Alive! Not Dead! (4 page)

She came out of the ladies room, backing up, her hands outstretched toward the restroom door.  Her jeans were wet on the seat.  She saw me coming toward her.  She screamed again.  “Dan
get her!”

An old woman zombie came out the door, its hair ragge
d, its mouth in a drawn sneer. Its back was arched crookedly at the shoulders.  Her arms were covered in sores.  She had no shirt on.  Her breasts were saggy.  The nipples were hard and dark as well as covered in sores.  A large dripping bruise was on her neck.  It ran up behind her ear on the right side of her head.

I had no weapon.  I grabbed Tara by the left hand.  I yanked her to me then moved her around, behind me.

The zombie gargled at both of us.

I looked around for any type of weapon.  There was a fire extinguisher far away on another wall.  The only thing next to us was a magazine stand and an empty mop bucket lying sideways on the floor

I heard Tara flip open her switchblade.  I knew it wasn’t a very good weapon for close zombie combat, but before I could stop her, Tara lashed out at the zombie.  She cut its arm deeply.

T
he zombie didn’t stop coming.  It grabbed Tara by the hair pulling Tara toward her.  Tara screamed again.  Her hair was being ripped out by the root.

Tara’s head was within inches of the zombies discolored teeth.

With my free hand I swung out with my fist.  I hit the zombie hard in the face.  It didn’t stop.

The zombie’s teeth clamped down.  Tara dodged just in the nick of tim
e! The zombie only got a mouthful of hair.

Suddenly, the men’s bathroom door slammed open.  From inside, another zombie shambled out.  This one only had one arm.  He wore a Conoco gas station uniform.  Around his ne
ck bloodied toilet paper hung. In his one hand he held a good size crescent wrench.

“That’s it!”
I shouted.

I let go of Tara for a split second.  This gave me enough time to reach down for the
crescent wrench.  Grabbing it out of the zombie’s loose grip, I swung it up into his head, breaking his chin.  This caused him to stumble backward.  Seeing my chance, I swung out with the crescent wrench toward the female.  It smacked with a clank on the side of her head, shattering her head into two wedges.  One half of her head split on the ground like a dropped watermelon when it hit the floor; the other half lopped to the side as her body went down.

Tara fell to her knees, holding her head where the zombie had just yanked the hair out by the roots.

I completed the job on the attendant, crushing his head with the crescent wrench, too.

“I pissed my pants!
Fucking dead scared the piss right out of me,” she said, a hitch of a laugh in her voice.

“You ok?”

She put her fingers to her scalp.  Some of the hair had ripped out.  It left a little blood there.  “God that fucking hurts,” she winced.

“Let’s take care of that.”

Standing her up, I walked her into the ladies room.  I propped the door open for light.  I turned on the sink.  We were both surprised to see that the water worked.  I helped her wash her scalp and gently cleaned the blood out of her hair with some paper towels.

“Thanks Dan,” she said.

“You’re welcome.  Let’s go get in the van and relax a minute.  When you feel up to it, there’s a whole bunch of jeans and stuff in the other shop.  You can go get a new pair or two if ya want.”

“Ok,” said with a crooked smile, “but I still gotta go pee.”

After our short breather, Tara finally got to pee.  Afterward, we went back into the shop.  Tara took off her shoes, socks and her wet shorts.  She balled the shorts up and threw them into a corner.  “Won’t need those again,” she said as she flicked her underwear over there, too.

She stood there, looking through the clothes, naked from the waist down.  My eyes kept trying to look down at her bare thighs.  She didn’t try to hide behind the rack of clothes at all.

Since she wasn’t going to be wearing underwear, she found a pair jeans one size
bigger than her normal size.  “If I got my regular size, they’d be too tight in the crotch since I like to wear them snug,” she said with a smile as she looped a belt with fake turquoise jewels around her waist.

Then we went through the shop looking for food.  On one shelf we found two loaves of bread.  One package had already been open.  On another shelf there was a partial tube of squeeze che
ese.  Some had been squeezed out on the shelf.  It looked like someone had tried to write something with the cheese, but we couldn’t make it out.  We stood side by side looking at the letters someone had written:

FEE – FEE

We had no idea what it meant.

“What’s a fee-fee?”
Tara asked.

She found a small box of breakfast snack bars, some pop-top cans of fruit, and in one corner of the shop there was a basket of untouched apples.  We each ate one as we looked around.

When we were done looting, I asked Tara if she was tired.  She said yeah.  I told her that I had seen a hotel on the way into town.  I thought we could stay there for the night.

We backtracked to the hotel.  One side of the 3 story building had
pancaked completely to the ground.  The other side seemed fine.  I went into the lobby first, tire iron in one hand, crescent wrench in the other.  The main desk was empty other than a clerk who was dead behind the counter.  We didn’t need to worry about him coming after us, though.  The entire top half of his head was gone.

There was a creaky stairway off the main lobby.  We went up, took the fourth door to the left instead of the first.  Inside, the room was clean.  It had 2 double beds that were made.  I bolted the door behind us.  Tara had brought a plastic sack of goodies up from the van.  We ate some of the breakfast bars and drank bottled water.

After, we both lay down in our own separate beds.

“Where do you think all of the people went?” she asked.

“I don’t know.  Maybe there’s a disaster shelter around here too.”

“Yeah, but
where
? There’s not a lot of places in this part of the state where thousands of people could go.”

I shook my head.  “I don’t know.  Maybe they’re all in their houses. I’m just glad we’re safe.”

“Are you scared?” she asked me.

“I’m more con
fused than anything else.  Why? Are you?”

“I just don’t like thinking that deads could be hiding around the corner.”

“Yeah me either.”

We were quiet.
Deads
she keeps calling them.  Name fits I guess.
 
They’re dead
after all
…

I
was almost asleep
.

I’ll call them that too,
I thought as I drifted off to sleep.

“You got a girlfriend?” she asked waking me up.

“No,” I said quietly.

“You know, I saw you looking at me,” she said.

“I know you know,” I said, smiling, my eyes still closed.

“Can I lay with you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She came over and lay down next to me.  She put her head on my chest.  I put my arm around her.

“My head still hurts,” she said quietly.

“It’ll be better in the morning…oh
wait, shit.  Here.”  I reached into my front right pants pocket.  The aspirin was still there.  “This might help with the pain.”

Her bottle of water was still half-full.  She downed three aspirin.

“Thanks” she said as she laid her head back on my chest.

After that we were very quiet.

Soon enough we were asleep.

Back on the highway the next morning, Tara wanted to drive.  As she drove, I looked over the roadmap that I had picked up at the gas station.  I studied our position:  it was about 196 miles to Spokane.  We still didn’t know exactly why we were heading there other than the army base that we knew about.

The
roads were pretty clear so far that morning.  It seemed to make everything better.

The destruction around us didn’t seem to be as severe.  Things looked more normal the further away we got from Seattle. 
Maybe the destruction only surrounds Seattle
, I thought.

Hours later, as we drove down into the Yakima River valley, we saw that both sides of
the highway had collapsed and were partially underwater.  My idea that the destruction was going away fell apart.  I climbed up on some rocks to get a better vantage point as I looked down the road.  The Yakima River ran right alongside the highway.  As far as I could see, the road was destroyed.  Large rippled cracks split off into several different directions.  Between the bent over forest, the road curved into the distance.  We would need to backtrack.

Back in the van, the roadmap showed that the only way around this would be to take a side highway.  That meant we would have to backtrack all the way to Cle Elum.

“All the way
back
?” Tara asked.

“Yeah.
  We wasted a good half day getting here.  If we walk, there’s no telling what might be down the road.  We might not be able to get through even on foot.”

“I really don’t want to dr
ive all the way back, Dan.”

“Yeah me either…”

I looked at the road map.  I said “Well, it’s about 5 miles to Ellensburg.  Hopefully Ellensburg’s not destroyed, too.  You think we can hike that far?”

“I think we can – if the deads let us.”

“Let’s not worry about them for now,” I said with a chuckle.  “We haven’t seen any for a while…let’s hope it stays that way.  Let’s each carry a small bag.  You carry the food.  I’ll carry the weapons.”

“K.”

We set off from the van.

At first, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.  There weren’t any deads around,
thankfully.

For the first few miles, the hardest part was hopping from highway slab to highway slab and then back onto dirt or mud.  Most of the road was built above water.  Pieces had fallen down or had cracked sideways so that the road angle
d down into the rushing water. As we walked and hopped, the river raged next to us.  The sound was very loud. It covered up our grunts as we jumped across gaps in the cool mountain air.  The scent of fir trees and fresh sap was very strong.

When we were about halfway to Ellensburg, Tara grabbed me by the back of the shirt to get my attention.  I looked.  The valley next to the road had dropped into a dee
p rippled crevasse.  We really couldn’t tell how deep it actually was from our position.

We stood side by side for a minute, looking at the complete destruction.  Trees had fallen into the crevasse like tossed toothpicks.  The whole split stretched as far as the eye could see, but was only maybe half a mile wide.  It was as if the earth had literally split in two.

A little further along, the road damage got worse.  To one side, on the left, the river was running below the road’s cock-eyed surface.  To the right there was a twisted guard rail.  Beyond that was the crevasse.  I peered over the edge as we approached.  I found it hard to believe that the river hadn’t poured over the edge yet; especially after the huge jolts that must have rocked this region during the pole shift.

Tara screamed.

She had slipped on some grit on the highway and lost her balance toward the edge of the crevasse.  It was only a slight yelp of a scream, not a full-fledged scream.

She looked at me, a crooked embarrassed smile on her fac
e as she regained her footing. Then she really slipped.

The slab that she had been standing on tilted down.  Her arms pin wheeled for balance.  Her footing gave way.  She was sliding off the side of the slab.  She was grabbing air, missing, sliding down the slab.

I reached for her but missed.

At the last second, she reached for a jut of a piece of guard rail.  She missed.  It cut her arm.

“Dan!! Oh god Dan help me!” she screamed.

She was dangling over the edge.

I looked for a way to reach her, but couldn’t see a way.  If I slid down the tilted slab with her, I would probably fall off myself.

“
I’m slipping Dan
!!” she screamed.

Quickly looking where she had fallen, I noticed that there was a muddy ledge below where I could stand to easily reach her.  I dropped both the tire iron and crescent wrench onto the cracked cement and jumped down into the mud below the bridge.  Dodging some low hanging sections of cement, I quickly worked my way over to her.  She was hanging onto a jutted rusty piece of pipe right above me.  Her belly and legs were in my face.  Her loose fitting jeans had slipped down.  I could see the top of her pubic hair. 
Her belly button was pierced.  If she were to drop now, she would fall down onto another tilted slab.  This other slab was tilted too much to even walk on.  If she fell, she would land on it, slip off and fall down into the crevasse.