Rise of the Dead (5 page)

I dump her in the back seat of the squad car and slam the door. She wails and pounds her fists against the window. Thank God the rear doors of the cruiser don’t open from the inside. I turn to go around the back of the car and bump into a guy in a maintenance jumpsuit with half the skin peeled off his face. His dislodged eyeball dangles by a thread of optic nerves. I stumble backward at the sight of him and struggle to stay on my feet when he lunges at me. His mouth opens, and his hands grab at my shirt. I reach for the gun tucked in the back waist of my pants, but the dead man lunges at me again. I instinctively raise my arm to fend him off while I fumble with the handle of the gun, but I lose my grip, and the gun falls to the ground. His massive hands seize upon my wrist and elbow, and he pulls my arm toward him and opens his mouth.

A hole suddenly appears in the forehead of the corpse. I look down to see dark flecks of coagulated blood spangle my shirt. The massive body falls to the ground. I look down at the corpse in shock and try to process what just happened. I hear Danielle’s voice, telling me to get in the car. I take my eyes off the body on the ground and spot the Mercedes driving away. Then I notice Danielle getting behind the wheel of the squad car.

“Hurry,” Danielle pleads.

My hand finds the handle on the passenger door of the cruiser, and I collapse into the seat. Danielle hits the gas, and I watch her eyes darting from the SUV in front of us to the young girl in the rear view mirror as we race down the road.

“You’re going to be okay now,” Danielle says to console the distraught girl in the back of the car.

“I want to go home,” she begs. “Please. Just take me home.” The girl pulls her knees up to her chest and lowers her face and cries.

“Blake?” Danielle calls to me trying to bring me out of my shocked silence. “Are you okay?”

I glance down at my arms, still unsure that none of the blood on me is mine. That was too close. I think about how I raised my arm to try to fend that corpse off. This reaction is an instinct developed by humans through millions of years of evolution to protect our vital organs. But now, even our instincts just make us more vulnerable. No matter how much we prepped for disasters, the human species is not equipped to deal with this. This is the end of the line for us. The human race won’t survive this.

The chirp of an electronic device in the car snaps me back to reality. It sounds like it could be my phone. My heart races. I dig it out of my pocket and look at the display. No alerts. One of the many devices in the cruiser must have made the noise. I glance around the console and spot the police radio and snatch up the handset.

“Can anyone hear me?” I plead. I am not even sure I am using the damn thing right. I jab at a couple of buttons and twist a dial then try again. “Is there anyone alive out there?” There is no answer. Nothing but dead air. I transmit again, “Please, we need help. If you can hear me, please respond.”

“They can’t all be dead,” says Danielle. “That’s not possible. Right?”

I don’t want to believe that, but the way things are going, it seems likely. After a few long moments with no response to our transmissions, I put the radio back on the hook. “I think from here on out we have to assume the worst,” I admit.

The gas station comes into view with the SUV parked out front of the convenience mart doors. The vehicle is empty. Then I see Dom and Joey haul out armloads of snacks and water and dump the crinkling plastic bags into the back of the Mercedes. Quentin peers up from behind the hood of the vehicle, picks off a corpse on the road then ducks back down.

Danielle pulls up behind them, and as soon as the car comes to a stop the girl in the back starts yanking on the door handle.

“Let me go!” she screams. “Let me go!”

“I’ll go see if they need help,” I tell Danielle. “Keep the car running.”

“Blake,” she places a hand on my arm as I open the car door. She glances at the girl in the back seat of the cruiser. “I’m going to try and calm her down. She’s terrified.”

Although I doubt anything Danielle can say will get through to the girl right now, I nod and tell her that’s a good idea. I leave the cruiser and hurry over to the SUV.

“There’s a police radio in the cruiser,” I inform Quentin. “I tried, but I can’t get anyone on it.”

Quentin grunts and glances around me to where Danielle squats to talk to the girl in the back of the Crown Vic. His scowl tells me he isn’t too happy about something. I wait for a minute, but he just turns and focuses on the corpses coming up the road.

“What is it?” Better to just get it out there and over with now. I can’t afford to have him pissed off at me.

“What did I say, man?” Quentin hisses. He pulls the trigger and drops another corpse near the compressed air pump.

“What are you talking about?” I wonder what I did to piss him off so bad.

“Tell me before you decide to do something stupid,” he gripes. “Remember that conversation?”

“I had to help her,” I insist. “I couldn’t leave her there. For god’s sake, she’s just a kid.”

“Don’t we got enough problems already?” he growls. “Now we got this damn kid to worry about.” Quentin leans his head to the side, and we both glance at the cruiser again. When I look back at Quentin, his expression has softened. He grabs the handle and pulls open the door of the truck and shoves a two-way radio in my chest. “Next time you get a stupid idea,” he warns.

“I know, I know,” I interrupt him. “I got it.”

The bell on the gas station door jingles as Dom and Joey come out again with their arms loaded with jerky, chips and candy bars. They dump it all into the back of the Mercedes.

“Last trip,” says Dom.

“Move it,” Quentin urges her. “We ain’t got all day, sweetheart.”

Dom pauses with her hand on the door handle and starts to open her mouth, but one look at the tall black man with the serious expression is enough to silence her. She whirls and vanishes into the darkness of the store.

“So where to now, boss?” Quentin asks.

I’m not sure what to make of his question. Nobody ever called me boss before for one thing. Maybe he’s being sarcastic, or pissed off, or maybe he’s just the kind of person that feels the need to give everyone a nickname to feel comfortable around them. For a long moment, I just look at him. “We should keep going west,” I say. “We have to get farther away from the city. Maybe we can get to the highway.”

“Less people out that way,” Quentin agrees. He scratches at the goatee on his chin. “Sounds like a solid plan, I guess,” he shrugs. “We’ll follow you, boss.”

This time, I can tell he isn’t being sarcastic at all. It’s just his way of easing the tension I suppose. But still, anyone calling me boss just makes me cringe. “Do me a favor?” I ask. “Don’t call me that.”

I turn to go back to the squad car and notice a corpse wearing a bicycle helmet stumbling around the trunk. Danielle is so preoccupied with the girl she doesn’t see it coming.

I raise the gun and fire off a round that puts a hole in his bright yellow shirt. The corpse wobbles and bumps against the trunk of the car. The girl in the police car lets out a scream and tries to run, but Danielle blocks the door, putting herself between the girl and the dead cyclist. My second shot cracks the bicycle helmet right off his head, but the corpse still stumbles towards Danielle.

“Stay in the car,” Danielle pleads with the terrified girl. Danielle scrambles to get herself inside the cruiser and slam the rear door closed, but it’s too late. The door strikes the shoulder of the dead man as he lunges toward her. Danielle clings to the door handle and leans back as the thing waves an arm around inside the car.

I let out a deep breath and pull the trigger again. The bullet punches a hole in the forehead of the corpse. Danielle releases her grip on the door handle, and the body slumps to the ground at her feet. I almost lower the gun, but then I notice the dead waitress ten steps back, and a couple of steps behind her there is a long-haired teenage corpse wearing a black trench coat.

“We got more coming,” I tell Danielle.

“Time to go,” Quentin yells as Dom and Joey push through the gas station doors. I glance over to see him reloading the handgun, and then he takes aim at the corpse of a postal carrier and fires.

Danielle closes the rear door to the police car, apologizing as she locks the screaming girl in the backseat again. I walk around the cruiser to the passenger side, shooting at the dead as I move. Firing the gun on the go proves too difficult for me, and I waste several rounds trying to hit the waitress in the head.

Joey and Dom hurry back out to the Mercedes, having heard the gunfire pick up. They dump the supplies in the back and climb in while Quentin runs around the front of the SUV and enters on the driver side.

“We’re going west,” I tell Danielle.

“West?” she squawks as she throws the car in reverse. She backs the cruiser up, knocking down the waitress. “Sorry,” she says. I’m not sure if she is apologizing to the dead waitress, or to me for damaging the car. She shifts the car into drive and looks around the road again. “Which way is it?” she wonders.

“West!” I repeat.

“Just say right or left!” she yells in frustration.

I point to the right, and she peels out of the gas station onto the road. I glance back to make sure the Mercedes made it out behind us. The four-lane road provides enough room to weave through the shambling dead and abandoned vehicles. Clouds of smoke billow from fires burning unopposed in the surrounding townhouses. Through the haze, I catch glimpses of the chaos down the side streets as we pass. A stroller lies mangled beneath the wheels of a car, a few feet away from the half-eaten remains of an infant in the street. A charred body lies smoking on the lawn of a burning home.

A few survivors hail us from a second story window. I almost tell Danielle to stop the car when I see them waving their arms, but then I spot the dead below. There must be fifty or sixty of them pounding their way through the flimsy glass windows to get inside. We will just get ourselves killed if we stop to help them. So I force myself to look away from their faces and don’t say a word as Danielle continues down the road.

We approach a sign for a grocery store at the entrance to a strip mall. The closer we get, the louder we hear a blaring alarm. The sound is coming from a bank with a Ford Escape overturned in the lobby. Hundreds of walking corpses crowd the vast parking lot between the bank and the grocery store. They must have been drawn there by the sound. The giant storefront windows of the grocery store are all smashed in. Shopping carts are piled high by the automatic doors like someone tried to make a stand there. By the look of it, it didn’t end well. Everything here belongs to the dead now.

We cross the intersection and follow the road over a hill. I stop breathing when I see the community college campus on the left.

“Oh my God,” gasps Danielle. “The school.” She slows the car to a stop in the middle of the road and stares at the college in disbelief. At the entrance, an ambulance and a couple of squad cars sit with their lights flashing in the intersection. A long line of abandoned cars stretches back to the parking lot, their doors flung open, some with the running lights still on. Hundreds of undead students spill across the road below from the campus lawn. There is no way in hell we can make it through so many of those things.

“Damn it!” I pound a fist against the dashboard of the car. We have to go back now and figure out some way around this nightmare.

“I have a friend that goes to that school,” Danielle says. She squints her eyes at the crowd in the road.

“Turn the car around,” I urge her. “Go back to the last street.”

She stares at the shambling students. They shuffle towards us in their sneakers. She doesn’t even seem to hear me. It’s like I’m talking to a wall.

“Danielle!” The sound of my voice yelling her name startles her, and she whirls to face me. Her eyes are filled with real terror now. She blinks at me a few times then looks back at the road and wheels the car around.

“Where do we go now?” she asks.

“Take a right at the light. We can try the next block over.”

Danielle swerves to avoid a dead crossing guard holding a stop sign in the middle of the intersection. The maneuver causes us to clip an abandoned shopping cart that careens off the hood and cracks the windshield. The girl in the back seat lets out a scream as the police cruiser fishtails. I clench the door handle in case Danielle loses control, but she recovers and keeps the car on the road.

“I want to go home,” the young girl pleads. She bangs her fists against the fiberglass partition between the back seat and the front. “Please, stop the car.”

“Everything is fine,” Danielle assures her, but the girl just begins to sob.

“She’s okay,” I tell Danielle. “Just worry about the road.” We don’t have time to deal with the girl right now. Not until we get someplace safe.

At the next intersection, the road comes to an end at an abandoned pizza factory. A police barricade blocks the left side of the intersection, so Danielle hooks a right. Unfortunately, this route takes us past the north entrance to the college. I just hope there are less of those things this way.

I feel my stomach tighten as the cruiser climbs the hill again. As the car approaches the college, Danielle has to weave through a graveyard of smoldering automobiles. Dead bodies drift through the clouds of smoke that seem to keep getting thicker. She brings the vehicle to a stop.