All That I See - 02 (17 page)

“Put it in reverse then cut it hard to the left. Do it fast and hard.”

The van lurched back.

“No!” I yelled. “To the left! You’re going the wrong way!”

“Stop screaming at me!” she yelled back. “I can’t see anything!”

It was getting difficult to hear each other because of the cacophony of howling, moaning,
and
hands slapping the van.

“Pull up!” I yelled.

The van lurched back again.

“Dammit, pull up!”

“I can’t pull up!”

I made my way to the front of the van, “Okay, then go back. Go fast and punch through.”

Sara was crying. I checked both side mirrors. The damned things were everywhere. She put the van in reverse. We rolled up onto the curb and over a highway sign. I heard a loud pop.

“Shit,” I said. “I think we lost a back tire.”

I looked around for options. There were two old buildings right across the road on Broadway. They were set close together with an alley in between them. The alley had been formed a decade before when the building between them had collapsed. The building had been narrow, as far as buildings go, but the space it left was wide enough for t
hree
cars drive through abreast. There was already a truck parked in there
with an odd A-shaped rack in it
s bed. On the side of the truck it said QUALITY GLASS SERVICE. I figured the rack in the back of the truck must have been for hauling large sheets of glass. The building on the other side of the alley was Plucky’s Diner.

A block past Quality Glass Service was the First Baptist Church. It looked like a castle, and would be a good place to hole up for a while, but I didn’t think we could make it that far.

“We need to do something,” Sara said. “They keep coming in.”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“That building there on the left, the glass place, has a garage door on the other side,” she said. “Do you think we could pull the van in there?”

“I can’t see it,” I said, shaking my head.

“It’s there. My friend Lori worked there one summer answering phones. She used to hang out by the garage door and talk to the guys that worked back there.”

“Even if the door is there, how are we going to open it? And what if there is already a truck parked in there?”

“We have to do something!”

Doors had been installed in the glass place and diner so they could access the alley.

“See if you can get into the alley,” I said. “Park next to the glass truck. We’ll go into the building th
r
ough the side door.”

She shifted into drive and floored it. The van struggled, but slowly, we plowed through the crowd, crossed the street, and pulled into the alley. The creatures immediately rushed in on both ends.

I presumed Sara would come out on my side, and go into the diner, but before I could say anything she’d climbed out her door. There was no time. She would never make it around the van to me. She hesitated when she realized her mistake. I was standing in the alley doorway of Plucky’s, and I started to go back to the van, but it was too late. There was no time for hesitation or second thoughts. Sara was forced to the other building. She skirted around the hood of the glass truck, and ran inside. We shut our doors just as the horde filled the space.

Chapter 19

I leaned against the door until I got it locked. They pounded against it and howled. It was dark in the room. I fumbled around in the plastic bag until I found the little flashlight. I was in the diner’s storeroom. My flashlight beam shined on a large refrigerator set in the wall. There were heavy wooden shelving units that went all the way up to the ceiling filled with bulk tubs of pickles, ketchup, and mayonnaise. There were also large cases of plastic cups and napkins. On the far wall was a plain wooden staircase going up, and opposite that, a door that led into the kitchen.

I looked around for windows that would give me a view into the alley and across to the other building. I needed to see if Sara was okay, and I needed a way to communicate with her. I hadn’t thought to look for windows when I was outside, and I doubted there would be any since the alley walls used to butt up against another building. I went into the kitchen then out into the dining room. I was surprised to find the front of the building unoccupied. There was old food on the grill and tables, and two of the tables in the dining room were turned over, but no one was inside. I went to the front entrance and turned the lock to prevent anyone from coming back into the building. There weren’t any windows on the alley side that I could see on the ground floor, so I ran back to the stairs.

The second floor was a large open room that was being used to store old tables, chairs, and Christmas decorations from the restaurant. In the corner by the stairs, a small space—approximately ten feet square—had been separated from the rest of the room by homemade plywood divider walls to be used as an office.

It was well-lit by three windows in the front of the building and one in the rear. There were no windows in the alley side or the other side wall. The building on the other side was still standing, but at the time, I couldn’t recall what business had been occupying it.

There were no more stairs inside, so I went to the back window with the hope of finding a fire escape where I could access the roof. There was an old, rusty ladder bolted to the outside of the building beside the window. It hooked over the edge of the roof then descended down to about five feet off the ground.

I opened the window and stepped out onto the ladder. The creatures were below me, but they didn’t notice; they were still pressing into the alley. I climbed up to the roof then ran over to the edge.

The alley was crammed. They were coming in from both ends and meeting at the truck and van, filling the space between them. There was still a group directly below me slapping the door I’d escaped into. They were banging on the door to the glass shop, too.

“Sara!” I called out. There were no windows in the side of her building either. She’d have to open the door or go up on the roof. The two buildings weren’t the same height. Her building was a few feet taller.

“Sara!”

I looked down. The creatures had heard me, and they were reaching for me. A thought passed through my head of losing my balance and spilling over the side into their waiting hands. The thought brought on a tightness in my scrotum and a wave of dizziness that forced me to step away from the edge.

“Sara! I’m on the roof!”

I went to the front of the building and looked down onto Broadway. They filled the street below me, more tightly packed nearer our buildings. The crowd extended out about a half block away from our location, getting sparse along the edges. There were several hundred of them down there, with more coming in.

I went to the other side, which looked down on the roof of the next building. It was about three feet lower. I jumped onto the next roof and ran along two more rooftops until I came to another edge. Below me on this side was a parking lot. There were a couple of cars, a dumpster, and four zombies down there.

I returned to the roof of the diner.

“Sara!”

There was the muffled pop of a gunshot from her building. I pulled the .45 from my waistband, even though there was nothing I could do to help her.

“Sara!”

I paced on the roof, anxious. After what felt like forever, she came into view at the edge of her roof.

“Sara! Are you okay?” I called over.

She waved and looked down into the alley.

“I had to shoot one in the garage,” she yelled to me. “It’s empty. If you could get to the van, I could open the door for you.”

“Can’t do it now,” I said. “There are too many.”

“Did you grab any guns?” she asked.

“Just this,” I said, holding up the revolver.

“Anything to eat or drink?”

I held up the plastic bag, “Just a few things. This is Plucky’s Diner, so I can probably find more to eat downstairs.”

She stared across to me but didn’t say anything. I knew what she was thinking. She had no food, water, or alcohol, and she had three rounds left in her rifle. Unless someone came to lure the creatures away, we’d be surrounded for at least a few more days until the end of her cycle, and maybe longer than that.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said but not loud enough.

“What?”

“It’ll be okay!” It didn’t sound any more believable the second time.

She nodded then looked around.

“I’m going down for a little while to look for food and water in the building,” she said. “Meet me back up here later, okay?”

After she disappeared from view, I decided to go back down into the diner to look for something I could use to get provisions over to her. I was second-guessing myself and starting to think that we should have stayed in the van. At least in there, we would have had the supplies we had collected, and we would have been together. Of course, inevitably, they would have gotten in to us, or we would have run out of food and water, or we would have gone crazy cooped up in there with
the
noise and almost un
-
breathable air. This was better--not ideal, but better. We would have more options this way. I just needed a moment to come up with one of those options.

In the short term, she w
ould need water, food, and alcoh
ol. I thought I could throw the items across to her. I guesstimated the distance between us to be about twenty to twenty-four feet. I would be throwing the items up, too, because her building was higher than mine, but I didn’t think that would be a problem. I just had to make sure that if she didn’t catch them, they would not break.

I emptied the plastic bag of supplies I’d grabbed before we left the van. I had a bottle of vodka, two one-liter bottles of water, a partial jar of peanut butter from the old lady’s house, and box of cereal bars. I thought I had grabbed more, but I had been in a rush.

In the diner’s storeroom, I found several packages of hamburger buns, but they were all green with mold. There was a big box of those small packets of crackers restaurants give out with soup, chili, and salads. There was another similar box of packaged croutons. I found five large cans of tomato paste and a large can of pinto beans. The rest of the food—produce and meat—was probably shut up in the huge, walk-in refrigerator, and I had no desire to open any more refrigerators. All that were left were the big condiment tubs.

I emptied one of the water bottles into a couple of plastic cups then poured half of the vodka into the bottle. I got a small pile of the cracker packets, the peanut butter, a knife, the two water bottles (one with water, the other with vodka), and a couple of cereal bars. I tied it all up in an apron from the kitchen making what resembled a hobo’s sack then I went back out on the roof.

Sara was already waiting for me when I came out.

“Did you find anything?” I said.

“They’ve broken through the front windows of the building,” she said. “And there’s no door to close off the stairs. I’m going to have to stay on the roof.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m not dead.”

“I have some stuff for you here. I’m going to toss it over. Try to catch it; there isn’t any glass in it, but the stuff is fragile just the same.”

I threw it harder and higher than I thought I needed, because I wanted to be sure it made it across. It sailed over the divide and disappeared from my view. Sara chased after it. She returned to the edge with it in her hands and was untying it.

“Did you catch it?”

“No,” she said. “But it’s okay. Thanks.”

“Sniff those bottles before you drink,” I said. “One of them is water, and the other is vodka.”

“We’re not going to stay here, are we?” she said. “We can’t.”

“I think I could get away on the far end on that last building over, but I don’t know how to get you out. There are too many around your building.”

“These aren’t enough supplies to last more than a day or two,” she said. “I don’t want to put you in any danger, but I’m stuck on a roof over here.”

I looked over the edge again. Hundreds of ghastly faces gaped up at me. Some of the creatures from the alley had started moving around to the new access in the front of the building, but others flooded in to take their place.

“I’m going to go over there and see if there is a way down.”

I crossed the three rooftops to the far end and looked over the edge again. The creatures that had been below were no longer there, but it was far too great a drop to the cars and dumpster in the lot below. I moved to the back of the building. It had no fire escape at all, but the middle building did. There were several infected individuals on the back side of the row of buildings, but they were making their way toward the Quality Glass building with the others.

“I can get down and get away,” I said. “But I don’t know how to get you out of there.”

“Just do the best you can. I’m not going anywhere.”

I went back down into the diner to make myself a small supply pack. I couldn’t take the water with me,
so I drank as much as I could while I stood
there. I went back through the kitchen and looked out through the dining room. I thought there might be a chance I could leave through the front door, but there would be no way; the crowd on Broadway was too thick. There were so many out there, they were pressing against the windows of the diner too and eventually their weight would push the glass in.