A Little More Dead (7 page)

Chapter
Twelve

Paul stood look out while Dan did his
business on the other side of the car. This was literally no time to
get caught
with your pants down. They were so out in the
open, however, that Paul probably didn’t need to be out here freezing his ass
off but after the gas station, better safe than sorry. Occasionally, Sophia
checked on them from the backseat and it was good to see her look up.

“This really sucks,” Dan said, squatting
in the snow like a yellow lab.

“I bet.”

Dan peeked over the trunk. “Where’d you
go?”

“What do you mean?”

“This morning,
back at the house.”

Paul snorted, inspecting the short
barrel shotgun he’d taken from the dash. According to the etching in the side,
it was a
Benelli
tactical shotgun, flat black with a
collapsible
buttstock
– five in the tube, one in the
chamber. “The bathtub in the master bedroom,” he replied, bringing the gun into
his shoulder and staring down the barrel, surveying the white fields stretching
into the distance around them.

“You’re so lucky. I couldn’t go.”

“You should’ve eaten breakfast, works
every time.”

“Wasn’t hungry.”

Paul lowered the weapon. “Remember when
you got stuck with a bad stomach ache out on the boat one time?”

Dan grunted. “Don’t remind me.”

“And you ended up having to go in the
water.”

“At least the water was warm. My balls
are tea-bagging the snow right now.”

Paul laughed and it felt wrong after
what just happened.

With the aid of some Burger King napkins
found in the glove box, Dan was back in a flash. They took the much needed
flashlights, ammunition and water from the trunk – another break – and climbed
back into the warm cop car while Paul made a mental note to grab some hand
sanitizer somewhere along the line.

“Here, found these in the console.” Dan
slipped a Mounds Bar and a Milky Way through the metal cage.

Paul offered Sophia the Mounds Bar and
she shook her head. He handed her the Milky Way and she shook her head again.

“You have to eat something.”

She hit him with a cold glare that made
him look away.

Unwrapping
the Mounds Bar,
he watched Dan toss M&Ms into his mouth, one after the other. The squad car
didn’t handle nearly as well as the Jeep, but it did okay. They took back roads
around Kansas City and its sprawling
burbs
, smoke
billowing in the distance and dusk scratching the sky. Paul looked over to Sophia
who was leaning against her door sound asleep. His stomach turned when he thought
about clearing the next place. They couldn’t even clear a gas station without
losing half their crew. Now down to three, how many would it be tomorrow?
Or the day after that?
Paul checked his guns, Mike’s dead
eyes watching him from the far corner of his mind.

Dan pulled off the interstate and rolled
through some small town that looked just like the one before it. Paul stared out
the side window and yawned. Normally, orange street lights would be flickering
across his face, but in this new world shadows ruled the night. Everything
looked different in the dark, leaving them trapped in two different worlds –
one where they could see and one where they couldn’t, both deadly in their own
right.

“Where are we anyway?”

Dan yawned. “Dwight, Kansas.”

A yellow school bus, flipped on its side
in the ditch, sailed through the squad car’s headlights. Paul could’ve sworn he
saw small heads bobbing around the open emergency door in the back. He shivered
and pumped the shotgun. Maybe the earthquakes were warning signs after all. Maybe
Ebola and ISIS finally met their match. Maybe this modern day horror story was
punishment for having more friends on
Facebook
than
in real life, for texting instead of talking, for shuffling through life with
our heads down like a bunch of zombies while our neighbors quietly pleaded for
help.

Civility was lucky…it died before
any of this hell began.

Dan stopped the cruiser in the middle of
a snow covered road, just on the outskirts of small town USA. Up on the left, a
large two story bar resembled a log cabin more fitting for The Great North
Woods. In large red letters,
The Red Stallion
adorned a tall sign in the moonlit parking lot. Below that, smaller words
reminded everyone that line dancing lessons kicked off Saturday night at seven and
Colt Ford would kill the stage on March ninth. Across the street was a single
story brick building with a sign of its own across the roof reading
Dancers
in big curling letters that, undoubtedly, came to life at night when there’d
been electricity. The dark neon beer signs covering the blacked out windows
made Paul guess they hadn’t been doing line dancing in there.

There were no cars in either parking lot,
which didn’t mean squat. Those things didn’t drive, not yet anyway.

“Let’s just sleep in the car,” Sophia
said, staring out her window. “I’m not getting out.”

Paul traded an uneasy look with Dan in
the mirror and set a tentative hand on her leg. “It’s too dangerous. What if
they saw us and surrounded the car?”

“Then we run them over!”

“It’s not that simple. This is just a
standard cop car and it could stall or get stuck or I don’t know but it’s too
risky.”

“And I really don’t want to wake up to a
hand smashing through the window and grabbing my face,” Dan added, eyes
bouncing between them.

Sophia looked up as if realizing Dan was
still here for the first time in hours. She spoke in a low voice. “I’m not
getting out.”

Paul released a heated breath and jerked
his chin to Dancers because of its blacked out
windows and
more manageable size.
Dan turned off the headlights and cruised around
back, like a real cop on the hunt for an escaped inmate while Sophia pouted. The
police radio cast an eerie glow across Dan’s face, turning his eyes into sunken
sockets and his mouth into a sullen frown. Shutting off the engine, they waited
for their night vision to adjust with the windows up and the doors locked. It
was dead quiet. The kind of
quiet that now followed them everywhere they
went.

Chills ran through Paul as he unbuckled
his seatbelt and turned to his wife. “We can do this without any mistakes this
time.”

Sophia studied the back of the bar like
there was something interesting to see, but Paul knew the green dumpster and
litter stuck in a chain link fence were just distractions to keep from meeting
his eyes. She blamed him for those boys’ deaths and that was okay because so
did he.

He could hear his own heart pounding in
his ears. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I missed that bathroom door and that’s
on me, no one else. Those kids didn’t deserve that and Carla didn’t deserve that
and I fucked up.”

“Oh God, it’s not your fault, Paul!” Dan
interrupted, twisting around in the front seat. “Pull your head out because I’m
going to need you in there. We’re not cops or the National Guard and it’s only
because of you that we’ve made it this far in the first place. We don’t even
have time to bury someone, let alone mourn them. We have to keep moving,
mentally and physically, or we will be next. So don’t start getting sentimental
on me now,
goddammit
!”

Sophia turned away in disgust. “Oh shut
up, Dan!”

He frowned at her. “Why? It’s true,
Sophia. So quit laying a guilt trip on him because we all missed that door, and
now we have to go and do it all over again and I need both of you in the game!”
He turned back around. “Jesus!”

Sophia pulled a zipper on the back of
her glove.
Back and forth.
Back and
forth.
Paul set a hand on his wife’s hand, stopping the zipper. “I know
how messed up this is but if we stick together, we are going to get through it.”

Sophia finally met his gaze, tears
magnifying her eyes as she searched his shadowy face. “I don’t blame you for
what happened this morning. I’m just scared.”

 
He cradled her cheeks in his palms and tipped
his chin down. “It’s okay to be scared. We’re all scared.”

Her eyes softened. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” he said, kissing her
lips and soaking her in like this might be his last chance.

Dan stared out the window, drumming his
fingers against the wheel. “Let’s get this over with,” he muttered. “I need a
drink.”

☠

The metal back door
was
locked
, and a nearby cellar door had a padlocked chain running through
its handles.

“What now?” Dan whispered, swinging his
nervous gaze around like he just heard something.

Paul looked up, a light bulb going off
in his eyes.
“The bolt cutters in the trunk.”

Dan pulled the keys from his jeans.
“I’ll get them.”

Paul covered him while Sophia gazed at
the night sky.

“It’s so dark.”

Paul looked up to the bright stars
above. “It’s crazy how much light pollution a city gives off.” He paused.
“Used to give off.”

“Even the sky has changed.”

“Everything’s changed,” he whispered,
snapping his head around to a sound that came from a small patch of trees
behind them. It sounded like someone, or something, stepped on a stick.

Sophia pressed up against him, her gun
hanging limply in one hand, a dark flashlight in the other. “What happens when
we run out of batteries in a few years?”

He turned to her, his heart warming. Her
confidence that they would still be here in a few years gave him a thin ray of
hope in the moonlit darkness. “Solar power is our future now. We’ll figure it
out.”

“Without Google or Wikipedia we’ll have
to start going to libraries again.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

She shrugged. “I like the smell of old
books,” she replied, exhaling a forlorn breath. “At least we still have the
stars.”

Paul pulled her against him. “At least I
still have you.”

She stood on her tippy-toes and gave him
a warm peck on the lips. “You will always have me.”

“They had this thing strapped in there
so tight,” Dan said, returning with the bolt cutters, “I thought I was going to
need bolt cutters to free the bolt cutters.”

Paul’s eyebrows drew together. “Why are
you yelling?”

Dan frowned. “I’m not.”

“Okay then, let’s do this.”

Paul stuffed one glove in a coat pocket
to free up his trigger finger. The gun felt like it was made of ice and he
could already feel his fingers getting stiff. Dan cut the chain and set the
bolt cutters aside before pulling the cellar doors back with a rusty squeak.
Sophia’s flashlight lit up a wooden staircase leading down into a pool of
darkness, a musty waft of stale air releasing into their faces.

“Oh great, another haunted house,” she
grumbled.

“You mean haunted strip bar.” Dan spread
a toothy grin into his red cheeks and held up a crumpled flyer with a grainy picture
of a tall blond named Busty Dusty. “I hope we didn’t miss her show.”

“Alright, we stay together and we check
every
door this time,” Paul said, tossing an empty beer bottle down the steps.

It shattered at the bottom and they
exchanged anxious glances in the quiet settling around their feet. When no one
came moaning into the light, Paul took the lead and went down first. Sophia and
Dan went next, leaving the doors open in case they needed to make a hasty retreat.
Paul grimaced as each step creaked like an old ship. Shadows jumped in Sophia’s
jerky light and at the bottom of the staircase, they fanned out and followed
her flashlight with their shotguns. The unfinished basement reeked of mothballs
and dirt, the cobweb-draped rafters pressing against them. They scanned the
dusty stacks of chairs and dented kegs, old glassware and a rusty bicycle with
a broken basket leaning in one corner. On the other side of the room, a narrow
stairway led up to another door. They swapped knowing glances and cautiously
crossed the room. Sophia jerked the light to a woman standing next to a poker table
free of dust. Paul aimed for her face and blew out a long breath before
lowering his gun.

“Damn, that’s creepy,” Dan whispered,
lowering his Browning.

Paul stared at the mannequin’s long
black wig and green painted nipples peeking out from a sheer negligee. “We
should haul her outside and use her for target practice before we leave in the
morning.”

“Forget that, I’m hauling her into bed
tonight.”

“You would,” Sophia muttered, moving
again. “And we don’t have enough ammo to waste on target practice.”