Books of the Dead (Book 1): Sanctuary From The Dead (10 page)

“What could those houses have anyway?”  I asked, trying to downplay the situation.

“We don’t know what those houses have,” he said, a tinge of anger in his voice and turned to me.  “How many people do we have downstairs?”

“Sixty seven at last count.”

“How much food do we have down in the kitchen?”

“Enough,” I said.

“Enough for how long?  We’ll be lucky to make it into next year before the shelves are going to look pretty bare.”

“But what are those people going to take?  There can’t be more than ten of them.”

“Joel, my man, when it comes down to the last can of peaches in Portsmouth, I want to make sure it’s our people that have it and not some out of town freeloading assholes.”  He turned away from me and headed for the door.

“Wait, what are you thinking of doing?”  I asked.

“I’m going to persuade those folks to move on down the road,” he said over his shoulder and I raced across the roof to catch up with him.

“You can’t just go down there by yourself.  You’re big, but like you said, there’s three carloads full of them.
”

He stood, his hand poised on the door knob, a wild ass glint in his eyes.  “Are you coming with me then?”

“I, ah, I,” I stammered out.

“Just what I thou
ght,” he said opening the door.

“Well, I don’
t have a gun,” I said.

He stopped midway through the door and backed up, his hands moving at his side.   Almost before I could react, he tossed me a gun.  I caught it like I was grabbing
a snake, afraid it might bite me.  While guns were a necessity in this brave new world, I shared none of the infatuation with them like the warriors.

“The safety’s on,” he said.

It was an automatic of some sort.  I think it was a .45, but my knowledge of guns was limited.  Even with the extensive training by the warriors, I rarely paid attention to makes and models.  You pointed them at your target, pulled the trigger, and shot it. 

“So, now you co
min’?” he asked.

“Well, shouldn’t we tell Greg or someone?”

“We don’t have to tell ‘
daddy
’ everything we do.” He put finger quotes around the word ‘daddy.’  “If you’re not coming then give me back the gun, because I’m heading down the back stairs in less than a minute.” 

Everything in me screamed to stay with the church, but letting even an asshole like Frank go out alone was a bad idea.  What he didn’t know was that I could call “daddy” anytime I wan
ted with the walkie-talkie in my pocket. 

I stuffed the gun in my waistband, hoping not to shoot off my private parts by accident, and followed him into the back stairwell.  As we descended the stairs I reached into my pocket and flipped the walk-talkie off.  In less than thirty seconds we were out the back door and into the night with me wondering what the hell I was doing.

CHAPTER 15

Field Trip

As soon as we got outside he pulled me close.  “I saw two groups of zombies.  One smaller group down Gallia and a larger one  -- maybe six or seven -- moving around the houses down on Fourth.”

“What do you have pn
you that doesn’t make a lot of noise because all I saw was guns?” I asked.

He reached to his side and pulled up a medium sized axe with an extended handle.  In his massive hands, it looked like a child’s toy hatchet.  How I’d missed it earlier was beyond me.  “Little Bessie here is good at splitting zombie skulls open.  She sure as shit is.   I say we take Gallia down to Sinton or Bond depending what we run into.  That work for you?”

“Whatever,” I said, gripping my bat so hard my knuckles hurt, all the while thinking,
a fool and his life are soon parted.

We made it down Gallia without incident.  I liked going down Sinton because there was more cover and places to duck into and hide if things went south.  That, of course, meant Frank would pick Bond.

We’d made it a block down Bond when we heard a clattering noise off in a parking lot
to the right.  A half dozen abandoned cars sat silent and dark, spaced out across the lot. 

I couldn’t see any movement but brought my bat up to a ready position and stopped in my tracks.  Frank, being Frank, didn’t lose a step and thundered on down the street.  I tried to get his attention making a hiss-hiss sound but he either didn’t hear me or didn’t care

The first zombie came from between two of the cars, shambling forward with a halting determination wearing nothing but a soiled and torn bath robe fluttering in the wind.  It looked to be a man in his fifties, but the zombification process poured on the years.  Let’s face it, death ages you. 

I froze in place.  Frank must have caught the movement out of the corner of his eye because he quickly changed his direction m
aking a beeline for the creature, bringing his axe up as he bore down on the thing. 

The zombie reached out for him expectantly as Frank closed the distance.  It seemed desperate to get a hold
of him, and Frank seemed equally desperate to meet this creature head on. 

Zombies are notoriously slow and while Frank was big and somewhat lumbering
, once he got going he brought a lot of momentum to the party.  He was sort of like the Titanic without the iceberg to stop it.  Just as they were about to collide, Frank brought the axe down with vicious force.  The motion was followed up by a sickening crunching and gushing noise.  The zombie went to the pavement in a heap sans its head.  Frank gave it another whack for good measure, then he booted the head down the street where it caromed off a couple cars before spinning into the gutter.

Frank turned to me and gave me
a; “
What the hell are you doing back there?”
look.  I shrugged, relaxing a bit.  That was when the two zombies came out from behind the house off to my left and started towards me.  One was a short woman with half her face missing and a badly mangled leg.  She didn’t worry me because she moved in a staggered, start and stop motion, almost losing ground with each step.  The other one seemed to have no bodily impairment and was moving along at a good clip on its way to me.  He was a big one.  Not as big as Frank, but still a good six-two and probably 280.  That gave it three inches and a hundred pounds on me.

I had two choices: hold my ground or turn and run.

You’d think in the face of a world-wide apocalypse, the rules of the school yard would no longer hold sway over us.  Old habits die hard.  Running would make me a coward. Despite the fact that I wanted to piss my pants, I decided to take the thing on, hoping my agility and speed could outmatch its size and strength.  I also prayed I could out-think the dead thing since it had virtually no cognitive processes in its atrophied brain. 

I backed up to the nearest car and hopped up onto its hood, hoping that getting some elevation might help me.  It closed on me, its beefy hands extended to their fullest, clutching wildly, trying to get a hold on my legs.

I timed my first swing for maximum impact, waiting until it was just about on me.  I gave it everything I had, swinging for the fences.  The meat of the bat impacted a few inches below the temple producing a combination of sounds -- the ping of an aluminum bat and the crunching of bone as I nearly knocked the thing’s jaw off.   Despite the fact that I had hit dozens of zombies over the past months, there was something deep down that clinched up inside me every time I hit one these undead sons of bitches.  They were once human.  Hitting humans was bad.  Or it was once bad.  In the end, to survive, I had to get past these deeply ingrained taboos because they held none of them.

While I had been able to get a lot into my swing, my aim was off.  These things didn’t feel pain.  They didn’t care if every bone in their body was broken
.  They were driven by one imperative - hunger.  This one didn’t mind it at all that its lower jaw was hanging on by just a few strands of muscle and tendons.  Dinner was waiting.

When taking down a zombie, you had to shut down the brain.  They could still function without arms or legs or even half of their body.  I had seen my share of one-legged undead creatures hobbling along or crawling. 

I wouldn’t say this zombie was unfazed, but it was still intent on taking me down.  It swung one of its tree-like arms and took my legs out from under me like they were made out of popsicle sticks.  My head flew backwards, smacking against the windshield.  I blinked away a shower of orange and yellows lights and yanked my legs up just as the zombie started clutching for my ankles. 

While on my back, I had little or no way to get anything behind a swing.  Instead, I used my baseball bat as mini-battering ram, forcing the end of it against the zombie’s arms and hands, beating it back.  I used my legs to push my way up the car’s windshield like an inchworm,
and was moving nearly as slow as one.  Just as I got my butt up past the lip of the windshield I launched myself backward with a forceful push of my legs and rolled onto my side, over the top, and off the back of the back of the car, ending up face down on the pavement. 

The thing was on the move, heading my way before I could get to my feet.  I reached down to my waistband for the gun but came up empty.  I took a quick glance and saw it sitting on the car’s roof.  It must have come out when I rolled backwards. 

My mind calculated that I had about one second before 280 pounds of stinking undead flesh rammed into me.  If this thing got its weight on me, it was all over but the crying.  I was still in a kneeling position when it was just a few inches from impact.  Some imaginary collision warning went off in the back of my mind, a klaxon sounding the alarm, and my instincts took over. 

I rolled onto my back, drew my legs up against my chest with my feet in a parallel position to my body, and waited for the creature to fall onto me.  They aren’t very smart and he did just wh
at I predicted, descending on me and landing squarely on my feet.  As soon as I felt all that weight hit the soles of my shoes, I allowed myself to roll backwards using its momentum to my advantage.

As a kid I used to play a game called “Ejector Seat” with one of my older cousins.  He’d
lie on his back on the ground and I’d sit on his feet.  We’d do a countdown and he’d launch me into the air just as I said “Ejector Seat Launch.”  It was all fun and games until I landed on the sidewalk, breaking my wrist.  Today, there was no fun at all.  I had to launch this big bastard if I had any hope of living through the night.

The zombie loomed over me like a large, dark cloud bank, blocking out the moon and stars.  I could see deep into the dark maw that was its mouth, its tongue lolling about as it salivated on me, anticipating a morsel of my flesh.  Its gray, empty eyes showed nothing. 

Judging the precise moment, I pushed off with my feet with everything I had.  Moving 280 pounds is no easy task but I had fear and adrenaline on my side. 

The combination of its momentum and my push sent the thing up and over me
and into airbound.  I estimated it flew about 10 feet in a gentle arc, its feet sticking up into the night sky and its head falling towards the pavement.  The impact sounded like a watermelon from a second floor window -- only this dull empty thud was accompanied by a crunching noise I assumed to be the thing’s neck breaking. 

I lay there panting, watching and waiting for the zombie to get back up but it was down for the count which was a good thing because I was nearly out of steam.

A dark form moved into view, occluding the night sky and I found my steam again -- really fast.  It had to be that third zombie. 

Then the form spoke.  “Nice move, little man,” Frank said.  “
Where’d ya’ get that -- from a kung-fu movie?”

“Asshole,” I said. 

He had dispatched the third zombie while I was playing Ejector Seat with mine. 

I nearly crapped out on him and headed back to the church, but he cajoled me into sticking it out since the college was only a block away.  Against my better judgment I went along for the rest of the ride because up until now it had been so much fun.  Woo-woo.  If they had postcards for zombie killing, I would have been sending them to all my relatives.

We both went quiet once we crossed Third Street and arrived at the campus grounds. 

At one point this had been a bustling hive of activity with students rushing from class to class and others playing
Frisbee on the lawns or just hanging out.  While it wasn’t Harvard, Yale, or even the massive Ohio State University to the north, there was a campus life that went on here.  Or, at least,
had
gone on here.  Now it was just as dead as the rest of the city and probably the rest of the world.

We passed by the library first, hugging close to the wall.  The wind whistled along the jagged edges of broken windows as we made it to the corner.  Frank had the lead.  He paused there for a moment taking a quick peek, then moved quickly acros
s an open space to the Center for the Arts.  Much of the north facing wall consisted of windows, most of which were broken.  Frank stepped through one of the openings and into the building.  I followed, hoping my sneakers were tough enough to resist any jagged edges of glass.  Cuts and infections were a big issue in this new dead world as there was no corner Urgent Care open for business.

We stood in the foyer for a moment.

“Let your eyes get used to the dark,” Frank said in a whisper.  “We’ll cut through here,” he said motioning to a dark hallway to the south.  “It’ll leave us less exposed than if we cut around the building.”

“It’s your party,” I said. “I’m just along for the ride.”

I couldn’t see his expression in the dark, but I sensed my response didn’t please him.