Life Among The Dead (Book 2): A Castle Made of Sand (6 page)

“No. You stole my car!”

Strong hands pull Dustin through the open
window. Before he can react, he finds himself on the ground looking
up at a man with a shotgun. Recognition comes slowly at first, but
he knows it is the man from West 8th. Dustin’s words come out in a
panic. “I thought you were one of them! You had stuff all over your
face!”

“I was a pretty princess, and I looked
beautiful.” The man opens the driver’s side door and pulls the seat
forward for a little girl to enter.

Dustin is too stunned to scream as the man
slides behind the wheel and starts the Camaro. He is about to be
left on the road and all he can do is slowly look around at all the
dead that hobble ever closer.

The car doesn’t speed off, but the driver
calls to him. “You coming or what, Chachi?”

It isn’t the first time Dustin has been
called that. Some guys at the factory have mentioned his
resemblance to the fictional television character.

He dashes around to the passenger side,
staying close to the purple steel in case the offer is an extremely
cruel prank. But it’s no hoax, and the man waits for him to enter.
His heart is thundering in his chest, but he gains enough composure
to finally speak as the car travels through the macabre metropolis.
“Th… Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank my daughter.”

Dustin turns to express his gratitude to the
girl, but before he can release the words the man speaks again,
shaking his head. “Don’t talk to my daughter.”

The self-proclaimed ‘Superdad’ had found
himself stranded with the light of his life and no weapons. After
the dead moved away from his home, he had snuck to the delivery
truck that thankfully had a set of keys hidden in the visor. He
brought it home to load his daughter into it, along with whatever
he could scrounge as far as supplies. It wasn’t long before he
found a vehicle that would offer better protection, and a shotgun.
It was only a coincidence that he came across his own car. He and
his girl were on their way out of the burbs when the purple Camaro
came back towards them.

Dustin reaches into the back for his bags. He
pulls out a CD and attempts to slip it into the radio, but Superdad
stops him, slapping the disc to the floor.

He releases a frustrated sigh while slumping
in the seat. “Where are we going?”

“We, my daughter and I, are going to the
Hammond Grand. You are not invited.”

“What’s your problem with me?”

“Grand theft auto aside, it isn’t you, it’s
your type.”

“What type?”

“You’re like a finger in the coin return of
life. You want something for nothing, no matter how big or small,
or how much someone else may need it, or how pathetic it makes you
look. You think the world owes you.”

The boy turns away from the truth the
stranger rings out, crossing his arms in a pout. “The Hammond is
the biggest hotel in the city, why go there?”

“Yeah it’s the biggest. 49 floors and nearly
2,000 rooms, easily containing a thousand zombies. But, the top
five floors will be empty.”

“How do you know that?”

“I own the extermination company that won the
bid to fumigate the joint. Four floors at a time with one as a
buffer so they could stay open. There’s going to be plenty of food,
since today is the day they were supposed to start clearing the
mini-fridges before we sealed off the first zone. We’ll also have
roof access to signal a chopper.” Superdad points at a helicopter
in the air overhead. “What’s your plan? Where were you taking my
car?”

“North,” Dustin answers while chewing his
fingernails. “There’s a place up there called the Flag Pole…”

“The strip joint?”

“Yeah, my band has a gig there in a few
weeks.”

Superdad laughs. With the dead lumbering
around abandoned cars and the smoke rising up from several burning
buildings, he offers advice. “You may want to call first. See if
they’ve cancelled or not.”

Dustin feels stupid as he stares at his
hands.

“Daddy?” the little girl says from the
back.

Knowing her as well as he does, he knows
exactly what his kind child is thinking. “No.”

She says that simple word again, only now the
tone is different. It tells him that she insists that he do the
right thing. “Daddy.”

The father groans, but he’s about to
surrender and not liking it. “Look… Chachi, you can come with
us.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Like I said, there’ll be plenty of
food.”

Griffin drives in silence through the
nightmare the city has become. Kelly is dismayed over the state of
her hometown. The sight of the walking dead shuffling through her
old stomping grounds makes her want to cry. She would, if she
hadn’t already wasted all her tears on Randy over the past three
days. Focusing on her hands is her first alternative to looking out
the window. Next she looks at the driver who still wears his mask,
but the man doesn’t pay her any attention.

It’s the third option that really frightens
her. She looks around the car and peers into the backseat, which is
occupied by something she finds instantly unsettling. Her own face
stares back at her. All over the seat and on the floor are her CDs,
magazines with her on the cover, both official and unofficial fan
periodicals. Virtually anything licensed to bear her image is
stockpiled on the backseat: coffee mugs, stickers, fashion dolls,
lunch boxes. Slowly she returns her attention to the man driving,
possibly her biggest fan. She now has his full attention as well.
For the first time in a long while, she wishes her husband was with
her.

Randy is unaccustomed to driving in Waterloo.
He knows how to get to a few key points of interest: the bars and
strip clubs, the airport and the Hammond Grand Hotel, and of course
he knows where to find street corner pharmacists. But he has no
idea where the hospital is, and has gotten lost due to the blocked
roads that force him to double back. The streets are worse now than
when he first ventured home early this morning. He had seen the
flashing lights of the police cars and ambulances and heard their
sirens wail in the night, but now all is quiet save for the
occasional pop of gunfire in the distance, or explosions elsewhere.
He now wishes he had joined the other two, or at least had his
driver, because he’s lost on the wrong side of the tracks. Even
before the world went mad, before the dead learned how to walk,
this part of the city was no place he’d ever be caught dead in, but
he fears now that he just might be.

“Christ! The only white person
here,
other than myself, is the illuminated fellow on the crosswalk
sign,” the comedian laments as the sign goes out. “Even he has
abandoned me.”

His soft top convertible stops at yet another
blocked road, behind a large yellow school bus. Randy lays his head
on the wheel. He’s grown tired of this and doubts that he will ever
find the hospital. He is certain the place can’t be as dangerous as
the psychopath chaperoning his wife says it is. He hopes to find a
physician there with a liberal interpretation of the Hippocratic
Oath. One who might give him the medication he wants for a moderate
fee.

He knows he obviously will never get there if
he just sits behind a bus full of his true nightmare, children, or
as he calls them in his act, useless vermin.
That’s
exactly what he gets. Before the Brit can put his transmission in
reverse, the emergency door on the back of the bus pops open
spilling ‘tweeners all over the hood of his car. He emits a rather
lady-like scream and is unable to function for a moment. Once his
trembling fingers find the steering wheel, he attempts to back away
from the young-adult zombies that rise to their feet all around
him.

“Why’re you all going to school so early,
tell me that?” he screams as he hits the accelerator.

He had entered an alley of cars, but the
opening he now backs towards is sealed by more of the walking dead.
Seeing what these things can do to a person first hand, his
neighbors in their own convertible, he had the presence of mind to
close the top before departing the estate. The strong fabric
writhes above him. He knows he has unwanted passengers up there,
but he has no idea how long it can keep them out.

Randy Russell has to move, so he exits
through the passenger side of his beloved car before the dead can
surround him. He sprints to the curb and vaults a sedan parked at a
meter. Already lost, he runs down streets he’s never been on,
determining what turns to take at intersections by capitalizing on
the safest choices.

Randy comes to a dead end once more, and the
zombies are on his heels. A few police cruisers have been pushed
against one another by a large fire truck. The building to his
right is burning out of control since the responders are now gone.
He desperately cups his hands around his face as he looks in the
squad cars for a weapon, finding nothing.

He has to keep moving or else the dead will
have him. The angle at which the red emergency vehicle is situated
allows him to crawl beneath and along its undercarriage. He wants
to put the dead end to good use, and hopes his pursuers aren’t as
smart as he is.

“Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” he
says, once again standing on wet asphalt, surrounded by more
corpses.

Many are firemen from the very vehicle he has
just crawled under. They advance toward him on broken limbs. Some
crawl, unable to use their legs. More zombies are arriving from the
connecting streets. He’s trapped.

“Hey, what’s going on out there?” a voice
calls from somewhere.

Randy searches for the source and comes up
empty. He has his back against the burning building.

“Down here, man.”

Two eyes look up at Randy from a basement
window. The glass portal is opaque with spray-paint on the inside
and pushed outward. Though the place is on fire, Randy dives in
through the tight opening, choosing the lesser of two evils.

The subterranean apartment smells like
heaven. Randy Russell picks himself off of the floor to find he is
surrounded by flood tables and tall green plants. The ceiling is
lined with bright lights that are wrapped in tin foil to direct
every possible ray of artificial sun onto the crop. The gracious
host hands his guest a hand rolled joint. Marijuana isn’t his
particular drug of choice, but not wanting to be rude he takes a
couple of puffs to calm himself. “We need to find a way out of
here.”

“Why’s that?” the man asks in a serene tone
reserved for stoners and clergy.

“You do realize this building is on
fire?”

“On fire?”

“Ablaze. Engulfed. Being consumed by flames
as we speak.”

“Really?” the man asks. “Shit! I have to save
the herb.”

While the underground dweller grabs a hemp
knapsack and begins to pluck buds from his illegal crop, Randy gets
a bit annoyed. “Fuck the herb! We need an escape plan.”

“No this is a very special strain, man. I
cultivated it myself. It’s my baby.” The guy laughs. “My friends
and I were eating a whole mess of watermelon once while enjoying my
Mary Jane… I got to thinking about how perfect she is, and how I
would hate for someone to take her, grow their own plants and mix
it with angel dust or PCP…”

“Angel dust is PCP,” Randy corrects.

“Exactly! I thought about the melon. It was
seedless. What if I could engineer my baby to be seedless too?”

“That’s very noble, but…”

“Aren’t you that guy?”

“Yes, I am. You may remember me from…”

“You’re the lucky bastard married to Kelly
Peel!” the stoner says with joy in his eyes.

“Right. Randy Russell. I’ve been in some
movies as well… Have you gathered enough? Can we get a move
on?”

“Of course.” The stoner hurries to stuff a
few more fistfuls into his sack. “Thanks for rushing in here to
pull me out, man, I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, don’t mention it. Honestly, I also
wanted to get away from the zombies.”

“Zombies?”

“Yes, zombies! The dead are among us and
they’re quite peckish. That reminds me, have you a gun?”

The stoner simply accepts the fact that the
dead are walking. He retrieves a rifle from the bedside of the
single room space. “Let’s roll.”

Randy takes the weapon, wanting to be
familiar with it. The barrel is rather narrow compared to the prop
guns he has handled in the past. “Is this a pellet gun?”

“Yeah.” The man nods. “You know, for home
defense.”

“What are you defending your home against,
tin cans?” Randy hands the weapon back with disdain. “Do they
really attack so often you felt it necessary to acquire this
thing?”

“No…?” the stoner sounds hurt.

“I’m sorry.” For the first time in his life,
he apologizes and means it sincerely. “I’m a bit irritable. I’m
going through a small divorce. What’s your name?”

“Gar,” the stoner answers, blissful once
again.

“Gah?”

“No, Gar-r. There’s an ‘R’ at the end.”

“That’s what I… Tell me Gah-err, where is the
nearest hospital?”

“There’s two that I know of and they are
about the same distance from here.” Gar holds his arms out to point
towards the general directions they can be found. “Memorial is
south in the Hills, and to the north there’s Olive Grove.”

“I detest olives. Take me to Memorial.”

“They don’t have actual olives there… Why do
you need a hospital?” The stoner tenses on his weapon. “Did one of
the zombies bite you?”

“No, I have a slight medical problem that I
must address.”

“You’re sick?”

“Not exactly. I have a small addiction to
morphine.”

“I thought you went to rehab?”

“That was for cocaine. I want morphine.”
Randy rationalizes the distinction. “We should probably get
going.”