by Jones, K. J.
“Shoot,” Syanna screamed.
“Forgive me.” She cringed as she pulled the hard trigger. A bang. The gun bucked in her hands. Blood and gray matter splattered on the window.
Monroe ceased movement. Gravity took his body down. His fingers ripped out a chunk of Syanna’s hair.
He lay on the driveway between the vehicles in filthy pajamas, eyes open, a growing pool of blood under his head.
Phebe stared at him. The awe. The terrifying power. She had taken a life.
“Come on.” Syanna grabbed Phebe’s arm and yanked her. “They’re coming.”
Phebe snapped out of it in time to see another monster sprinting down the street. She turned with Syanna’s pull and saw another coming from the cross street.
The girls ran the walkway. Syanna slammed her shoulder against the metal front door and locked the deadbolt. They panted. Hearts racing. Syanna’s hair stuck up in the section where she had lost a chunk. Normally a sky falling crisis, her hair, but she now didn’t even touch her head.
A person slammed into the door. Fists pounded on its solid structure.
The girls scurried out of the foyer and stood in the living room.
“What about the windows?” Phebe whispered.
They both looked around for what to use. There were no bookshelves down here.
“The couch?” Syanna whispered.
“Do it.”
It took Matt and another guy to bring the couch in. Adrenaline combined with survival instinct gave the girls tremendous strength. They lifted the couch, moved it to the windows and tilted it on its side.
Shadows behind the drawn drapes and blinds.
“Coffee table,” said Phebe.
Soon, they had every piece of furniture in the living room piled against the windows. Candles, glasses and remotes strewn across the carpet.
The window screens tore out. Punches against the double-ply glass.
“That isn’t gonna hold,” Syanna said in a small voice.
“Think. What can we do?”
“The dryer?”
“Kitchen table. C’mon!”
In the kitchen, the analog clock’s ticking couldn’t be heard over all the noise.
Glass shattering sounds from the living room.
The girls shoved the chairs away and grasped the sides of the wooden table.
A shadow crossed the closed blinds of the backdoor window.
“Wait. Shhh.” Phebe gestured her chin to the door behind Syanna.
Footsteps on their little wooden deck. A small whine came from Syanna’s throat. She backed away from the door. The first hit caused the blinds to bang against the window.
“My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, please help,” prayed Syanna. “Forgive us for our sins and for how we have offended Thee. Get us out of this, Jesus!”
Sounds of furniture shifting in the living room. More glass breaking.
“Matty where are you?” Syanna cried. “Oh God. Daddy!”
Multiple hits on the backdoor. The blinds steadily banged. The monsters threw their bodies against it. Dust fell from the door frame above.
Syanna ran to Phebe. She trembled.
More hits. The blinds fell. Ghoulish faces appeared through the window, looking in at them with black insane eyes. The wooden frame at the bolt cracked. The strong lock would hold, but the frame holding it would not.
“Grab the table!” Phebe ordered.
“What?”
“The table. Now. Run with it.”
“Are you crazy?”
The doorframe cracked further. It wouldn’t be long.
“Run into the living room!” Phebe yelled over the clatter.
With no other choice, Syanna ran to the other side of the table, near the breaking door. They lifted it.
They carried the table, tilting it to get it through the archway. Loud sounds of breaking wood. The backdoor busted open with. Syanna looked back and screamed at the top of her lungs. But she kept carrying and hurrying.
Into the living room, furniture tumbled from the pile, crashing onto the carpet. The drapes fell, curtain rod clanging down. A monster wrestled with entanglement in the blinds.
“Up the stairs!” Phebe yelled. “Put it behind us. Block the stairs.”
They rolled it to the foot of the stairs, scurried around it, and rested it at a sixty-degree angle against the staircase newel.
The monsters from the kitchen sped into the living room.
“Run!” Phebe screamed.
The girls’ feet took the steps two-by-two. Hands reached through the stair spindles, trying to grab at their legs.
The furniture heap in front of the battered front windows avalanched. Monsters crawled through, falling over the strewn pile and each other.
The girls reached the landing of the dark upstairs. Heartbeats as fast as rabbits. Sweat pouring down their sides and faces. Their bodies so hot they couldn’t feel the cooling of wet skin in the cold temperate.
At the place where Syanna had fought Monster Rebecca, they stood in indecision on where to go now.
The monsters struggled with the table. One jumped on top and his weight pulled it down, onto the others.
“My room!” yelled Syanna.
Phebe looked one last time and saw monsters slowing as they climbed the stairs. Their coordination off. They had to use all fours to traverse the rises.
Into Syanna’s brown and red bedroom. They moved in unison as they piled furniture against the hollow-wood, locked door. Syanna’s wood furniture was strong. First went the high boy dresser, flushed against the door. They picked up her bed and tilted it against the dresser. Kicking pillows out of their way, they grabbed an upholstered chair and placed it on top of the bedhead.
Direful sounds in the hallway. The monsters were coming.
Phebe pulled from her hoody pocket the gun and radio. Seeing the gun, Syanna hurried to her lock box. Her hands shook as she entered the combo. Box open, she withdrew magazines of extra ammo and shoved them in her pockets.
Phebe called on the radio. “Matt, Peter, anyone, this is Phebe. Our house is under attack. We are trapped in Syanna’s bedroom. They are in the house. Please, help us, anyone! Over.” She stared at the radio for a response.
Syanna held her pink gun readied to fire at the door. She didn’t shake. The gun calmed her.
Footsteps closer. They sounded to be checking every room.
“C’mon, you sonsabitches,” growled Syanna.
Peter’s voice came through the radio, “Matt, this is Sul, are you anywhere near them? Over.”
No response.
“Gleason?” A pause while waiting for Matt to respond. “Do you copy? Over.”
Nothing.
“Shit. Julio, where are you? Over.”
The monsters found the room. They attacked the easily cracking door.
Another male voice responded on the radio, but the girls couldn’t hear it over the noise. It was too late for anyone to help them now. The monsters made their way through the cheap hollow door. Only the furniture held them back.
“The window!” Phebe barked. “I have my car keys.”
“Oh hell.”
While the door fell apart, the girls stripped the bed of its sheets, hearing the monsters just beyond the rocking dresser. They made strange noises, like hiccup-barks. The Gollum-bark. Like the girl from the Commons. And the rabid dogs.
Syanna opened the sashes of the two windows. The cold air rushed in. She punched the screens out. They dropped onto the front lawn. She looked out to see if it was clear below.
Phebe tied the bedsheets into knots. She tied one end around the beam between the two windows.
The dresser teetered. The bed bounced, threatening to go over.
“Go down!” Phebe order.
Syanna stowed her gun and threw her leg over. “Please, Lord Jesus.” The next leg and she slid down the sheets onto the lawn. As she soon as her feet hit ground, she pulled out her gun and covered the scene.
Phebe threw her long leg over the side.
The bed tumbled over.
She moved her butt onto the sill.
The dresser teetered over. Drawers slid open, contents tumbling out. Monsters pressed through the opening behind the dresser, struggling with each other to get through.
She threw her other leg over.
The dresser fell at an angle, braced against the drawers. The monsters shoved in and sped towards her. Their ragged, hot hands reached out for her as she went over, their fingers just missing her hair.
The sheet burned her hands as she slid down. Her feet hit ground and she fell onto her butt.
“Hurry!” Syanna yelled.
Standing up, wincing at new bruises, Phebe dug her keys out of her jeans pocket and threw them to Syanna.
Syanna caught them and ran to the little blue Honda.
Faces peered down at Phebe from the open windows above. She ran after Syanna.
A half-naked sprinter down the street. Syanna turned and fired, nailing him in the abdomen. The general’s daughter was a good shot.
To the driver’s side door, Syanna shoved the key into the lock and turned. All the locks popped up. She whipped open the door, just as Phebe arrived. Syanna crawled over the stick shift console, moving her left leg just as Phebe sat down.
Phebe slammed the door and hit all the locks button. Her hand shook as she tried to get the key into the ignition.
“Hurry!” Syanna yelled.
Engine on.
A monster jumped onto the hood and rammed his forehead against the windshield. Syanna screamed. Phebe pressed down the clutch and her hand rotated into reverse. The gears grinded. “No!” More monsters ran at them. Again, rotated the stick. Grinding. “C’mon. For the love of God. Work!”
6.
Matt Gleason came to. He hung suspended by a lap seatbelt, looking down at the side of the ambulance and the bottom of a patient gurney. Equipment strewn everywhere.
Pressure on his abdomen and hips from the seatbelt hurt. Holding himself upright tired his muscles. His instinct was to unlock the belt to free himself. He’d fall straight down onto the gurney if he unlocked the belt.
Instead, he remained calm. He rotated his neck. A few twinges conveying slight whiplash. He wiggled his fingers and, inside his boots, his toes. Everything seemed to be functioning. His arms and shoulders worked. He held his back against the seat against gravity. His stomach muscles quivered with the exertion.
Assessing the landscape of the situation, he realized to not fall, he’d have to use one arm to hold on to the seat while unlocking the seatbelt.
His hand found a frame bar behind the seat. The other hand reached the seatbelt.
Releasing the seat belt, his hand only held for a second. He fell.
Pain shot up from his knees as they landed on the frame of the gurney. “Shit.” He rolled over, feeling his weight mushing the patient strapped below.
Despite the knee pain, he scurried off the bottom of the gurney and got his boots precariously secured on the floor, which had been the side of the ambulance. Machines lay everywhere. Trying to get to solid footing required nudging them out of the way.
“Sorry, man.” But he heard nothing from the patient in the gurney. No movement.
Investigating his knees, blood stained rips in his pants. Beneath, his knees skinned and bruised, but no serious damage.
He turned his attention to the patient. Squatting, he tried to lift the gurney. Groaning at the strain. He let it drop back down. Between the gurney’s weight, the rather robust adult male patient strapped to it, and the shear length of the gurney in the confined space, there was no leverage. It was too much for one man. Cabinets obstructed flipping the gurney over sideways. The angles were all wrong.
“Rick,” he called towards the front to the man with the ‘70s mustache. “You okay?”
No response.
What had happened came back to him. They would deliver this last patient to the hospital and call it quits, after learning from the HAM radio conversation that the virus was fatal. Rick and he had determined they were way in over their heads with whatever this outbreak virus was, and they needed to look after their own safety. That was when the ambulance was attacked.
Matt had seen nothing from the back. Maybe Rick, up front driving, had panicked. Matt had heard him cursing and yelling. Sounds of glass breaking. He kept yelling to Rick for information on what was happening. Then the ambulance flipped on its side. Machines and medical supplies showered down and bounced against hard surfaces, and his patient in the gurney flipped. That was the last thing Matt remembered.
How long he had been unconscious, he could not ascertain.
“Rick?”
A narrow door separated the back from the front. Matt crawled around the gurney to reach it.
Sounds of movement up front.
“Rick?”
Reaching up to the door handle, he released it, and the door flung down. He climbed up into the sideways opening.
His throat gave an instinctual yelp, and he dropped out of the doorway.
A bloodied person crawled through.
“Shit!”
He seized the door and slammed it up at the person.
The person knocked it away and continued to crawl forward.
Matt scanned the mess surrounding him for anything to use as a weapon. His 9 mm was in his bag, but where the hell was that now. He grabbed a hard case automated external defibrillator and knocked it across the face of the person.
The person’s face only moved with the force. No other effect, despite more blood came out of its frothing mouth. The mouth seemed to grimace at Matt.
He stumbled back in revulsion.
The teeth looked cracked and sharp.
Matt’s thumb accidentally flipped on the AEF. It began to talk, instructing how to use it. The digitized voice broke up as Matt hit the person with it again.
It wasn’t enough. Matt threw the AEF aside.
He spotted a portable oxygen tank. He chucked things out of the way to get to it. The person crawled further through the sideways doorway. Matt lifted the portable oxygen tank and beat it against the person’s head. One hit. Two hits. Three. He kept going until he saw the skull crush. The person finally stopped moving.
“Die, fucker, die!”
“Fully charged,” the AEF’s digital voice said from the floor.
More movement of people in the cab. Matt dropped the tank. He pulled the dead person all the way through and seized the door. He slammed it on another face peering through.
That would not hold them for long if they wanted to get through. He searched the mess for his bag.
Movement under the gurney.
Matt squatted down to peer under it. The man strapped beneath should be in terrible pain.
The patient increased movement. No wails or moans of pain.
Matt searched for his bag, throwing medical supplies out of his way. “Where is it?”
The patient’s movement grew wild.
“Shit. C’mon.”
A choke-bark sound Matt had heard too many times came from beneath the gurney. A Gollum-bark. The heavy gurney began to move upwards with extraordinary strength.
“Oh, no you don’t.” Matt put his boot on it to hold it down. Bucking from beneath. A hand reached out. He spotted his bag near the hand.
With one foot holding down the gurney, he reached and grabbed the charged AEF. Popping it open, he took out the paddles. Removing the sticky backing, he stuck them on the hand and hit the shock button.
“Stand clear,” the automated voice said.
A jolt of electricity went through the patient’s hand.
The hand spazzed.
Screwing up the electrical impulses of the hand gave Matt a moment. But no more.
He struggled to pull the bag out from under the gurney. The hand moved again. Freeing the bag, he quickly unzipped it. The black handgun had nested between the portable HAM radio, a stick of deodorant, and the
smashed plasticware of Matt’s lunch. He grabbed the gun, pulled back the bolt, and fired into the back of gurney where the torso should be.
The body strapped on the other side took bullets. The gurney’s metal frame rattled.
“Die!”
Figuring that was the end of that, he took up the radio.
“Guys, this is Gleason. I’m in some trouble here. Over.”
“At least you’re alive.” Peter. “Don’t worry your mother like that. Over.”
Another voice, “Matt, Julio, what’s your trouble, hombre? Over.”
“I’m in a wrecked ambulance. And I got infected in the ambulance. And infected surrounding the ambulance, from the sounds I’m hearing. Over.”
“What’s your location? Over.” Julio.
Matt gave his last known location. Being in the back, he had no way of seeing where they had crashed.
“I’m not too far off. I’m on my way to you. Stay tight, brother. Reyes, over and out.”
Matt took a breath to calm himself. He assumed Mustache Rick was dead up front. Eventually the infected people would grow interested in the door. The inside of the ambulance was not a secured place to wait for reinforcement.
Sounds from above. Somebody was walking on the topside.
Matt checked his bullets. One magazine in the gun, three bullets spent, and a spare mag in the bag.
The gurney began to move.
“Oh, come on.”
Gollum-bark.
“You cannot still be alive.”
The gurney lifted.
Matt stepped on it.
Gurney-guy freaked out, bucking up and down, trying to free himself.
Matt put his other foot on the back and, with his full weight on the gurney, bounced up and down while bracing his hands on the roof.
“Die already.”
Snap of bones, grunts, farts, squishy sounds, as Matt crushed the man.
“Finally. My God.”
Now, to the sideways back doors. He stepped among the mess to the back.
Julio Reyes had wasted no time getting to him. He drove a rebuilt old Ram Charger, painted black, with a menacing metal bumper on the front. They called it the Black Beast.
Matt could hear the engine of the Beast approaching.
