Surge (102 page)

“Wait a minute, you’re telling me, that some infected thing is in there right now, and is what knocked in response?” Webby nods. “The fuck?”

“They can mimic noises,” Wally explains. “Kind of like how we used to teach chimps sign language, the wheezers can learn too.”

“Can they open door knobs too?” Cory asks with a look at the handle.

“Nah, they aren’t that advanced yet,” Webby answers. “We’ve only seen them knock or clap.”

“Why would you teach them at all?” I ask. Wally and Webby shrug.

“Wasn’t us,” Webby replies and turns back to the door. “Just get ready, because I can hear more in there than just the knocker.”

I see everyone pull out some type of weapon, Cory his knives, Wally a silenced gun, Webby a freaking taser, and I pull out my own bowie knife. I grip it with my left hand, since my right hand is still busted, and the mother fucker wouldn’t quit bitching at me to cut the shit. I can handle myself just as well with my left hand anyway, but I prefer using my right; I guess I’ll have to remember that the next time I have a temper tantrum.

“Everyone ready?” Wally asks.

A chorus of
‘Yes’
goes around, before he opens the door. Stepping to the right, Wally lets the first one come out, and Webby tases the bastard. Obviously, it doesn’t kill the wheezer, but it does drop him. Behind the convulsing creature on the ground are three more wheezers. Since its nighttime, they’re the type two ones, the night feeders who are fast as hell. The one that runs across the back of the seizing bastard on the ground is on all fours, and leaps forward in an attempt at tackling Cory. That hairy bitch earns a knife through her jaw for the offense.

The bloated thing behind her is almost upright, but his shoulders are hunched forward slightly, sort of like a humpback. Quasimodo makes a move to lunge for Wally, but he pulls the trigger before the asshole’s stank mouth can fully open. Wanting to end this shit, I step forward, only to be pulled to an abrupt stop. Following the source to that hindrance, I see Kelly tugging on the other end of the rope.

“Quit it!” I demand.

“I’m not going in there!” Kelly shrieks.

“You’ll do whatever I fucking tell you to,” I hiss.

“I won’t!” Kelly screams, and starts pulling with all of her insignificant strength. “I won’t do it!” I ignore her protests and turn back to the wheezer, only to find that I missed my chance to take him out. Webby reloads his taser, and wipes the knife in his hand clean on the fallen wheezer’s scrap of a shirt. She’s lucky there weren’t more, or else I could have been eaten due to her dumb ass.

“You should untie her,” Webby says with a pointed look at the rope. “She’ll get you killed.”

“Then what do should I with her?” I ask. “If I untie her, she’ll just run.”

“Let her,” he says carelessly. “She won’t last more than ten minutes on her own, so why offer her your protection. Cut her loose, and let her stupidity kill her.”

“Yeah, that ain’t happening,” I counter. “This bitch tried to kill Olivia, and if I were to let her go, her crazy ass will just stalk us back to the compound and try again, or she’ll tell others about your location.” Webby glares at the blonde and steps forward.

“You fuck with my girl?” Webby asks. Kelly shakes her head back and forth. “I believe you did.”

“I-I di-didn’t,” Kelly stutters. “Sh-she’s not a g-girl, she’s the d-devil.” Cory walks over and ends the bull shit once and for all. He takes his knife, slashes the rope in half and drags Kelly along behind him.

“You just earned yourself a ticket to a wheezer buffet,” Cory says. Kelly immediately starts crying and screaming, so he stops long enough to stuff something in her mouth, before entering the bathroom.

“We should have just shoved her in first,” Webby says.

“Yeah, but then her screaming would have attracted more.”

“That’s what these are for,” he says and shows me, of all things, a fucking spray bottle. Webby must see my dumbfounded expression, because he grins. “You’ll see soon enough.”

“After witnessing Olivia’s whistle trick, I wouldn’t be surprised if a fucking bubble gum wrapper could distract a wheezer.”

“Hey, maybe you should work for our tech department,” he proposes. “I’ve seen weirder shit than that come out of there.”

“
‘Tech department,’
” I repeat and he nods.

“Yeah, they design weapons, sources of power, machines, and all types of other shit that we could use.”

“You probably want Cory in there then,” I say and jerk my chin at him. “He was our architect back at the condo.”

“Ollie said the same thing,” Webby says with a smile at her name. He then shakes his head. “I can’t believe she caught me.” I look at his tall form, I’m 6’2”, so I’m no shrimp, but this bastard tops me with at least two inches. Webby catches my raised eyebrows. “Fine, I’m kind of hard to miss, but I tried to distract her with Sammy.”

“Her note said that Sammy saw you too,” I point out.

“He saw Santa too,” Webby says with a laugh. “Guess I should quit trying to be sneaky, huh?” I nod my agreement. “You’re the one with the sister, right?”

“Yeah,” I answer, confused by the question from left field. “Why?”

“She talked about you a lot,” he answers.

“Who?”

“Ollie,” Webby replies.

“Really?” I ask, and I display my own excited Yorkie expression this time. “What’d she say? Was it good, bad? Was she pissed? Planning on snuffing me with my pillow? What?”

“Jesus, slow down,” Webby orders as he holds up his hands. “She just said that some asshole tricked her into trusting him, only to turn out like every other bastard she’s met.” Well, there goes my excitement. “But that was before her talk with Melly.”

“Your grandma?” I ask and he nods.

“She gives good advice,” he says. “Trust me, I would know after being raised by her. Anyway, Olivia was pissed, then confused, and by the time she walked out of my cabin; she had figured it out.”

“Figured what out?”

“That you were scared, and decided that being a complete douche, would be the better option,” Webby tells me.

“That about sums it up,” I agree.

“Figured that,” he replies. “Just don’t do it again, she’s a great girl and doesn’t deserve to be mind-fucked with head games.”

“I won’t,” I promise. And I’m telling the truth, because I’m done with circling my feelings. It gets me nowhere and hurts those around me. I glance up a couple inches to meet Webby’s brown eyes. “So, you were never interested in her?”

“I thought I was,” he says. I look at him to explain. “When she first came, I was kind of struck by her, you know?” I nod, because Olivia has that effect on people. “I mean, some gorgeous chick doesn’t come popping out of the woods every day, but then when she was able to talk? She was funny as hell, smart as a whip, and could knock someone down four pegs with a single word. And then there was the way she was with Sammy.” Webby smiles when he mentions his son. “His own mother didn’t want him, but Olivia took to him like he was her own. He was actually the reason that she started talking to me in the first place. Before that, she wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes, would jump at every noise, and would only talk to Ally.”

“But when Melly went over with Sammy, she started paying attention to more people,” Webby continues. “Melly, she was a dance instructor up until the lockdown. When Ally mentioned Ollie’s love of dancing, she decided to take it upon herself to pull a
‘sister of the art trade’
into her ranks.”

“So, how’d you figure out that you weren’t interested?” I ask.

“A kiss,” he answers. Well, I really didn’t need to know that, because now I want to punch the dude, when I was just starting to like him. “Don’t give me that look, it was one time, and I was the one who initiated it.” So, not helping. “Let me explain before you decide to hit me.” I curl my hand at him to get on with it. “It was, I don’t know, six weeks after she got there, when I found her crying. Now, I’m a dad, so I know how to comfort someone, and decided that I could give it a go with her too. Anyway, we got to talking about what upset her. It took a lot of coaxing, but she finally told me that it was her brother’s birthday. She was saying how she got separated from him, and hadn’t seen him in almost ten months, so she figured that he was either alone, or dead by then.” Webby looks at Cory, who’s searching the corpses’ pockets on the floor.

“I guess he didn’t die,” Webby says.

“Nope, he was with us,” I reply. “Back to the kiss.” Webby rolls his eyes.

“I’m getting there, relax,” he tells me. “Since she was sharing, I decided to share a bit about myself. I told her about my one and only train wreck of a relationship, and how I wouldn’t change having Sammy for anything in the world, but wished that he had a different mom, kind of like her. Yeah, it was kind of cheesy, but she really would be a great mom; which is probably why I got in my head to try and make her Sammy’s step mom.”

“And it obviously didn’t work,” I say and he nods.

“Nope, there was just nothing there,” he replies. “I’m obviously attracted to her, any straight guy would be, but that’s it. It’s kind of like having a hot friend, that you know is attractive, but you just don’t have those kinds of feelings for them. Which is pretty much Olivia told me. She said something like, you can find tons of people whom your attracted to, some of which you might even despise, but when you find a girl who’s able to knock you on your ass with a look or a simple kiss; then you’ve found the one for you.”

“Did she tell you about Travis?”

“Some,” Webby answers. “I know that he was her first love, and that he died; but that was pretty much it, since she didn’t stay much longer after that. It was, I don’t know, the beginning of March when she left the first time. Then it was just sporadic visits that lasted a few days, before she’d disappear again. That was another factor that decided she wasn’t the one for me. I already had a runner, I couldn’t deal with another.”

“Yeah, well I’m chaining myself to her foot. That way, she’ll either have to hack mine off, or chew through her own, to get away again.” Webby laughs at that.

“So, I guess that she’s the one who knocked you down?” Webby asks, and I nod. “Damn, I knew you were different.”

“Different, how?”

“Yours is the first group that she’s hand delivered to us,” he replies. “At first, I thought it was because of Cory, but when she wouldn’t stop talking about
‘Jared’
this, or
‘Mouth’
that; I figured that someone finally caught her attention.”

“As her friend,” I mutter. Webby shakes his head.

“Give her time, she’ll eventually figure it out,” he says.

“Hopefully, but we have to find her first, before she does something stupid.”

“We’ll find her,” Webby says with conviction.

We better, or else I’ll burn the fucking world to the ground until I do.

<~~~<~~~
~~~>~~~>

“Find anything?” I ask.

Cory and Wally are both on the floor, digging through the pockets of the half eaten corpses, while Kelly’s cowering in the corner with a sock in her mouth. I’m guessing that she’s finally starting to take Cory’s threats seriously. Wally glances up, holding a flip out wallet in his hand.

“Hard to tell,” he answers and shakes the wallet, so that it flips open. “A name really doesn’t do us any good without a data base to run it through.”

“How about an address?” Cory inquires as he passes another wallet to Wally. “This one is the next town over.”

“But it could just be from an infected,” I point out.

“Or a local,” Webby adds. “What says he had anything to do with Cole?”

“I recognized him,” Cory replies as he points at what’s left of a guy’s face. “Livi stabbed him in the throat, so my guess is that she knew him, or he did something to her.”

“Maybe,” Wally allows. “He might have just been involved in an unrelated incident.”

“Whatever,” I say. “It’s a start, that we didn’t have.”

“Do we call it in?” Webby asks. “That way we can check it out tonight.”

“We’ll finish the run through on our side, if that’s all we find, then we’ll call it in,” Wally says. “Until then, we treat this as inconsequential.”

“Fine,” Cory huffs as he shoves the wallet into his back pocket. He stands and brushes his hands off, as he says the next part. “But let’s move on. There’s nothing else that these bodies have on them.” Wally nods his agreement before standing as well.

“We have another quadrant to cover up north,” Wally says. “If we go out that door, it should lead to an alleyway for the loading docks. We’ll use it as a shortcut, and swing around the other side.”

Everyone nods their agreement, and that’s when we hear a loud static noise come buzzing out of Wally and Webby’s walkies at the same time. Wally reaches his first, and pulls it off of its clip.

“6567,
Donaghue
speaking,” the walkie cracks out a voice sounding like Patsy. “Calling for Captain Walter Briggs, 2525.” Wally hits a button to reply.

“2525, Walter Briggs,” he says. “What do ya got?”

“Large concentration of infected forces spotted in west quadrant,” Patsy
answers. “Cannot reach appointed rally point, permission to abort?”