof. They set up their chairs with the backs to the courtyard. It was too hard to have a private conversation, even in one of the dorm rooms, with the constant patrols and wandering cadets, but they only patrolled the roof when one of their own was beyond the safety of the walls.

  The two of them sat quietly enjoying the breeze and ignoring the constant moans of the undead. If they listened closely, they could hear the distant crackle of houses and cars burning. Mike ate his second peanut butter and jelly sandwich, savoring each bite. Joseph tried to enjoy the feeling of the sun on his skin.

  “Alright, what’s on your mind, Grasshoppa?” Mike asked as he finished the last bite of his sandwich.

  “I’m trying to get away from a problem so maybe inspiration will hit me.”

  “You can’t help Stacy,” Mike said. “If she goes, she goes. Ain’t nothin’ you can do about that.”

  “No, actually that’s not the problem I’m talking about. The problem is the Blazer,” Joseph said. “It’s crippled. I could fix it if I had the parts. But I don’t, so I can’t.”

  Mike nodded. “How bad is it?”

  “I wouldn’t bet a dollar on it getting to Arizona,” Joseph said.

  Mike let his head fall back and sighed loudly, the way he did when he was given bad news.

  They sat there for a few minutes: Mike with his head back, swearing, and Joseph looking at the mess of vehicles wrecked and abandoned on the road below. Most of the cars and trucks on the road were destroyed, either laying on their sides or smashed beyond recognition. A few looked operable, provided they could get to them.

  Joseph scanned the potentially functional cars. Most of them were too small or horribly under powered for what the duo needed. The SUV’s and trucks seemed to favor laying on their sides because Joseph couldn’t find a single one still sitting on all four wheels. A single handicapped school bus sat a little further out and mostly on its own. Joseph scanned right past it and on to a tractor-trailer that plowed into the side of a small house. He sat forward in his chair and considered the school bus again.

  “Chill out, Mike. I think I’ve got an idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That bus right there,” Joseph said, pointing.

  “What bus?”

  “Sitting in the middle of the road just before the big-rig buried in the house. About a two hundred-fifty yards out. Or two-and-a-half klicks, as you jarheads would say.”

  “Two and a half clicks would be twenty-five hundred meters, smart guy.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dammit.”

  Mike sat back in his chair and considered the bus for a moment. “And I suppose you think I have a license to drive one of those things? I think we've established that I have issues with big vehicles.”

  “I don’t have a license, either. But I can drive that bus, no problem. It’s got more metal, so it’ll take more abuse before it dies. And we can reinforce the weak points. Besides that, it’s got more room. So it’ll carry more gear, more ammo, and more supplies. We could probably even set up a triage unit in that thing, or at least a bed for Stacy to be comfortable in. She’s having a hard enough time as things are.”

  “Dude, that bus? It’s out there,” Mike said looking dead into Joe’s. He didn’t want to admit it, but Joseph’s argument was a good one, and it would save time. “You know? With the zombies?”

  “Well, that’s the catch now. Isn’t it?” Joseph said. “Which is why I’m hoping you can come up with a way to get me, um, out there so I can, uh, bring it back here.”

  Joseph stayed quiet and
let Mike think. He was asking something difficult at best. Going out there to get the bus wasn’t going to be a walk in the park even assuming everything went perfectly.

  “It’s the only way—“ Joseph began, but was immediately shushed by Mike.

  “I’m not arguing that, Joe. Your point is sound,” Mike said, his tone noticeable softer than before. “But gimme a break, man. I only found out where we were a few minutes ago.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Joseph replied, mimicking Mike’s quieted volume, though he wasn’t sure why.

  “We are visitors here, man. These are a bunch of kids! You hear me? Kids!”

  “Again, I'm missing your point.”

  “Who’s the oldest cadet here?”

  “A kid named McCoy. A cadet sergeant, I think. He’s seventeen.”

  “Seventeen,” Mike said with a sigh. “And let me guess, he’s in charge, is he?”

  “Yeah. Seems like it.”

  “And what does that tell you?”

  “Damn it, Mike,” Joseph growled. “Would you stop asking me freakin’ questions like you’re that old guy in Kung Fu and just tell me something, already?”

  “If this is a military academy,” Mike continued. “Then there should be college cadets, right? Guys who are commissioning for officer ranks? And the boys back at the surplus store already told us that the Guard came and took those boys outta here. Which means that no one is coming for these kids. The fact that we haven’t seen any instructors and the oldest kid is in charge tells me that they are waiting for someone else, a grown up, to tell them what to do. Long story short? They are looking for someone to come and rescue them, and that’s sure as hell not us.”

  “Well, as it happens I don’t think McCoy has a mind to wait here for rescue,” Joseph said. Mike stared at him as if he’d just said the sky was green.

  “I’m listening.”

  Joseph told Mike about the daily raids into the surrounding neighborhoods. At least once and sometimes two or three times a day small groups of armed cadets would leave and returned with a few cases of food and water. Mike thought about all of this for a moment.