Life Among The Dead (Book 2): A Castle Made of Sand (7 page)

With a boost from Randy, Gar climbs out
through his window. He hasn’t been out of his apartment in months.
He’s just been cultivating his pride and joy, weighing out bags for
customers, and hugging the small trees. Many plant lovers will tell
you that talking to them makes them grow faster, but Gar feels a
more physical expression of love does an even better job.

Reeking of his musty den, he helps the
celebrity up to street level. The area is clear. They had wasted so
much time the dead had lost interest.

“I was up for a role in a zombie picture back
home, you know? They opted to go with some ginger headed fuck
instead. Now he’s doing big budget blockbusters, and I’m getting
stuck with shitty, supporting roles,” Randy angrily whispers.

“You did the one with the monkey, remember?”
Gar whispers back to cheer the man up. He feels like he’s in a
movie right now; on a mission, armed, and being covert. “The funny
one.”

“I didn’t find it a bit funny!” the comedian
speaks louder. “They gave that bloody simian top billing!”

“Did you get paid more?”

“Well, yeah…” Randy calms down, lowering his
voice. “It was a monkey after all.”

The Hammond Grand is situated a few blocks
south of Olive Grove Hospital. The Camaro pulls under the hotel’s
awning, where valets once ran to open doors and take the cars of
guests away. Superdad kills the engine, and Dustin looks at the
gilded revolving door that leads into the darkened lobby.

“We’re just marching in?”

“That’s the plan," Eli, aka Superdad, says.
He still hasn't told Dustin his daughter's name. "Staffing should
be at a minimum since this sh… stuff happened so early.”

“You said there’s a thousand of those things
in there!” Dustin isn't certain he wants to tag along with
them.

Eli abruptly hushes him. He drags him down
below the car’s windows so they won't be seen by a small band of
wandering dead, and he whispers, “This isn’t only the biggest hotel
in the city, it’s the oldest. They still use old fashioned keys and
real knobs instead of electronic keycards and open-with-ease
handles. Anyone dead in their rooms will be trapped there. That’s
not to say we won’t have to deal with any threats inside. Some
staff, janitors, but I suspect it will be minor.”

Eli checks to see if the coast is clear
before laying out the protocol. “We’ll leave our stuff here for
now. I’m going to lead us in. Keep my daughter between us. After we
secure the upstairs we’ll come back for the supplies, and then jam
something big enough into that revolving door it loses its
name.”

The three sneak out, staying low. The car
doors are closed gently for fear of making too much noise. They
remain in their crouched postures all the way to the massive
entrance. Having come here several times to research his quote and
take a tour with the management, Eli plans to use that prior
knowledge to guide them through the dark establishment.

Light from the world outside enters, exposing
an ornate fountain that resides quietly in the middle of the vast
reception area. It's flanked by plush, curved couches that face it.
They proceed through in a tight train, and their leader takes an
adjustable lamp from a small table as they do. He steps on the cord
and yanks it free from the base of the appliance. A hand is held up
to tell the younger two of the party to ‘stay put.’ Eli sees a
figure behind the concierge desk.

The late attendant of the hotel paces back
and forth in a pale pool of light let in from the front. Once Eli
emerges from the shadows, the dead woman’s eyes lock onto him. The
ghoul reaches for him as he approaches. He plans on battering the
deceased with the heavy base of the lamp, and he does just that,
letting it swing on its flexible neck like a blackjack until the
zombie goes still.

Emergency lighting illuminates the corridors.
Through their glare, Eli can see figures within a large glass
elevator. They move slow as they palm the smeared barrier that
surrounds them, but they remain trapped and harmless.

Eli inspects every possible hiding place on
his way back to his companions. He needs to get them to the
employees only staircase by going through the dining area and
kitchen. They follow him under a walkway that spans over the
reception desk and offices so guests can look down upon the pool
area.

Traveling through the gloom, they come to a
restaurant in the hotel. The open space is recessed into the floor,
with a bar in the middle like an island amid a sea of shadow. A
stainless steel breakfast area glitters in the modest light.

The management had shown Eli where his men
would need to bring their equipment through, after breakfast hours
and before final checkout. The owners wouldn’t want patrons seeing
the tanks of insecticides coming in, or the men in coveralls
depicting dead roaches. As much as possible, they would need to be
discrete.

The breakfast buffet is slick with blood, and
a scarlet smear runs across the floor from a swinging door. It
leads to the dark sitting area they have just navigated. Eli is
about to warn his party, but is too late. His daughter shrieks out
in fear. The sound stills his heart, and he pushes past the boy he
calls Chachi to get to her.

A man in a white apron has her by one of her
blonde pigtails. The dead man has only one arm to use in this
painful game of tug-o-war. Her resistance drops him to his knees.
The girl hunches over, pulling away as hard as she can. The corpse
loses his balance and falls to the floor, taking her with him.

Eli howls an unintelligible roar as he pins
the zombie with his knee and draws a blade from his belt. He has to
saw through the rope of hair to free his little girl before
plunging the blade into the ghoul’s skull.

Dustin is more scared than he has ever been
in his life. Near the point of hyperventilation, he feels his
nerves abandon him. He becomes very aware of how full his bladder
is. A thumping draws his attention to the swinging door that leads
to the kitchen as more undead cooks push their way out. Folks who
once made a living feeding others are drawn to the sounds of a
meal.

The small girl screams again, too petrified
to run. The sight has the opposite effect on Dustin, who can run
just fine. He rushes out of the nook and into the dark dining room,
toppling over chairs and shrouded tables in his mad dash to
safety.

As he heads towards the lobby, two figures
fall from the elevated walk, landing with a sickening crunch.
Before the corpses can recover from the posthumous injuries, Dustin
leaps over them like an Olympic hurdler. He doesn’t break his
stride until he exits the hotel.

Alone in the Camaro, he tries to calm himself
down. He notices his bladder no longer feels full and he smells the
warm aroma of urine.

The uncomfortable, cold wetness of his pants
aside, Dustin’s hands cease trembling as he places them on the
wheel. He is ready to resume his original plan. From here, all he
needs to do is take a right and head to the bridge, and then north
all the way to Fallen where he can live out his dream.

A helicopter cruises along the street
unusually low, taking the path he intends to follow. He watches it
pass over the hospital and rows of unmoving cars that he knows will
make his journey tough, but hopefully not impossible. The flying
craft mesmerizes him as it curiously reduces its altitude once it
approaches the expansion. A sudden nosedive transforms the chopper
into a fireball.

“Fuck me!”

The motionless traffic becomes a chain
reaction of explosions heading his way. His eyes are wide with
shock, taking in the rapidly advancing carnage. His brain won’t
engage and put the Camaro into gear. Glass shatters in the adjacent
buildings due to the concussive force of the blasts. The chaos
ceases as fast as it started, leaving Dustin dazed, but he is
finally able to put the car into drive and edge to the road. He
can’t believe he’s just witnessed such a disaster, or that he just
sat there while it closed in on him. He feels ready to proceed, but
he’ll just have to find a new route since the Washington Bridge
appears to have fallen into the Charles River.

A rumble coming from the right causes him to
pause at the mouth of the hotel’s drive. A semi-truck is barreling
down the road. It pushes vehicles aside, inadvertently blocking his
progress.

“Are you kidding me?” He watches the large
vehicle depart. “Inconsiderate fuck!”

He’s trapped. If he wants to drive out of
here, he’ll have to get out and clear the cars in his way. Armed
with his semi-automatic pistol that is no longer semi-automatic, he
exits and cautiously examines the mess before him. It reminds him
of a game he used to play on his phone, back when he carried the
thing, it featured a parking lot full of cars, and the point of the
diversion was to move the cars around so the player could drive one
in particular out of the grid. The stakes were never as high as
this, though.

Dustin finds a powder blue sedan that isn’t
completely blocked. He glances all around the scene while he
reaches into the vehicle to steer it away. A white convertible is
the next to be relocated, leaving a tight passage for him to
squeeze through. Proud of his work, he turns towards the purple car
he is about to steal for the second time that day, and comes face
to face with a walking corpse.

The dead woman’s throat has been torn out,
nullifying the cautionary moans that would have warned him of her
presence. The skin is gone from her jaw to her cheeks, revealing
bloody teeth and gums. He is taken aback by the gruesome sight, and
is about to fire his pistol, when a stomach-turning sound rains
down around him.

People are falling from the sky. Zombies are
tumbling out of the devastated panes of glass above him, landing
hard upon the asphalt, only to rise to their broken limbs.
Carcasses smash hoods of cars. The mobile dead roll off and advance
on him.

Bodies fall from the awning his car is under,
but he can’t get to it. Dustin has no choice but to run away
without his music and means of escape. A mass of zombies grows in
his wake, following on his heels. He hopes he can find a way to
trick them, give them the slip and double back to the Grand. He
takes a corner only to find more awkwardly footed ghouls heading
his way, drawn to the commotion. Dustin slides under their grasp,
scampering frantically to increase the distance between himself and
the zombies.

Dustin is up and running down the street.
With a healthy lead, he decides to duck into an alley, but hands
greet him immediately. He bats them away with revulsion, however
these hands are not trying to get a hold of him. They push him away
instead, and a voice tells him, “Get the bloody fuck outta
here!”

The owner of the British accented whisper
hides behind a silver trashcan in a dead end alley. The gun he
points makes it perfectly clear that protest and begging will get
Dustin nowhere.

He has to go. The dead are coming.

Dustin trips over a trash receptacle as he
retreats from the alcove. The drum clatters noisily onto the
sidewalk. He grabs the circular lid as he dashes off.

Dustin hides behind a car, biding his time as
the hobbling threats near the mouth of the alley. He tosses the
trashcan lid at the gap between buildings. The metallic discus
propels into the divide he had wished to crouch in. It ricochets
noisily off the brick walls like a pinball, and the clanging
attracts the dead to the niche.

Screams lure in the rest of the zombies, and
it isn’t long until the sounds of resistance cease. Dustin sneaks
back towards the hotel, using parked vehicles as cover. He tries to
resist but can’t help glancing into the alley. Luckily he can’t see
much more than the backs of the horde bent over their meal as they
feast.

As a pop icon, Kelly Peel is used to obsessed
fans. She’s received many letters from men declaring their undying
love and devotion, and many from prisoners serving life sentences.
She’s even encountered the rare fanatic that shows up on her
property, hoping to get close to her. She’s never been this close
to one.

The man known to her only as Griffin had
simply told her not to worry about all the fan paraphernalia on the
backseat. He kept driving, periodically glancing at a crumpled,
bloodstained sheet of paper in his hand as he guided them around
the walking dead and stalled traffic.

Kelly was uncertain what would be the worst
case scenario: being devoured by the dead, or being forced to
endure whatever fantasy may be brewing behind that hockey mask. She
is determined to make a break from this man the first chance she
gets, if she gets one.

“Damn it!” the man growls, pounding a closed
fist upon the wheel. He becomes more irritable the longer they are
on the road; every turn they take brings more outbursts.

He folds his crusted slip of paper and
pinches it tightly between the thumb and forefinger of his left
hand.

Kelly wonders if appealing to his humanity
will make a difference. “Griffin, what is that?”

“A list,” his rough voice sounds distraught.
“The radio told of some safe places for people to go. They’re all
lost. It’s imperative that I get you to safety.”

He had said such things at her home. He never
intended to include Randy in his plan, and didn’t make a fuss when
her husband decided to go it alone. “Why me?”

“For my daughter.” Sorrow softens his raspy
voice. “She was your biggest fan.”

“All this stuff…”

“Was hers.” He is a man who has lost
everything he has ever cared about. The collection in his backseat
brings a weak chuckle to his throat. His tear glazed eyes have
trouble staying in focus. “She knew all of your dance moves. She
used to make me dance to your rooster song. Not exactly age
appropriate, but it was damned cute to watch her… It’s my fault
she’s gone.”