Life Among The Dead (14 page)

Dan can’t stand up through his post just yet. He has to wait until they exit the garage. He kneels below it.

“
There will be some obstacles in the street.” He tells the woman behind the wheel.

“
Got it.” Lindsey replies while starting the engine. The zombies are entering the carport, Bill is not happy with this.

“
They’re going to touch all my stuff.” He whines.

The van pulls out slowly, bumping the walking corpses aside that are in its way. Some are knocked off balance and get caught under the tires. Lindsey cringes at the feeling of the bodies being crushed beneath them.

“
It’s OK, sweetie. They’re already dead.” Bill consoles her. The van takes a left leaving the driveway, heading towards the city.

Dan stands up taking his position as human turret. He doesn’t see any immediate danger, but wants to try out the foreign weapon.

Bill can see Dan taking aim. He pulls out a packet of earplugs. The green foam is pinched between his fingers and rolled into tight points. The man inserts them into Barbara’s ears.

“
Here you go, sweetie. You’ll need these.” He tells her then inserts plugs into his wife’s ears. Barbara remembers wearing the uncomfortable things before when she went shooting with her daddy at the range. As they expand in her ear canal the volume of the world is slowly turned down. She barely registers the first shot.

Dan has taken aim on a zombie in fatigues, an ex-comrade of his. He can’t recall the man’s name. Like all the other guys Dan always referred to him as ‘new guy’. He was no more than 18 years old and fresh out of boot.

The gun recoils violently as he squeezes the trigger. The butt slams against his shoulder, knocking him back against the edge of the sunroof. If not for the flak jacket he wore Dan could have seriously injured himself. The round nearly takes New Guy’s head off. The entire left side is gone, what remains is a large red crater.

“
I told you they’re powerful,” Bill says handing up a fresh rifle and taking the spent one. “.54 caliber kicks like a mule.”

The van speeds up to 25 miles per hour, bullying its way through the mass of dead that crowd the street like zombie Mardi gras.

“
Hey,” Lindsey points. “It’s Abby.”

“
Not anymore.” Bill responds. He quickly loads the rifle Dan had exchanged.

Barbara is keeping her eyes on the floor. She doesn’t want to see the people outside the windows that claw at them. What really scares her is the possibility of seeing her mom.

“
Are you doing all right?” Lindsey asks the frightened child. The girl just nods and tries to keep her mind on the living souls inside the vehicle with her. Barbara wishes to be strong like the adults, though she feels she should be crying.

18

Becka had landed hard on her arm, but feeling vulnerable she forced herself to her feet. It was mobile so the pain was inconsequential. Dashing to the tree she had seen earlier she found a makeshift ladder of plywood scraps nailed into the trunk. The thin planks wobbled under her weight and turned under her feet at awkward angles. She wouldn’t stop. She carried her bruised and sore body all the way to the top.

She now sits in silence except for the moaning below and her incessantly beeping phone that wants attention. She finally takes the cellular out of her purse. The screen reports that she has a voice mail. Becka holds the phone to her ear and depresses the buttons in the familiar ritual needed to retrieve her message.

“
Becka, it’s mom.” She listens to her mother’s tinny and distant voice. “Stay where you are. It isn’t safe outside.” A crashing sound can be heard over the line.

“
Oh shit! I love you, honey.” The message ends with that. A mechanical voice starts asking questions that Becka doesn’t respond to. The phone just gets folded up and Becka begins to cry.

“
Mom never swears.” She says.
What was that crash?
She ponders, trying to dissect the message.
She said ‘I love you’ so urgently. Like it’s the last time she’ll be able to say it.
The girl fears her mom is dead. In fact, she is almost positive, but won’t fully admit it to herself yet. Tears are flowing from her eyes. She can’t help but blame herself.
What if my calling home caused this? What if they heard the phone ring and got my mom?

Like a lot of kids her age she only has one parent. Her mom was all she had left in the world. A world now reduced to a rickety old tree house above a stranger’s lawn.

The handmade structure in which she hides is bigger on the inside then she imagined from Derek’s lawn. The boards are rough and weathered. She can see the zombies that chased her next door through a window overlooking her dead friend’s place. They are just pacing around in circles, their heads move trying to catch sight of the meat that got away.

Below the window is a short wooden box. From the fruit depicted on the side Becka can tell it was once full of peaches. The box now contains hundreds of ball bearings. The floorboards beneath the crate are sagging from the weight of the steel. Sitting on top of the shimmering orbs is a slingshot. It has a padded arm that juts from the base of the handle. Becka had seen one of these used before. The arm cradles the user’s forearm so they can pull back on the thick elastic cord without straining their wrist.

She scoops up a handful of balls and kneels by the window. One bearing gets loaded into a suede patch affixed to the middle of the thick, yellow rubber band that is a half an inch in diameter. Her sadness becomes anger as she lines up a target between the prongs.

Thwip! The missile sails to its mark, a man in a suit and tie. The steel ball buries itself into his chest. The zombie staggers, but is relatively unfazed by the attack. He seems to be searching for whatever just hit him.

Becka releases another that lodges in his throat directly above his double Windsor. The third time is the charm as the cheerleader scores a headshot.

The dead man stops in his tracks as his head knocks back from the impact. He stands for a split second before crumpling to the ground in a limp heap.

“
I fucking hate zombies.” The girl says loading another ball into the sling. She looks out the crudely cut window for her next victim. An ex-cop shambles past the last to incur her wrath. Becka takes aim.

From her point of view the cop is standing profile. Becka wishes to send a ball through his temple. She pulls the elastic back, the cradle presses down painfully on her skinny forearm. She ignores the pain in favor of her vendetta. The prongs are lined up and she is about to let go.

A gunshot rings out startling Becka. The ball flies wildly off its mark. The assassin of the undead crouches below the window.
Who would shoot at me?
It takes a second for her to realize it wasn’t her being shot at.

“
People are out there.” The cheerleader says, running to the entrance. From here she can see the road. The only movement is that of a zombie housewife in a red splashed sundress who stumbles around. The woman’s throat is torn open; the sight makes Becka feel nauseous. The girl wants to overcome the sympathy by rationalizing the fact that the lady is already dead. It helps that the woman is put out of her misery by a speeding white van.

“
Holy shit!” Becka exclaims. She rushes back to the window to fill her pockets with as many ball bearings that she could grab.
I have to catch that van,
she tells herself.

Heading down the treacherous ladder, her pockets are heavy with steel. The sides of her pants now swing with every step throwing her balance off. Becka is two thirds of the way down the tree when one of the tired rungs decides it wants to flip into a vertical position while she is upon it.

Becka lands hard on her butt. She gets up fast and runs towards the alley. A chain link gate blocks it at the middle. The girl hides behind a lumpy object covered by a crisp blue tarp; the plastic cover is old and starting to break apart from years of use. She sees hundreds of zombies chasing the van.
It would be suicide to go out there.

“
I’ll never get to them.” She sits on the tarp, all hope erodes. Her body depresses the blue shroud she sits upon as her hands idly fiddle with the object it obscures. She looks at what her hand is toying with and a new hope springs to life.

The girl kneels before the mystery object as she whips the covering off like a magician doing a trick. The tarp disintegrates from the sudden motion, little bits of blue plastic fall from the air like confetti. She smiles at what she has found.

“
I’ve always wanted one of these.”

19

The dead follow the van faithfully.

“
Like we’re the fucking Beatles.” Dan mutters from his post. The vehicle is slowing and the zombies are able to catch up to them, the dead along the sides of the street are starting to converge.

Up ahead the cars Dan had seen earlier still block the road. There isn’t much room on either side of the wreck for them to pass.
Lindsey must want to take it slow,
Dan figures as he lights a cigarette.
Not too slow I hope.
The corpses are within feet of them.

A few of the deceased lunge at the glass in their attempt to grab the people behind the panes. Some just stare at the vehicle with their mouths agape. Most are trying to reach the man exposed on the roof. Their pale emaciated fingers clutch the air as they close in on him.

At this distance Dan doesn’t need to aim. All he has to do is point and pull. A man in a Hawaiian shirt takes a round point blank in the face.

“
A little too cold for that kinda shirt, huh?” Dan drops the spent rifle to Bill and takes up another. The van crawls along with the soldier firing gun after gun. He is pretty impressed with the rate of fire they achieve with the muzzleloaders; there is almost always a fresh one waiting for him.

Dan notices a slight lag when Bill has to clean the bore of one. He has Barbara handing up the weapons now so he can have his hands free to run a patch through the barrel. The small girl has to turn in her seat up front to do the job, but she is more than happy to have something to occupy herself. It gave her something else to look at instead of the zombies trying to reach her through the glass.

“
Here you go.” Barbara says in a cheery voice every time she gives Dan a rifle.

The van is at a standstill now. Lindsey didn’t know which way to go around the wreck in front of them. Both paths are narrow and she fears not being able to get clearance. Dan can hear Bill yelling instructions to her, but can’t make out his words. His focus is on the dead surrounding him.

The zombies are now able to grab a hold of the luggage racks that run the length of the vehicle. Dan is having trouble getting a clear shot on them now. The rifles are so long and the dead are so close it is nearly impossible. The soldier has to settle for striking at them with the gun he held, but without leverage his blows are weak and ineffective. The zombies just keep coming, more and more start to latch on to the racks. Their emotionless faces getting closer as they pull themselves towards their food.

This is futile,
Dan realizes. He is about to drop down with the others below. He figures he can just close the hatch and wait it out.
As soon as we’re moving again, the dead should fall away.

He starts to lower himself, but his collar is seized and yanked to the side. He is being pulled towards the gaping maw of one of the zombies. Dan tries to wrench free, the ghoul has a vise like grip on his flak.

Dan has to push away with his legs to get a little distance from the corpse. He feels fingers brushing his ear as the dead behind him try to get a piece of him as well. Frantically, the soldier starts to unfasten his flak jacket.

He thinks if he can just slip out of it he will be home free. His hand slides down the front of the vest, separating the thick band of Velcro that holds the jacket together. A hand takes hold of his head, palming it. He feels something odd on his garment that shouldn’t be there. He has discovered the hammer that snagged him back at Bill’s. He had chastised himself for his clumsiness earlier. He now grips the rubberized handle tightly in his fist.

“
Clumsy like a fox!” He yells, twisting out of the hand that has him by his head. He bludgeons the corpse who ensnared his collar. Relief washes over him as the van begins to move again. The zombies remain on the sides, they hold on, still trying to reach him.

The white van is maneuvering through the metal blockade as Dan proceeds to play a macabre game of whack-a-mole. He brings the hammer down on the tightly gripped fingers of the dead, decimating bone with every blow. They feel no pain so he must completely destroy their digits before the flesh-starved cadavers drop off.

The van is up on the curb. Its left fender scrapes against one of the wrecked cars, hedges batter the other side.

“
See.” Bill says. “Plenty of room.”

They are able to build up speed again; the horde is being left behind. Dan smiles at this. The sight of the swarm of zombies getting smaller does his heart good. There is something odd about it though. He watches the dead that pursue; something behind them is diverting their attention. Within a gap he can see some of the dead are tracking something along the ground. From the horde an object emerges. It appears out of the heart of the mass traveling low and speeding towards them.