Containment (37 page)

Neil, up to this point, quiet and avoiding having to do anything but follow the others, stepped forward with his shotgun to his shoulder and fired three successive shots. Like the first blasts of a pyrotechnic display at a Fourth of July celebration, the echoing roar brought all of them out of their stunned paralysis.

Neil could feel himself growl a little inside as he pulled the trigger. All three slugs found their mark, striking three different zombies, though only one dispatched its target while the other two merely created rust-colored holes on the others’ chests that did little more than decorate the pair. He pumped another twelve gauge shell into the chamber and fired again, this time very nearly severing the head of yet another.

Dr. Caldwell shouted, “Back! We need to get back! Everyone!”

By then Jerry had started squeezing off rounds as well. He didn’t need to use his scope, given the closeness of the range to his quarry, but he chose to use it regardless. The illusion of distance by peering through the glass eye probably helped to calm him and allowed him to focus on his target. He pulled his trigger and watched the scalp of one of them lift from its head and disappear in a horrid burst of brown. He lowered the rifle slightly and chambered another round with a quick action on the rifle’s bolt. He pulled the trigger and another monster fell motionless to the ground. These things didn’t seem to suffer or feel any sensation at all. It was just as if the lights were simply turned out as the things collapsed into the piles of decaying flesh that they should have been in the first place.

Dr. Caldwell again demanded as Emma, Gerald, and now Evelyn moved Art away, “We don’t have time for this! There are too many! We’ve got to go! Come on!”

Neil looked back and said, “Go! We’ll watch your back. Doc, you and Claire had probably better keep your guns at the ready. They seem to be converging on us from all around the base and the gunshots aren’t going to help. There’ll probably be more, so stay alert. We’ve got this.”

“Neil, we can’t separate the group.”

He didn’t answer that point directly but instead said as he looked Meghan in the eyes for the first time since their heated exchange, “Keep ‘em safe. All of them. We got this.”

“But...”

“Go damnit! We’ll catch up.”

Jerry discharged his rifle again, bringing down another one. The younger man said as he brought the rifle back to his shoulder, “Can you guys finish this later? Neil, I could really use some help here.”

Another shot rang out, this one coming from neither Neil nor Jerry. The bullet caught one of them in the exposed part of the beast’s upper chest in the space between its neck and shoulder. The creature, though not dispatched, was spun around, gurgling a nasty, wet sound as its gelled internal fluids filled its throat.

Neil, Jerry, and Dr. Caldwell all looked back to see young Danny with his rifle still at the ready. He pulled the pump action on the small rifle and shot again. This bullet hit the thing squarely in its chest, shattering its sternum as it set it back several steps.

Neil smiled at Danny but said to the doctor, “You better go before Danny takes them all and makes us look bad.” And to Danny he said, “Nice shootin’ there, Tex. Help the Doc keep everyone safe for me.”

There was no more discussion. Neil and Jerry were once again on their own. Jerry fired again and realized he’d emptied the five round capacity of his rifle. He slung it over his back and pulled his pistol from its holster. “You know, I’m not very good with these things, don’t you?”

Neil pulled the trigger on the shotgun again and then said, “Yeah, I know buddy. I think it may be time to get ourselves moving again before you prove that point.”

Looking down the road from where their group had originally come, Jerry could see that the first group of zombies who had been tracking them were now coming up from that direction. Options were quickly being eliminated. He shouted to Neil, “We got more company.”

Neil fired his remaining three shots into the nearest crowd of undead and then ran in the same direction the others had gone with Jerry fast on his heels. Trying to think ahead as they ran, Neil started to feed more orange plastic sheathed shells into the aperture on the bottom of the still hot gun. He tried to keep track but lost count almost immediately. Having anything in it would be of benefit he figured. He just hoped that he loaded enough to get them out of a pinch if necessary.

They were thankful for the fact that the now desiccated and decaying zombies were by this point unable to get beyond the pace of a serious mall-walker. Their limbs were simply too stiff to allow any fluid movement at all. There was some comfort in that but running into the new group of monsters created a new reason for alarm. And to drive that point home, they heard a not too distant scream followed by a pair of gunshots somewhere ahead of them.

They increased their pace as much as they could. Another shot, this one a little closer, raised the urgency in their steps still further. By then, they were close enough to hear and recognize the next scream as belonging to Claire.

They looked down each intersecting street they passed, searching for evidence of the rest of the group. They saw nothing; just empty pavement and abandoned houses. They finally came to a spot where the road turned to the right, heading east and directly toward the distant mountains. There, in the middle of the street, were four more of the creatures, all with their backs to the two men. Neil shot the first one, hitting it at the base of its skull. The creature very nearly did a forward flip from the blunt, violent impact. The three remaining zekes tried to turn, but Jerry’s sleek firearm barked and spat feverishly and he quickly dispatched those. In only a matter of seconds both his pistol and the street were empty.

The two men paused, breathing heavily, their breath animated by the cold air into thin white clouds, reluctantly dispersing before their faces. Neil nodded and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Nice shooting.”

Jerry choked out between labored breaths, “Where are they?”

Looking around and hoping to get the slightest idea from any clues left for them, Neil said despairingly, “I’ve got no idea. They could’ve gone anywhere but they couldn’t have gone far. Besides, they’ll hear our gunshots and know that we’re following. I mean, the Doc knows that we—”

Jerry held up his hand and stood stock still with his ear turned toward the street. He looked around wide-eyed and asked, “What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“I can hear something. It kind of sounds like...”

Neil was already pumping the action on the shotgun. He’d learned to trust Jerry’s ears and his instincts. And once again, both of these attributes served them well.

There, amidst the coagulated carnage piled in the street, lay a fifth body; a body that had gone unnoticed previously. Neil could tell by the noises it was making that it was no longer human. He was all too familiar with the preternatural and predatory sounds made by the undead ghouls who now populated their city.

Both Neil and Jerry felt the terror in their chests burst into painful, heavy knots. This newly reanimating corpse was most likely from their group and could be just about anyone.

Still unable to definitively discern who it was, they were able to at least figure out that it was a woman based upon her clothing and size. It raised itself onto its hands and knees as its disorientation turned to ravenous rage. Neil was able to hear the new vibrations in the air this time. From the beast’s mouth a steady, foul, dark fluid spilled onto the damp pavement.

Neil said with a mixture of regret and limited relief, “It’s Evelyn. They got Evelyn.”

The poor woman had been brutalized. Her neck had been sheared clean of any flesh, exposing both her trachea and esophagus; both life-giving passageways also severed. This was the cause of the fluid spilling from her gaping mouth, which continued even as she rose to her feet. Once she was up, the fluid found its original path back down the now open drains that currently comprised what was left of her throat. The air still in her lungs slowly tried to force its way up and out against the downward flow of bright red blood, causing a bubbling, sucking, red morass to form on her upper chest.

“Evelyn, I’m so sorry,” Jerry managed. His words were just fading into the ethereal soup when Neil discharged the shotgun and ended their former companion’s suffering.

Jerry said solemnly and honestly, “I’m glad you were able to do that.”

“It was done before I could think about it.”

“And now?”

Neil was already walking when he said, “Let’s just leave it at that. C’mon, let’s keep moving.”

With the possible threats all around them seemingly multiplying, the two men were more on guard than ever. They were moving at a good clip, but not running. They couldn’t chance it. Not anymore. One wrong move and they could end up like Evelyn.

They had traveled a couple of blocks further east when Neil said, “I think I see them.”

Jerry asked, “By ‘them” you mean...?”

“Up there, ya goof,” and Neil pointed. “Use your scope if you can’t see them.”

Jerry was way ahead of him. Peering through the optic on his rifle, he said with a smile, “Yeah. It’s them alright.” He lowered the rifle. “Thanks, man.”

Neil wasn’t quite certain the reason for the gratitude and his expression must have betrayed this fact.

Jerry clarified, “I guess I didn’t know that Claire meant that much to me. Getting back to her means an awful lot. Back there I was afraid that...well...it could have been anyone lying there in the street. It could have been her. I don’t know for sure what I would have done if it was.”

Recounting his own fears of the possibilities to himself, Neil said only, “Yeah, man. I get you completely.”

Now away from base housing and moving along a road that had been cut through a thick forest of alder and spruce trees, the relief of not seeing the horde of undead hot on their trail helped them all to relax somewhat and fall into a much more sustainable pace. Dr. Caldwell and Neil were at the head of the column, Jerry and Claire were at the tail, and everyone else was in between taking turns pulling the travois. From either side, they could hear the gentle snaps and cracks of the falling autumn leaves, noises that at first made them all jumpy. The air was cold and moist, pinching their exposed cheeks and ushering in a chorus of stuffy, sniffling noses. As they walked, a thick ominous fog rolled in and obscured the road ahead and the forest behind the first rank of trees to either side. It was as if they were walking into an only partially completed painting with blank canvas all around the central focal point.

It was as quiet as a church on an early Sunday morning before services began. The fog, taking full advantage of the stillness of the air, waited and watched, anticipating the next act of the drama that was unfolding in its midst.

Not one for showing reverence to just anything, Claire said to Jerry, “I used to love the fog. It always seemed so full of mystery, and questions and possibility. I remember waking up early on school mornings when I was a kid and standing on the deck with my dad and watching the morning fog as it clung to the trees and bushes like cotton balls caught in the branches and leaves...like today.” Claire paused and thought about her father, who had been dead for a few years by then, and then about her mother who, in all likelihood, joined him on that morning a few weeks ago when their living nightmare began.

Jerry asked, “And now?”

“I hate the fog,” she spit like poison.

“Why?”

“Same reasons I guess. Now the unknown seems a heck of a lot more frightening than back then. Before it was just a matter of seeing what the fog was hiding. I knew every inch of my backyard during the day, but when the fog was there and I couldn’t even see my swing set that had been there for years, it was like I was in some foreign place. Now, the fog and the dark and the unknown are just as likely to kill you as anything else.” She looked ahead at Jules and Danny and lamented, “I feel so bad for those two kids. Whatever childhood they had is gone and it’ll never come back. Even if—and that’s a big if—all of this somehow sorts itself out, they’ll never be able to go back to just being normal kids again. What hope do they have? What hope do any of us have?”

Jerry put his arm around her small shoulders. “There may still be hope yet. Don’t give up. Not yet.”

She looked at him squarely. “You say that, but do you really mean it? I mean, every time I turn around, there are fewer and fewer of us. That’s what happened before you found us. When we started out, there were so many and then there was just me and Art. And now we’ve been whittled down to just a handful again. What happens if we’re all that’s left? What happens?”

Jerry knew that was, or could become, a very real possibility. They’d heard nothing from the outside world since this all began. He wondered about other extinct species and if they were able to begin to contemplate the end.

He wasn’t a great student in school but he remembered a high school English class with Mr. Anderson. They read a book called
Grendel
that captured his attention. It was the story about a monster from another older book called
Beowulf,
but this more recent novel was told from the monster’s point of view. At one point, Grendel happened upon an old dragon who was angry at the whole world because he was the last of his kind and was hunted merely because of who he was and what he represented. Jerry was really able to relate to the dragon’s anger at the world and his fate. There were just far too many similarities between the dragon’s reality and his own. The worst part was that the dragon could see into the future and knew that the end was coming and there was nothing he could do to change his fate. Perhaps there was some comfort for Jerry in not knowing the future. There was still free will and chance that needed to be figured into their situation, and to that he clung.