Dead World (Book 1): Dead Come Home (11 page)

Just as he put the Desert Eagle back into his waistband and took up the rifle, he heard the sound of a raspy gasp from behind him. He spun around, snapping the rifle butt into his shoulder, ready to fire.

This is not Ma
, he told himself, though the thought was of little comfort.

Her spine must have been damaged when they’d fed upon her. She crunched forward, clawed for him, barely sitting up, her legs not moving. She chomped at the air. Yellow eyes darted back and forth.

Mike’s vision blurred. He could see the twisted figure before him. In his mind’s eye, he could see her reaching out to give him a hug.

His hands shook. He tried to line up the sights, but they wouldn’t sit still. In all his years, he had never held a weapon so heavy.

His shoulders convulsed. Not since his first firefight, when he’d been paralyzed by terror, had his body refused to obey him so vehemently. This wasn’t the enemy … this was his Ma.

For more than a brief moment, perhaps longer than he would ever realize, Mike O’Connell stood over the reanimated corpse of his mother like a gelatinous statue, in a state of near-catatonic shock.

At some point, Mike realized that he had cocked the lever on the antique Winchester rifle, a late 19
^th
century piece that had always been the pride and joy of his father’s gun collection. As though in a trance, he pulled back the hammer and drew a bead on his Ma with Dad’s rifle. She had long been the most beloved person in Mike’s life … the only reason he’d ever had to come back home, the only thing that allowed him to still feel human.

Mike stood there, his mind trying to reconcile the matricidal sin his hands had committed. The rifle fell from his trembling palms. The crash of the stock thudding to the carpet slammed through him like roll of thunder.

He knelt and gingerly scooped up Ma’s lifeless corpse. He worked his arms into a cradle to pick up her destroyed body in one piece. Carefully, lovingly, as though she had simply fallen asleep on the couch, he carried her to the bed in the next room. He retrieved her favorite quilt from the hall closet and covered her with it gently. He stepped out of the room and shut the door, making sure it was shut as firmly as possible … as though he never wanted it to open again.

He turned around and slumped against the door, sliding down to the floor. His head hung between his knees as the metal-armor of his mental world shattered like a stained glass window.

Moments later, something caused Mike to pop up his head, pulling him from his sad trance. What was that? Was some knocking on the front door? He had only been dimly aware of the sound at first. He listened closely. There it was again.

Who could that be? A survivor? Or one of these godforsaken things? I don’t think these undead things bother to knock.

* * *

Joseph drove straight through the small towns of Alvord and Bowie without so much as slowing down. He blew through both towns with tunnel vision. He didn’t give a damn what was happening in the small towns. With the exception of a few northbound truckers, he was still one of the relative few running in that direction. He guessed everyone else felt that just being outside of the Metroplex made them safe. He wasn’t about to take any chances—road rage could easily escalate into another riot if enough people got involved and no cops were around to keep things under control.

Joseph kept his eyes on nothing but the road. He wanted to know exactly what was in front of him … and to hell with everything else. Perhaps if he had paid more attention to his surroundings, he might have noticed the figures shambling with the same off-kilter posture as Ryan or standing absently in front yards or beating against the doors of roadside homes. He might also have noticed the bloody palm prints on windows, blood pooled on front porches and smeared across doors.

Keep your eyes on the road, Joseph. Fuck me, I killed Ryan. Get to Wichita Falls; you can sort things out there, away from all the craziness in the city. Shit, I killed Ryan. Eyes on the road, moron.

His mental mantra was interrupted by the sudden realization that he wasn’t alone on the road anymore. Other cars swarmed around him and flew past him, snapping his mind back into gear. Joseph started watching his escape routes again.

He could almost hear his high school Driver’s Ed. teacher preaching about knowing where your escape routes are. For the second time that day he was actively driving defensively, something he hadn’t really done in years.

The miles rolled past.

A sapphire blue Taurus calmly passed Joseph on the left side. He looked over in time to see that there were dents in the hood. He had no doubts that the car next to him had come out of a riot similar to the mess from which he had recently fled. He looked at the driver through the cracked passenger window. The woman’s face was ashen, damp hair sticking to pale skin.

Something moved in the back seat of the Taurus. It was small and fleeting; for a moment Joseph thought he had imagined the flash of motion.

Joseph kept glancing back at the car.

A small, bandaged hand arced slowly toward the rear passenger window. The hand turned and pressed against the glass as if its owner was slowly rolling over in the back seat. A child’s face appeared in the rear window next to the hand. The kid’s face was a mess of gashes and blood, and he looked like he’d recently been mauled by a pack of rabid dogs. The cuts on his face, oddly, seemed to have stopped bleeding. Something had bitten off the top half of his left ear and torn off a piece of his lower lip.

The child pushed himself into a kneeling position and turned toward the woman driving the car.

Joseph took both eyes off the road and watched the little kid grab a fistful of the woman’s hair and her shoulder. He dragged himself over the back of the seat and sank his teeth into the flesh of her collar. The woman jerked down and to the left, trying to get away from the child’s teeth. She groped for a handhold on the child’s blood slicked T-shirt. The kid grabbed her right hand and latched onto it like a pit bull. Joseph nearly vomited when he saw the kid pull his head back, taking away a chunk of flesh from the woman’s wrist as though it was a turkey leg.

Joseph noticed the road curving to the right just in time to keep from running off of it. He hit his horn in a futile attempt to warn the woman in the Taurus. She either didn’t notice or was too focused on trying to protect herself from the psychotic child. The Taurus plowed through the rail and rolled several times. He wasn’t sure, but Joseph thought he saw the child fly out through the windshield before the car crunched to a rest on the driver’s side. The woman may have still been in the car but, from what was left of it, she was certainly dead.

Joseph thought about stopping to see if he could help. His instincts told him to keep moving and not stop until he had no other choice.

No one stopped.

Joseph went back to listening to the radio to see if they had any new information. He scanned through a few radio stations; none of them had anything new running, just the same crap about staying inside.

Henrietta was quiet. Joseph figured people had started taking the emergency statements
very
seriously. He looked over the freeway to one of the side streets. A police cruiser sat in the center of the road with its lights flashing, but the officer was not in it. Joseph assumed he must have taken cover in the gas station on the corner. Near the edge of town he saw an ambulance with an unattended gurney. The patient strapped to the gurney bounced around as if trying to breaks the straps holding him down.

Okay, where are the paramedics? They should be trying to calm that guy down before he hurts himself.

His stomach rumbled. Out of habit, he looked at his watch—quarter to two. A moment later he saw a green, travel distance sign, “Wichita Falls 20 miles.” He pushed thoughts of hunger aside and slid his car in behind one of the big rigs.

He blew past a hitchhiker shuffling along the side of the road. He glanced at his rearview mirror a second after he passed the hitchhiker. A red Suburban jumped to the right as its right front tire blew out. The driver must have jammed on the brakes and turned the wheels left to avoid the hitchhiker. The man snapped his head up at the sound of the tire blowing but didn’t seem to attach any significance to the grinding metal or screeching tires that were coming his way. He didn’t attempt to run to safety or jump out of the path of the careening SUV. The Suburban swerved too late and plowed broadside into the man, leaving a bloody smear on the side of the road.

If
I make it to Wichita Falls, it may be nothing short of a miracle.

Just past a small pond with a fountain that sat in the median, traffic slammed to a halt yet again. Joseph took a deep breath and started looking for a way out. He was still more than a mile from the nearest exit and had to cross a bridge to get there. As much as he hated the idea, he settled down to wait for traffic to inchworm its way forward until he could slide up to the exit along the shoulder.

Joseph rested his arm on the door and used his hand to block as much of the sun as he could. He turned the radio back up and scanned through every radio station, mainly just to pass the time. He tried to think of what he was going to do to find more information and, more importantly, food and a safe place to sleep.

An hour later, he still had no clue what he was going to do, but he had moved forward enough to clear the bridge and get an idea of what caused the traffic jam. Traffic collapsed to just the left lane a few hundred yards later. From the number of flashing lights in the immediate area, it must have been a hellacious wreck.

A red light on the gauge panel caught his eye. He looked at his gas gauge—his car was down to fumes.

His panic level jumped to critical mass.

Joseph jumped on the left shoulder and slid up to the clear left exit for Highway 79. He didn’t care where he was heading now that he was out of Dallas. Besides, he was almost out of gas. The only thing that mattered to him was that he was moving again.

About two miles down the smaller highway, Joseph saw the tall sign of a
Fina
station. He edged toward the right hand lane so he could exit. A crack of thunder erupted from his left. He looked back to the gas station in time to see a fireball rising up from a tower of black smoke.

Joseph stayed in the right hand lane and followed the right exit that looked like more highway leading back toward civilization. A black SUV refused to move over blocking him into an exit lane. He eased his car to a halt at the stop sign. A traffic cop waved him to turn left through the intersection. He went straight through the next stop sign.

Joseph went less than a mile before he started panicking again. The road continued away from town and had nothing that looked like a gas station anywhere in sight. He turned right at the first stop sign onto an ill-repaired country road. He heard the snarling of fighting dogs. He looked to see what had the dogs so riled up. He was repulsed to find that they were eating a llama. For a second Joseph wondered how the dogs had gotten out of their kennel and into the llama pen. He decided he didn’t want to know.

At the end of the road, Joseph’s skin began to crawl as he approached a well-kept cemetery on his left. His terrified imagination shot into overdrive when he saw about ten people milling aimlessly about in the front lawn of a funeral home across from the cemetery. He hesitated speeding off long enough to notice the broken bay windows and the body lying beneath them on the ground.

Joseph turned left and stomped on the gas, not giving a damn that his car was already nearly out of fuel.

He drove about three miles down the two-lane highway, passing an area marked
Lakeside City — Pop. 984,
before finally finding a gas station at a Y-fork in a small country road. He coasted into the gas station and stopped in front of one of the ancient looking pumps. He closed his eyes, calmly counted to five, and climbed out of his car. He had the nozzle almost into his tank when he noticed the sign “All Pumps Pre-Pay.”

Joseph re-racked the nozzle and screwed the gas cap back on. He walked into the store as if everything was perfectly normal. His head snapped up when he heard the distinct
Clack-Clack
of a shotgun chambering a shell.

Joseph watched the back door swing in. A person came in and shuffled quietly forward. Joseph would have sworn he was hallucinating … the side of the person’s throat appeared to have been torn away, as if by an animal.

“I didn’t think you would. Now get da hell outta hurr,” the man ordered, waving the shotgun to the side before re-leveling it at Joseph’s head.

Joseph slowly raised a finger at the strange man emerging from the shadows of the back room as he backed his way out the front door.