Dying Days (15 page)

Three hours later she had run out of work to do and knew that she had been stalling. She didn’t want to go outside and dig two graves for the men. A part of her didn’t even care about doing it, but she felt compelled. They had been alive, after all, and it would be proper to bury them and say something.

Back outside the sun was fierce, with no clouds in the Florida sky. The two bodies were right where she’d left them. She wasn’t surprised, but then again not much could surprise her at this point. If they had been dancing or missing when she’d come outside it wouldn’t have shocked her. In fact, it now disappointed her that she’d have to bury them. She needed a shovel, which she didn’t have.

The house up the road was quiet. She wondered if they had a shed out back, and if she could keep enough distance from the house in the event that the undead inside could escape. There were no zombies outside the fence in the immediate area. Darlene decided to chance it. The sandy road leading to the house offered nothing save a few old footprints.

By the time she reached the bridge she was drenched in sweat. “I need another bath,” she whispered. From here the grounds were overgrown with weeds poking through the sand. The dirt road was dusty and rutted from long-ago traffic. The front yard had, at one time, been landscaped. A section of stone wall ran the length of the driveway to the left, now showing wear in a spot and leaning back. A line of short bushes had been planted on the right, now all stunted and dead.

The house loomed before her in the midday heat like a creature ready to pounce. The windows had been boarded hastily from outside, the front door jammed with two rocking chairs and nailed shut.

Darlene was holding her breath as she put a hesitant foot on the first step. “Go around to the back,” she whispered. She didn’t need to be going onto the porch; she already knew what awaited her inside. She felt like the stupid chick in every horror movie that ignores the scary noises downstairs and goes into the basement, clad in her underwear, and then is amazed when an axe is sticking out of her head.

She put her full weight down on her foot. Not a sound. The wooden steps were solid. Gingerly she made it up the remaining four steps and stood at the front door with her Desert Eagle in hand. She didn’t have eight bullets left – three in the Desert Eagle, three in the Sig Sauer 226 - or even know if he had been telling the truth about the number inside. Maybe it was one and he wanted to scare her away. Maybe there weren’t any dead inside and the house was filled with food and drink, piles of clothing and form-fitting bras and panties with the tags still attached.

The next step forward and the boards creaked.

Darlene fell back when the banging inside started, right in front of her. It sounded like a hundred undead were inside, slamming against the wall. The windows and door shook with the impact.

Scared and ashamed at how easily she’d been rattled, Darlene ran from the porch and around to the back, in search of a shed and a shovel.

Chapter Five

As she finished burying the two men night was falling. The sounds of the trapped had brought more undead to investigate. Darlene counted almost thirty of them on the other side of the fence groaning and reaching for her. She ignored them as best she could.

At first she was going to simply walk up to them and begin smacking them with the shovel, but she knew it would be futile. The fence would keep her from doing permanent damage. In a strange way she was enjoying the company after being alone for so long. Even if her company wanted to rip off her head and fuck her headless corpse.

Back inside she drank more water and made a can of sirloin burger soup. As a kid she’d hated eating soup, but her father insisted on making it a meal at least once per week. She remembered dreading it when her parents came home from food shopping and her father stacked another three cans on the topmost shelf for later in the week.

Exhausted, Darlene checked the locks on the doors, stared into the darkness outside for lights, listened for noises, and then finally turned in for the night.

The next morning she rose, cleaned up, ate more noodle soup, and was mildly disappointed to see that the undead had moved on during the night. She wished she had binoculars so that she could climb onto the roof and see for miles.

With nothing else to do today, she decided to clean. The undead already knew she was here so she decided to see if the radio worked. Maybe they had a CD she could play while she was cleaning. Darlene decided against it, though. The zombies weren’t the only thing she had to fear; out here there was probably more than one Lazy Eye and a noise that loud would give her away.

The air conditioning felt nice. She found some over-priced toothbrushes on a shelf peg and decided to give this place a thorough cleaning. A bottle of cheap bleach and some spray bottles of cleaning supplies were in the small stockroom. The mop and mop bucket were both broken and looked like they hadn’t been used a long time before the end of the world. It was just as well. For the first time in months Darlene had a task besides finding food, shelter, and trying not to get killed. She dropped to her hands and knees in front of the counter and began to wash the floor, one inch at a time.

The blankets and pillows smelled funky, so they were hand-washed in the sink before she took them outside and draped them over the gas pumps to dry in the ocean breeze.

A lone zombie crested the dunes over the broken bridge, moving away from her. She wondered if they ever stopped, ever grew tired or ever had a real destination in mind when noises didn’t compel them to move in a certain direction. Once again she longed for days that were long gone. In movies she used to watch with her father when she was a kid the zombies would come at night, dark and dreary, gray and overcast, with rain and lightning strikes silhouetting the background.

Darlene’s reality was even more disturbing: blue, clear skies, the smell of the beach, the sound of the pounding surf, and the undead. She couldn’t remember the last time it had rained since she’d been this far south. She wasn’t complaining after the long, cold winter in Baltimore, but still… a little rainfall would be nice, something to break up the sun and the heat.

Once again, before going back inside to continue her cleaning project, she stepped around the side of the station and looked at the house.

It was quiet, as she knew it would be. She almost wished they’d found a way out, one at a time, so she could finish them off and grab the treasure inside. She felt like Laura Croft or Indiana Jones, only they weren’t too scared to kick down the door and start shooting and killing with a trusted machete. Instead, she decided to go inside and keep scrubbing with a damn toothbrush.

At first the noise was so unexpected and so far away that she ignored it and went back inside. It seemed like a distant memory. Every now and then, especially after a fitful night of nightmares, she would sometimes wake and hear a voice or a radio playing or traffic in the distance. Fully awake she would cease to hear anything but the wind or the undead.

As it got closer she stopped and stared at the ceiling. “What the Hell?” she whispered. Back outside she stared at the sky.

She heard a plane.

“Where are you?” Darlene spun in a circle, looking and looking. There was no cloud cover. It grew louder, the sound of the engine. It might be a Cessna, something small. It wasn’t a commercial airliner.
Did it matter at this point, anyway?

Darlene couldn’t remember the last time a plane, helicopter or air balloon had been spotted in the sky. She shielded her eyes from the glare and wished there was a sunglass rack inside. It made her laugh to think of her standing out here with a pair of huge white tourist sunglasses on and one of those huge weaved hats on her head.

She was positively giggling by the time the plane, indeed a Cessna, shot overhead from the west, glided straight out to sea and then shot up the coast to the north.

Immediately a score of zombies appeared and began to follow the smoke trail in the sky.

Darlene ran inside, locked up, grabbed two bags of groceries, and decided to follow.

Chapter Six

She lost sight and sound of the plane by the time she hopped the fence. Getting back across the water was easier because it was low tide, but she still watched for submerged undead. Back across she moved as fast as she could on A1A. A mob of zombies were ahead of her, following the plane. She knew from experience that they would give up once it was completely gone. She didn’t want to be around when that happened. A single zombie or even two or three wasn’t a problem in wide open spaces, but twenty or thirty could easily surround you or trip you up.

After half a mile the undead began veering off into random directions. Most of them moved toward the east and the beach. Three stayed course on the road. Trying to be as quiet as possible while still moving, Darlene quickened her pace and was soon past them. One of them grunted but when she saw that none were before her she began to jog.

Bad move.

The noise of her bags jangling brought two undead from out of nowhere, directly in her path. She shouldered through them, getting slashed with rotting fingernails as she moved. Now she was running. Two abandoned cars were in the road and she stayed as far away as possible. It was a good thing because a zombie, legless, was behind the lead car. She could hear its jaws snap as she ran past.

Up ahead, about a quarter mile, a solitary zombie was heading north. Darlene slowed her pace and watched it. She was breathing heavily from her short run and was frustrated to be so out of shape. “You’re fucking thirty-five, not eighty-five,” she whispered.

The zombie suddenly fell forward and was gone.

Darlene stopped and looked around. Only open road and sand greeted her. She walked quickly to the spot where the zombie had been and saw a crater in the road. Ten feet below the zombie struggled to move, run through on a bevy of sharp wooden spikes in the hole. He wasn’t alone. Three more had been caught as well, their bodies falling to pieces on the spikes. Darlene looked around again. The trap was man-made, running across the road. To either side large wooden stakes had been driven into the dunes at angles meant to impale.

On the other side of the pit she noticed several tripwires. The dunes to the west were covered in short pieces of sharpened metal. She’d have to proceed with caution. The paranoid feeling of being watched came over her and she ducked down instinctively and moved toward the beach, careful to watch what she was stepping on.

The waves were strong today, slapping against a horrific sight: a whale, half submerged in the surf, was being eviscerated by a group of zombies. Darlene nearly puked when she saw one of them trying to ejaculate on the dead, bloated creature as other zombies pulled off chunks of flesh. The scene was surreal; gulls fought with the zombies for pieces. She wasn’t surprised when one of the gulls got too close and his head was promptly bitten off.

Sticking to the dunes, Darlene tried to ignore the scene and not fall apart. She’d seen some disgusting things in the last few months, things that might have made the old her go mad. Now she tried to chalk it up to just another nauseating sight in the long line of many. There were plenty more in her future, she guessed.

She supposed that the secret was to keep moving and not think too long on any one thing. When this first started she tried to think of pleasant thoughts like vacations on the Maine coast as a child or going to see the Red Sox with her family or playing in the park at the end of her street. Nightmares about zombies coming out of the surf, Fenway Park overrun by the undead and other children dismembered on the slide and the swings at the park forced her to look ahead.
Always look ahead.

She circumvented the road pit about two hundred feet north before trying to get on stable ground once again. The road was devoid of footprints and traps. Up ahead a charred school bus was on its side, blocking the path. To either side the sand had built up, creating an effective barrier. Darlene doubted that it was natural.

There was no movement from inside or around the bus but she proceeded with caution. If there was going to be an ambush – from undead or living – this would be perfect. She had the machete and the Desert Eagle at the ready as she took tentative steps forward, eyes darting all around her.

To the right, closest to the beach, was a path through the dune. She could either try to climb the bus or follow the trail and go around it via the beach.