Project Lazarus (11 page)

He opened the door.

Mr. Adams stood before him.

“Can you fix this?”  He asked Charlie.

“No,” he shook his head, “I’m sorry.  I can’t Sir.”

Things became desolate quickly.  Once sprawling towns were cut down in an instant.  Cotter, Arkansas  was a desperate town filled with desperate people.  They were about to do some desperate things.  But who are we to judge?  If it were life or death, we choose what we know.

We like to believe we’re untouchable, invincible but our deepest fear is our torture.  We are all vulnerable.  Life as we know it can change.  We all experience these life events.  The ones we don’t want.  The experiences we didn’t ask for.  The unwelcome enemy.

Cotter, Arkansas had been playing with fire for years.  Now, the enemy invited itself right through the front door, stomped on the welcome mat and presented an invitation for a ghost town.

The cars that could get gas were evacuating the town.  People, living people, wanted out.

“This is a warning….We are warning all citizens of Cotter to stay inside and lock their doors.  This warning is formally issued by the Baxter County Sherriff Department.  Do not, we repeat do not let anyone you don’t  know into your dwelling.  Should you choose to leave Cotter, you will be stopped at a police check point.  You will be forced to show your identification, so please have identification on you or you will not be allowed through.  Due to military orders, you can’t pass the borders of Cotter without verification.” the voice on the end of WLKZ, the local Cotter radio station, repeated the same message every fifteen minutes, every hour, every day.

David Walters learned the hard way.  Rules weren’t meant to be broken.

He forgot his driver’s license.  It was too late to go back.  He was already at one of the police check points.

“I’m sorry Sir,” the police officer told him, “you’ll have to go get some form of ID.”

David, looked at his wife in the passenger seat and then back at his two small children, one boy and one girl, in the backseat.  It was the picture perfect family but it was about to crack.  David would start the slow chipping pace.

“No way,” he yelled, furious, “Do you know what you’re sending me back to?”

“Yes Sir, I’m aware of the gravity of the situation.  But I can’t let you through.”

“Those people….those living dead people they just killed my neighbor.  They killed him.  We can’t go back there.  They’re waiting for us.”

“I’m sorry Sir but you can’t pass.”

“But it’s suicide,” David tried to reason with him.

The police officer shook his head.

“I’m sorry Sir.  Those are the rules.”

“Who made these rules?  You people are leaving us here to die.  I want out of this town.”

The officer remained unmoved and that’s when David Walters made up his mind.  He was the ruler of his own fate, his own destiny.  This was a fight for survival.  He was responsible for his family.

Panic was setting in all across Cotter.  Horns were honking behind him.  Folks were in a hurry to get out of Cotter.

David Walters was in a hurry too.  He didn’t want to go back to that hell he saw outside his veranda window just beyond the white picket fence.

He watched three living dead tearing apart a screaming man limb by limb.  That surely was an image that would haunt him the rest of his life.  He was military man,  serving two tours in Iraq.  War was scary and bloody and you didn’t sleep.  But this was no war.  This was a massacre.  The living didn’t have a chance.  There was no fight and there was no protection.  These living dead didn’t die, even when fellow neighbors tried to shoot them.  This was genocide of the living.

The horns behind him started honking wildly.  It was time to go.  He could turn around and play by the rules but he crashed the gates instead.

He let out a primal blood curdling scream.  All of his life he played by the books.  It felt freeing to break the rules, crack the picture and scribble on the pages of the books.

He felt the body of the police officer hit the hood and ricochet off the car.

“David.  What have you done?” His wife Nancy exclaimed in horror.

“Don’t worry honey.”

“Good God, I think you killed him,” she announced.

She looked back in horror.  The body hit the ground, only to be trampled by car after car, now cheering and honking in adulation of the bold move of David Walters.

They crossed the lines of Cotter.  Panic had won.  The reward was being set free from the terror in a town they loved but now willingly left behind.

And while David Walters watched the “Welcome to Cotter” sign pass his car and the others, he knew more than one line was crossed.

“It’ll be okay now Nancy.  We’re safe.”

She stared at a man she barely knew.  But things had changed.  This wasn’t the world they were used to.  How could she judge him?  How could she after all she had seen?

David Walters cruised in his black four-door Chevy and smiled on the inside.  He killed many men on the battlefield.  But he never really knew he made a difference.  Whether, his wife saw it now or his kids did in the future, he didn’t feel so small anymore.  He saved four lives that day.  Four very important lives.  One life on his conscience didn’t seem too big a price to pay.

Emma Winters and Audra Thyme sat silently in the hush of Emma’s house.  They too heard the warnings on the radio.  They decided to stick it out.

Unfortunately, they really didn’t have much of a choice.  The living dead were still congregating outside their subdivision.  They couldn’t leave, even if they wanted to.

They were about to see the worst of it.  They were moments away from witnessing what might become of them because of their choice.

“Emma,” Audra whispered, as loud as she could for a whisper, “Emma come here quick.”

Her face was ashen.  Her expression, one of terror.

“Look,” she exclaimed.

Emma hurried over, the two women now bonded forever in friendship and the most unusual of situations.

“Shhhh…..,” Emma warned, “be quiet and don’t let them see you move that curtain.  We don’t want them knowing we’re in here.”

“Look,” Audra said.

Over fifty living dead were across the street at Jim’s house, pounding on the door, kicking it down, clawing their way inside.

“Step away from the curtain,” Emma told her friend, “get away from there.”

They both crouched down, hiding behind the couch, covering their ears.

Jim was screaming in agony.

“Oh my God,” Audra said, “they’re killing people.”

“Calm down,” Emma told her.

“What are we going to do?  We’ve got to have a plan.”

Emma tried thinking but it was hard.  Jim was screaming so loudly and the living dead were screaming too.  It sounded a bit like a terror choir, straight from hell.

“I think some of them are good and some of them are bad,” Emma told her.

“They’re gonna find us Emma.  Sooner or later.  They’re gonna kill us.”

“Yeah.  The bad ones, that’s for sure.  I would suggest barricading the doors but we would make too much noise.”

“I agree,” Audra whispered.

“I think we sneak our way upstairs.  There’s lots of carpeting in my bedroom.  We can move the dresser against the door and keep them out long enough to escape through the window.”

“But there are so many of them,” Audra retorted.

“We don’t have a choice,” Emma assured her.

“I suppose you’re right.  We have to try.  I’m good with that.  How do we get up there?”

“We crawl,” Emma offered.

Both women got down on their hands and knees.  Emma led the way.

“Real slow,” Emma told her.

Audra nodded.

“How do we get out of the window?” Audra asked.

“We jump,” Emma answered.

“Jump?”

“Yeah, like in the movies.  I figure we can take my mattress and we’ll toss it out the window and jump onto it.”

The women inched their way to the stairwell.

The sirens came up from nowhere, loud and quick.  Doors started slamming outside, car doors.  Voices, human voices could be heard.

“Let’s start with this group,” announced a police officer, “round them up.”

Both women sighed of relief, got up slowly and crept back to the window.

They watched the officers gather a non-hostile group of the living dead into a large school bus.  They shackled each one of them, their feet first so they couldn’t walk.  Once their feet were shackled, a few bobbled a bit trying to move and fell over in the process.  The police officers then shackled their hands and dragged or lifted them into the school buses.

Beyond the cavalry scene, there was a bloody mess on Jim’s lawn.  It appeared someone else tried to escape from the home.  The living dead got Jim inside.  The two women figured his wife Arlene attempted an escape, as they killed her husband.  It would seem her plan failed.  Would theirs?

Both women acknowledged the horror of it all.

“Imagine what she must have seen,” Audra said.

“We never even heard her scream,” Emma replied.

She shuttered looking at the torn leg on the right corner of the lawn.  The hand near the mailbox.  The woman’s head in the driveway.

“They tore her apart,” Emma said in disbelief.

They turned away from the scene.

The police officers moved inside Jim’s house.  There would be more screaming.

The two women watched.  The police officers, all twelve of them were running back out.  They were outnumbered.

They packed up the school bus and tore out of the subdivision.

Audra and Emma hit the floor.

They heard the footsteps now, in their panic, they knew the living dead were coming out of the house.  Where were they headed?

It occurred to the women, the police weren’t cowards but instead warned not deal with the hostile living dead.