Dawn of the Dead (12 page)

“Where the hell are those guys?” he asked, still half-asleep and rubbing his eyes. “What the hell is going on around here?”

Fran had calmed down sufficiently to try to explain what had transpired while Steve was asleep.

“You mean they’re actually going to raid the department store? What do they expect to do with stuff from there?”

“That’s just it,” she told him, a look of fear in her eyes. “It’s as if they’ve lost all perspective. We just wanted to stop here for some food and rest, or so that’s what I thought. But they act like they’re on some kind of secret mission. I swear, they’re acting like a bunch of kids playing cops and robbers!”

Steve reached over and pulled Fran close to him.

“Don’t worry,” he told her in a voice that he hoped sounded calm. “They’re not
that
crazy.”

“Then what are we going to do? They said if they didn’t come back to leave without them . . . how long should we wait?” She collapsed in a heap, crying and shaking at the same time.

All Steve could do was hold her to him tightly. He knew that if he tried to explain anything, he would break down as well.

Meanwhile, on the first floor of the mall, it looked as if a giant hand had turned on its own special mechanical toy. Only it wasn’t a toy—it was an entire shopping center. The automobile turntable started spinning; the great escalators began to move up and down. Two of the living dead, caught just starting up a stalled escalator, fell and rolled down as the mechanical steps began to move.

As if it were a carnival come alive, lights blinked on in the exhibits, mechanical window displays began their robotlike motions. The zombies, bothered by the Muzak, wandered about the floor in increased confusion. Some of them swatted ineffectually at the moving exhibits.

Disturbed by the movement, the tropical birds housed in the floor-to-ceiling cages woke up, chirping and squawking for their feed.

In a pet shop, puppies and kittens in a window display whined and scrambled over one another in fright at the noise, the motion and the tottering creatures.

All that was missing was the real-life action of human shoppers. On one of the floor exhibits, a rear-projection movie started.

A narrator spoke in a friendly voice: “. . . and for a price that anyone can afford, you can live in these luxurious new homes by Brandon. Fully electric, central air . . .”

The newly distracted zombies started strutting around at a quicker pace, bumping into each other and the moving displays. Some tried to return the way they’d come in, but they only bounced off the glass door. The one who had been circling endlessly had fallen to the ground, and his head was wedged between the ground and the door, preventing anyone else from entering or leaving.

In the maintenance office, the troopers readied themselves for their raid. Peter secured the vital key ring to his utility belt, and they moved out.

Roger’s mind was a million miles away as he moved through the doorway and into the corridor. He was still lightheaded from the thought of all those wonderful goodies waiting for him downstairs. He was totally unprepared for his head-on meeting with one of the zombies from the balcony. Startled, he ducked back into the room. The zombie, blindly reaching out with clutching hands, rounded the corner and appeared in the doorway. With precision accuracy, Peter raised his gun and fired two shots cleanly through the creature’s head.

On the top of the fire stair, Fran jumped as the sound of the shots reverberated through the enormous mall.

“Jesus Christ,” Steve screamed, grabbing the rifle from the petrified woman. “They’re maniacs.”

He looked long and hard at Fran. He was torn between staying here with her and charging downstairs to see what was going on. Fran needed protection, but he also needed to prove to her, to himself, and to those two macho supermen downstairs that he could join the battle.

Fran saw the indecision in his eyes.

“Stephen, don’t go down there,” she pleaded. “Stephen, please!”

“It’s all right,” he said calmly, starting to make his way down the stairs.

In the corridor of the administration offices below, Roger and Peter were stepping over the corpse.

“What da ya think?” Roger asked as the second zombie, the armless female, came into his view. He fired his weapon and the creature fell in a heap. As if nothing had happened, he continued his conversation.

“Bag it or try for it?” he asked his comrade.

“You game?” Peter asked.

Roger nodded, and the two men ran down the hall toward the mall. With their rifles poised, they seemed like commandos on an important raid.

All that was missing was the blare of the trumpets as Roger and Peter charged into battle. The enemy wandered around the first floor, attracted by the sound but confused by the sudden intrusion of the noise into their quiet domain. In misguided, staggering strides, they walked this way and that, glazed, vacant eyes passing by the stores and shops with their glittering array of goodies.

Several of the zombies walked toward the escalators, which in their dormant state had been easy to negotiate. But now, the moving escalators tossed the zombies this way and that. Some of them tried going up the down escalators, while those few creatures who moved onto the up escalator fell against each other from the movement. They seemed like tumbling pins in a bowling alley.

One of the zombies that fell on the escalator was carried upward despite its awkward position. Another managed to keep its balance by holding onto the handrail.

And unbeknownst to Roger and Peter, several creatures had begun to move up the steps of a stationary stairway that ran from the first to the second floor and was located at the other end of the mall from the administration offices.

Meanwhile, a sweating, nervous Steve was cautiously making his way down the steps of the fire stair. His rifle ready, his palms dripping, he tried to control his jittery nerves. Fran looked anxiously from the top landing.

Several hundred yards away, Roger and Peter were barreling toward the huge gate that locked off the entrance to Porter’s. The two troopers came to a crashing halt. Four or five zombies were staggering their way down a side concourse toward the troopers. They were about three hundred feet away.

Roger kept his rifle leveled off in the direction of the creatures while Peter tried the lock at the middle of the big roll gate.

Beads of perspiration formed on his forehead as he fumbled with the keys and finally found the proper one. When it sank with a click into the receptacle that was right at the floor and the tumbler turned successfully, Peter sighed in relief.

“All right!” he yelled to his friend.

Creeping toward them, however, was the creature that had fallen on the escalator. His ghoulish companion, the one who was able to ride the whole way without falling, was also approaching the two unsuspecting troopers.

Suddenly, to Roger’s surprise, the head of the standing zombie became visible from Roger’s perspective. He raised his gun and aimed for the creature’s forehead.

Peter tried to lift the roll gate but it wouldn’t move. It was still locked!

“You bastard,” Peter screamed in frustration.

“What?” Roger asked, his attention focused on the approaching ghouls.

“Still locked . . . on the side,” Peter said, pointing to another assembly. He moved to the far side of the gate. The same key fit, and Peter repeated the process.

But Roger could not share his joy. His attention was on the creature riding the escalator, almost near the top. Just as Roger was about to shoot, something caught his eye.

The fallen zombies, which up until now could not be seen behind the escalator railwall, suddenly came tumbling out onto the balcony floor.

A shaken Roger took fire, but his aim was inaccurate. The pressures were starting to build, and for one moment he stopped to think about the idiocy of what he was doing. That was his downfall, because it disturbed his concentration. His shot hit the standing zombie in the neck, tearing half the throat away. The creature was thrown off balance enough to lose its footing. It fell back down the escalator, but before it reached the bottom, it stopped rolling. The steps carried it back up toward the second floor again. It was still very much alive.

Two more creatures on the balcony struggled to stand. Roger watched them and then looked back over his shoulder. To his horror he saw that zombies from the side concourse were about a hundred and fifty feet away.

Working against time, Peter turned the key in the lock, but again the gate would not budge. It moved slightly, and Peter could see that it was free from the middle and far right mechanism, but that there was a third lock on the far left. He moved to it quickly.

As if they possessed some kind of primitive antennae, the other creatures on the first floor began to take note of the action upstairs, and they, too, started to move.

Zombies surrounded the troopers on all sides now. Those who had managed to climb the stationary stairway were now beginning to reach the second floor, but they were far down the main balcony. In order to reach the entrance to Porter’s they would have to pass the administrative corridor.

Roger steadied his nerves and collected his thoughts. In the back of his mind he was wondering what the hell was taking Peter so damn long.

He fired his rifle again and one of the nearby zombies fell in a heap. His confidence restored, he looked around for more of the enemy to mow down.

“For God’s sake, Stephen,” Fran called down the stairway upon hearing Roger’s shot. “Let’s get up on the roof . . .” she cried out to him desperately.

At the middle landing, Steve stared down into the darkness below. More gunfire could be heard from the mall. He was stuck: part of him wanted to run up to Fran and escape with her in the chopper. The other part wanted to go down and get into the action.

“It’s all right,” he said, trying to convince himself as well. “Those things don’t move fast enough to catch us.” The last part of his sentence was practically drowned out by the staccato beat of the gunfire.

With a loud rumble, the large gate finally freed itself from its bonds and rolled up. Peter ducked into the store even as the gate was still rising. The momentum of the heavy metal carried the lip out of Peter’s grasp, and it rolled out of his reach. It jerked up into its fully open position and rolled back down slightly, but still Peter could not reach the lip. It was over ten feet to the ceiling. The bottom of the gate rested about three feet above Peter’s outstretched fingertips.

Panicking for the first time since the whole horrible situation evolved, Peter turned to see the zombies advancing.

Roger had just dropped another with a clean shot through the head, then he backed into the archway of Porter’s entranceway. Desperately, Peter looked around for something to stand on in order to reach the elusive gate.

Steadily, the zombies advanced toward the arch.

Peter grabbed a small counter used to display shoes, but it was deceptively heavy, and he called out to Roger.

“Here . . . come on . . .”

Unfortunately, Roger had to abandon his strategic post at the arch in order to help Peter drag over the little counter. They dragged it to a point just at the side of the open arch and Peter immediately jumped up on top of it. At that instant, a zombie rounded the corner and grabbed at Peter’s leg.

Startled, Peter started to kick, and the awkward motion caused him to fall off the little counter. Gracefully, he landed on his feet, but he was out on the balcony beyond the arch. Quickly, Roger brought his rifle butt around against the creature’s head and the zombie fell backward, but it was still alive.

A few other creatures were only a few feet from Peter, who was now unarmed as his gun sat on the small counter inside the store. Roger leveled off his rifle but couldn’t fire, since Peter was in his line of vision. Suddenly, Peter made a move, and like a football player, cut to the left and then to the right. Diving, he threw himself at one of the creatures, carrying it into the store.

Roger, all the while, had been firing on the advancing zombies, dropping one and then another. “Behind you, behind you,” Peter cried to Roger as he jumped back up on the counter.

The creature trapped in the store had knocked over a cosmetics display and tubes of lipsticks, compacts, cylinders of eye liner and mascara rolled around under its feet. Finally, the creature leaned against the glass case that displayed false eyelashes and plastic nails and was able to regain its footing.

In an instant, Roger turned and fired. The creature fell. In that time, Peter was able to grab the lip of the roll gate, and he started to bring it down.

During all the commotion, several creatures gathered in the archway. They stood there, clutching at the air with clawlike hands. One stood in the middle of the path of the roll gate, blocking its downward progress.

Roger took careful aim and fired point-blank into the forehead of the zombie who was blocking the gate. It flew backward, crashing into a few of its brothers. As the gate started to lower, the clutching hands of the other zombies seemed to reach out and try to strangle Roger for killing one of their own. Roger dropped his rifle and ran to the gate now to try and help pull it down. Peter, still holding onto the lip, jumped off the counter to get more leverage.

The two troopers were now sweating profusely. Large areas of dark were spreading under the arms and on the back of their uniforms. They were struggling to move the gate steadily down. It was now only four feet from the floor, but the creatures, who seemed to feel no pain, were throwing themselves in the path of the descending gate, making it more difficult. One of them tried to crawl underneath, and its torso just got through as the gate slammed down against its chest. Its arms grabbed for Peter’s legs, and its mouth gaped open. Its mutilated body prevented the gate from engaging in the floor mechanisms.

Roger let go of the gate as Peter tried to hold it against the creatures outside. Both men were exhausted now, and barely had enough strength to pull the gate down, let alone battle the zombies. But some inner resource, some extra dose of adrenaline, coursed through their veins. Grabbing his rifle, Roger brought the butt straight down, crushing the pawing zombie’s skull. The zombie went limp, and Roger tried to push it clear of the gate, but the pressure was too enormous.