Dead Hunger V: The Road To California (42 page)

My AR-15 was ready and my Walther was loaded, too.  I hoped not to need either.

We made it in another fifteen minutes.  When we got to the top, not one abnormal – not one red-eye – waited at the entry hatch.  I got to the top of the hill and saw the steel door embedded in the earth.

“David,” said Serena, touching my shoulder and pointing.  “Look.”

We all looked.  Just thirty yards down the hill, we saw twenty rotters moving away, over the rough terrain.  They were being drawn by Lolita Lane, I knew.  I prayed there were no red-eyes within view who might turn their rotting bodies, topped with their eerily perfect heads and crimson eyes, spotting us and forsaking Lola’s call to instead come after us.

None did.  We watched them until their heads slowly dropped out of sight, and only then did I grab my radio.

“Uncle Bug,” I said.  “We’re here.  Turn on your camera.”

“Roger,” he said.  A moment later, I heard the hum of a tiny motor and saw a camera painted with camouflage mounted on a similarly painted rod sticking out of the earth.  It panned us for a moment, then stopped when it was pointed at me.  I waved.

“Holy shit, Davey!  Is that you?”

“In the flesh.  Why?”

“You’ll see,” he said.  This was followed by the sound of metal sliding in a slot.  We all took a step back and watched as the doors  embedded into the rock slid open from the center in both directions, revealing a stairway leading down inside.

“Well, what you staring at, kid?” he said.  “You guys get in so I can close it up.  Now!”

I waved the others in and got on my radio.  “Russell, you read?”

“Yeah,” he said.  “We’re about a quarter mile farther back down the road, Dave.  Tons of them.  Red-eyes and the others, too.  Never seen so many pregnant things at once.”

“Just be happy they’ll never be born, Russell.  And stay clear of them.  Tell Lola to keep calling them, but you be careful.  The WAT-5 doesn’t fool the red-eyes.”

“Roger that.”

“Okay,” I said.  “We’re going inside now.  You guys be careful.”

“I didn’t last this long being anything else,” said Russell.  “Keep in touch.”

With that, I followed Albert, Nelson, Rachel and Serena into the hideaway home that had become my Uncle Bug’s private prison.

*****

             
Chapter Seventeen             

“Wow,” said Serena, looking from Bug to me.  “Crazy resemblance.  You guys could be twins.”

“Yeah, if I were twenty years younger or the other way around,” Bug said. 

I hugged my uncle, and it did register that our hair was about the same length, and we both had long beards and the same blue eyes.  We were identical in height, and he wore a brown pullover tee-shirt and jeans.  Being unable to see any wrinkles beneath all the facial hair, it was almost like looking in a mirror.

“So what you’re saying is that my uncle’s good looking, too,” I said.

Serena smiled and moved in for a hug from Uncle Bug.   Rachel held out her hand and Bug shook it briefly, then pulled her in for a hug, too.

Albert was not in the mood for hellos.  Instead, he slowly walked the perimeter of the huge room, touching the many metal doors embedded into what appeared to be a solid rock wall.

Nelson got his hug and said, “Dude, I’ve never met a Bug before.  But I hear you grow hydroponic pot.”

“Not anymore,” he said.  “Grew enough to last me a lifetime before all this shit ever got started.”

“Good to know,” said Nelson.

“Uncle Bug, where are the other people?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Albert, walking back up the small flight of steps and standing directly in front of my uncle.  “How many, and where are they?”

“I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” said Bug.  “But I recognize you, kid.  I saw you on the cameras down below once in a while.  You’d come out of the woods and just stare at all the crazies.”

Albert nodded.  “That was me.  My dad was with those crazies.”

“Sorry,” said Bug.  “Lots of good folks turned.”

“None as good as my dad,” said Albert.

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Bug. 

“Where are they?” asked Albert.

Uncle Bug turned to me and said, “This guy’s a fuckin’ buzz kill.  I didn’t open the door after over a year for this shit, and –”

“Uncle Bug,” I interrupted.  “Albert is hoping his mother’s inside here somewhere.”

“Oh,” he said.  “Kid, I’m sorry.”

“What about?” asked Albert.  “Sorry, buddy, but your mom’s not here, or sorry for being a greedy hermit for a year and letting everybody fend for themselves?”

“I feel for your situation, buddy, but you have no fuckin’ idea what you’re talkin’ about.”  He turned to me and clasped me on the shoulder.  “We’ve got a lot to talk about, Davey.  Man, it’s good to see you.  Good to see anyone.”

“Uncle Bug, we don’t have a lot of time.  The only reason that horde isn’t out there right now is because Lola and Russell drew them away.”

Bug nodded.  “So I have a decision to make.  About leaving.”

“Yeah, you do,” I said.  “And you don’t have long to make it.  You said you were here with one other person.  Where?”

“In the nursery.”

“The nursery?” I said.

“Yeah.  It’s my daughter.  Isis.”

“What?”

“Isis.  After the Goddess of motherhood, magic and fertility.  She’s just over a year old,” said Bug.

“Where’s Angela?” I asked.  “You said you –”

“Now it’s my turn to interrupt,” he said.  “I didn’t finish the story, and it’s a long one that I’ve never told before.  Don’t know if I can, but you’re my blood, Davey, so if there’s a time, I guess it’s now.”

I nodded.  I had some idea of what he would say from the sadness in his eyes.

“Anyway, I suppose we have a little time if we’re going to use what you’ve brought in those bags.  You guys need a shower?  Some food?”

“We’re good,” said Serena.  “The shower sounds great, but I think we can wait until after we set up the still to extract the urushiol.”

We got the four bags of poison ivy unwrapped and opened.  All of us sat down and began shredding the plant matter with our hands until the pieces were as small as we could make them.  After that, we stuffed them into the tank and Bug got it closed up and powered on.  At the end was a half-gallon sized, glass container.  I hoped to see oil in there within a couple of hours.

When we were done, we rinsed the sticky residue off our hands and sat down.

“Alright,” said Bug.  “I suppose I’ll tell you how things got to be the way they are right now.”

“Got any of that pot?” asked Nelson.  “I wouldn’t mind a little toke before story time, and mine’s in my backpack.”  He smiled, and Bug smiled back and glanced at me for approval. 

“Helps him focus,” I said.

Bug laughed.  “Me too, once upon a time.  Sure, Nelson.  See that white desk over there?  There’s a tray and a pipe in the top drawer.  Knock yourself out.”

“Why would I do that?” asked Nelson.  “I just want to get high.”

My uncle just stared at him.  Rachel shook her head.

Nelson shrugged and laughed.  “Sorry man,” he said.  “My kook act dies hard.”  He was already halfway to the desk.

The dude was pretty funny. 

*****

The room was almost a perfect circle.  Around the perimeter were massive steel beams for support, and eight metal doors of some kind, which Bug explained led to various storage and living quarters.  The main room had to be sixty feet in diameter, the floors bare concrete.  Rubber mats were placed in work areas, like the kitchen, and he had spread out large, carpeted area rugs beneath the sitting areas.

Overall, it looked like a industrial-themed loft in New York, but without a view.

Bug had hung paintings, too.  Mostly scenes of a snow-capped Mount Shasta and the town of Dunsmuir, and I even noticed one painting of the Railroad Park in which we had stayed.  An old, framed photograph of me sat atop the white desk where Nelson got the pot.  In the picture, I was about twenty years old, my hair still long, but my beard pretty much non-existent.

Albert said again, “Look.  I know I’m not the reason Dave and these guys came here, but I can’t do or think about anything else until you show me where these other people are,” he said. 

“The problem is getting them out,” said Bug.  “The garage level is the base.  It’s like a 5-car, so it’s big.  In the northeast corner, which is just to your left as you walk in from the outside, there’s a set of four steps that lead to a steel door.  Behind that is a 20’ x 30’ chamber where they’re trapped.  It’s got one gravity flush toilet that still seems to be limping along and tons of food storage in recessed alcoves, and there’s plenty of that.  I hadn’t gotten my water stocked up in that area yet, but they had enough for a couple of months.  They’ve been staying alive by drinking runoff from the mountain streams and snow that I could never seem to completely seal up.”

“Good thing,” said Albert.

“It was, in retrospect.  God’s plan, maybe.”

I thought it strange that my uncle, who didn’t trust anyone, had any belief in God at all.

Bug continued.  “I can’t leave the lights on for them all the time, but I turn them on once in a while, and I talk to them.”

“Do you know their names?   Ever make a list?”

“Most of them.  I didn’t have anyone to give the list to,” said Bug.  “They’re alive, and they’re eating.”

“What’s beyond that room?” I asked.

“Where you are now,” he said.  “The whole configuration is shaped kind of like a Z,” he said.  “From the garage, you’d open the lower door and go up the steps on your immediate left.  When you get inside the chamber where they’re trapped, you’d turn right and walk to the end.  There are storage alcoves at the end and on the right, but at the end on the left is the door into this chamber.  Three steps up and you’re in.”

“So why the hell didn’t you just let them in?” asked Albert, incredulous.

“Don’t you think I would have?” asked Uncle Bug, looking directly at Albert.  “Buddy, I know it’s no fuckin’ picnic in there after a year, but I can’t open that door to let them in here without opening the lower door, and with all them zombies in there, that’ll kill ‘em.”

“Why?” asked Albert, not breaking his gaze with Bug.

“Something happened to the electrical lines,” said my uncle.  Wires fused or something.  The button for the lower door doesn’t do shit.  If I hit the button to open the door into this chamber, the lower door from the garage opens, too, only it starts opening first.”

“So they could be inundated with infecteds before they could even start to move,” said Serena.

“Yeah, and I’m pretty sure there’s a nice number of your red-eyes down there and they’re not exactly lackadaisical.”

“You painted a picture that meshes with what we thought as far as the garage occupancy goes,” I said.  “You got any surveillance in there?”

“Yep,” he said.  Bug walked across the room to where a bank of LCD computer monitors were arranged on brackets that ran them three high and seven wide.  It looked like a setup an ambitious day trader would put together.  Twenty-one monitors in all.  At the moment they were all dark.

“You can see why I keep them off,” he said.  “It’s a lot of power draw.”

He reached under the table below them and pushed a button.  The monitor marked MAIN ENTRY came on, and showed the exterior entry hatch.

“This is where you came in.”  He pushed another button on the one marked GARAGE EXTERIOR.

“Shit,” he said.  “I haven’t turned this one on.  You guys did a number down there, too.  What a mess.”

“It was a lot of work,” said Rachel.  “Some close calls, too.”

“The question was, what’s on the lower level?’ asked Albert.

Bug leaned forward and pressed the button on the monitor marked GARAGE INTERIOR.

A mass of something appeared on the 27” monitor, but it wasn’t clear what it was.

“Too dark,” I said.  “No such thing as low light cameras?”

“Don’t need ‘em,” said Uncle Bug.  He slid a panel up on the table and pushed a button that said G.I. LIGHTS.

When the light chased away the darkness, I think we all physically drew away from the monitor.  The room was packed with the stinking, walking dead, and as we looked, several faces featuring piercing, red eyes turned toward the light and the camera.  In a massive push, they came toward it.  The gnashing and chewing was visible in the HD monitor, and at their feet we could see what appeared to be chunks of bone, some pulverized to powder.  Several skulls littered the floor, and among it all were torn pieces of clothing and shoes – so many pairs of shoes of all kinds. 

“Oh, my God,” whispered Serena.

“Are they all … infected?” asked Albert.

“In this room, yeah,” said my uncle.  “The ones that weren’t died pretty nasty deaths a long time ago.”

I cringed.  “Can you show us the survivors?” I asked.

Bug thumbed a joystick by the button and the camera panned to the entirely opposite direction until another aluminum door appeared on the monitor.

“This is the door to their chamber,” he said.  Bug then tilted the view downward, and we saw a skeleton – or rather, half a skeleton – on the floor, part of it beneath the door, keeping it about an inch from closing completely.

“What happened?” asked Nelson, still holding the now extinguished glass pipe in his hand.

“When everyone came running up my trail to get away from the creatures in town, me and my wife, Angela, had just gotten inside.  By then, I knew that whatever happened was worse than anything I’d ever expected.  Like I told you, Davey, I thought I’d be fighting our fucked up government – not some extremely efficient human transformation shit where your neighbors turn into monsters and try to kill you.”

“Hey,” I said.  “I’m sure all the people running were as surprised as you.”

“Yeah, I know” said Bug.  “Anyway, back to what happened.  The only doors that aren’t on electronic controls are the two big ones down there.  I planned on it, but didn’t have enough fuckin’ time to finish the work before this came on.  It all happened too fast.  So I went down and got those doors opened manually.  Before people from town got here, I got my ass back up here and monitored it with my cameras.  I used my speakers to instruct them what to do, but before long, I saw too many infected motherfuckers were getting inside with the healthy ones.”

“Wow,” said Rachel.  “We tried to open those doors,” she said.  “So if they’re not electronic, what’s holding them closed?”

“Belts, believe it or not,” said Bug.  “I yelled at ‘em, told ‘em too many sick fucks were getting inside.  That’s when the normal ones rushed the doors and started pulling them closed.  It was crazy, man.” 

At the memory, Bug broke out in beads of sweat.  He stared at the shuffling creatures in the monitor, obviously remembering.  “You can see it’s a big room.  I figure there are two hundred or so biters in there right now, but there were over three hundred people at first.  More were pouring in, but the people were freaked out and they were desperate.  They started pushing new arrivals away and pulling the doors closed.  I watched for what seemed like forever, because everyone rushing the doors started panicking when they saw those doors swinging shut.  Fought like crazy.  The people inside finally got ‘em almost closed, and the guys with baseball bats – about four of them, just started pulverizing anyone who blocked them from closing the rest of the way.”