The Reanimates (Book 3): The Escape (4 page)

My dreams that night were filled with tidal waves of the dead overtaking us like a Hollywood movie. Over and over they took me away from my family on waves of bobbing heads and hands until there were no living people around me, and I was all alone with the dead. In the morning I woke up with sweat and tears on my face.

The Business District

I was stiff when I finally tried to roll out of my sleeping bag. I could hear the others rustling around in the room as they cleaned themselves up, preparing for the day, and I grudgingly had to join them in the land of the awake. At least I wasn't being pulled out of great dreams; I was just being pulled out of sleep. I felt the exertion of the last many days of body lifting and zombie slaying in every muscle of my body. I stumbled into the bathroom where I plugged the sink basin and poured some water into it. I splashed some water on my face and looked up in the mirror. I hardly recognized the image in front of me. Dark circles hung out under my eyes, and not all of it was dirt. I looked as tired as I felt, and a lot of work was still in store for the day. Part of me was looking forward to being done with the clearing job so I could go back to Idaho, partly to be back on the duties that didn't involve hoisting dead carcasses around and part to have a bed again. Sure, I could have been sleeping in the bed here, it wasn't like the home owner was coming back to claim it, but I still couldn't make it alright to snuggle in just yet. That would probably come later, once we really felt like we took the town, but for now, I felt like a guest traveling through. While staring at my reflection, I gave myself a mental pep talk, reminding myself that the big picture was what mattered here; the resources available. One of my favorite things about this place was that it had a medical center and there were things that wouldn't have been looted, like exam tables, and there was that possibility that there were other supplies there that people wouldn't take. There was such a question mark that hung over that one building alone that would be a part of our town. There was the mercantile as well, and an unknown quantity of supplies there. When we settled in, we were going to spread out and have a place to trade things like clothes that the kids had outgrown, and to put the supplies that the former homeowners had left behind. We would be able to feel like regular people shopping for stuff. We could set up the fire department again and know that if there was a structure fire or something that we would have something more going for us than a bucket brigade. We were going to have a little caf
é to have town dinners in. We were going to be able to have a sliver of the before life and we were going to be able to do it as a community. It was not going to be like it was in Heartsvale, where everyone operated under the thumb of a loon with henchmen. It crossed my mind that I had a hippie commune idea in my head, but it was the way we worked. Everyone was a leader of certain aspects of our life.

This was going to be fine. We could handle clearing out a few buildings.

I finished washing up and put on my clothes. It was cooler this morning than it had been, so I went to locate a jacket. I was lucky to find a leather one close to my size. I liked leather jackets, they were more durable than wool and, I imagined, more bite resistant. I realized that I had seen several leather jackets while looking for zombies, almost like it was a requirement for living in Montana. I wandered back to the living room where I put on my boots and laced them tight.

We piled into the truck and drove the short distance to town. When we climbed out of the cab, we heard the muffled moans of the dead that were trapped inside one of the buildings. Their fists banged on windows as they heard and smelled the fresh meat that was us close in on their space.

We started with the café. The windows were crusted with a heavy layer of grime, a mixture of dust, rain, and last year's snow, making it difficult to see inside. We opened the door cautiously. Patrons still sat in their chairs, waiting for the waitress to come so they could eat. Oh God, that was corny even for me. Even still, that was the impression that I had, that they were going to sit and wait forever, like their drive to do anything had abandoned them. They were in energy conservation mode, right until we opened the door. Heads rose up sharply from the tables they were resting on. They turned in unison to see why the direct sunlight suddenly was on them for the first time in over a year. When they realized that there was food walking in, they pulled themselves into a standing position and shambled towards us. We had our weapons out and at the ready. As they came to the door we stepped back, letting them come out to the street where we could swing at them with less hindrance.

Like I hoped, they came to the door and created a bottleneck, making it so only a few could come out at a time. We plunged our knives in head after head, killing off these emaciated, mummy-like restaurant patrons quickly until the flow of corpses stopped. Once there were no more hungry dead things coming at us, we went inside to make sure there were no more stragglers.

There were.

As we stepped inside, we walked around the counter to clear the area. Suddenly, there was a hand that grasped my leg. I looked down at my feet frightened, to find that a fry cook that was missing his legs had me in a vice-like grip. Rotten, broken teeth were gnashing as it tried to pull itself towards me, pulling me off balance. As I regained my footing, those teeth were wrapped around my steel-toed boot. I sunk my knife into its head. Ink-black fluid came out of the new opening in the skull and pooled on the floor where he lay motionless. I pulled my foot out of its mouth and kicked the dead thing in the face. I kept kicking and kicking until the face was nothing but a sunken hole that never resembled anything human. When I was done, my head was spinning in fear and adrenalin, and I grasped the counter with both hands and let out a sigh. Once I felt more steady, I looked up at my husband who was battling his own decayed monster with no leg control. That zombie seemed to have a gunshot wound in the chest, and the bullet must have severed the spinal cord. Tyreese and Lucas were in the kitchen where someone had shoved a door on a couple of zombies in the pantry. No one had seen how frighteningly close my encounter had been and my first reaction was to laugh softly, as waves of complete relief washed over me. I was embarrassed that I had been so careless to not have watched my feet better. I knew that zombie clearing was a three dimensional duty, but I had only been looking at my eye level. It was a mistake that could have been fatal, and I recognized that I had simply been lucky this time. I was going to have to be a whole lot more careful since this was my second near miss. I didn't want to risk the three strikes and you're out scenario.

I strode over to Trent and the others joined us. We kicked in the other doors and cleared the rest of the café, and when we had checked every nook and cranny, we started to load the bodies in the truck. When the last corpse was loaded, we moved on to the next building, the bar.

The bar in town was a neat building. It was called The Bank Bar, and was a rustic looking place made of gray stone brick. I wasn't up on a lot of history when it comes to little towns in Montana, so I have no idea if it was ever really a bank, or if they just took people's money like a bank. I kept an eye out for a sign that would tell me one way or another, but I never did find one. I wanted to obsess on the building, but the fact remained, duty called. It didn't matter what it was in the past, it mattered what needed to be done now, and that was to go in, clear-out zombies, and take a mental inventory of what was inside when we were done. I didn't drink, that was something I gave up a long time before, but I knew that there was value to alcohol, as trade, as antiseptic, as something for my friends who may not share my take on alcohol to enjoy.

The door was pretty, much prettier than the bar doors back home. There was ornate glass paneling on them like in a high end home. The only windows to the bar were set high off the ground and darkened out so it gave no clues to what we were going to find inside. We opened the door and for a very scary moment, the dark room left us blind to the zombies inside.

Throaty growls came out of the curtain of blackness like a pack of feral dogs about to take down their prey. My hand tightened involuntarily around the handle of my homemade sword, the muscles in my shoulders twisted in a knot. My jaw clenched even though I was trying to keep myself calm. I didn't want to let this ball of swarming butterflies in my stomach take over. It frustrated me that I still had this anxiety washing over me in waves. I was a seasoned fighter, not some newbie. I'd buried my knife deep into skulls before, I was very aware of what it sounded like when the skull was broken by the impact of a bullet or the way the rotted blood seeped into the dirt in a halo around their heads. I knew the smells that made up the scent of the dead. I knew the sight of the leathery, torn skin and the sharp, jagged teeth that rotted quickly. I knew the dead. I knew them more than I cared to know, but even still, even in the face of knowing what zombies were, I felt fear when they were coming towards me. I felt everything that I figured I would have outgrown when I faced that first zombie in front of the sporting goods store. I thought I would have been so prepared to face the zombie apocalypse with my plans, but here I was, scared while I waited for the growling creatures to stumble out of the bar that was their home, their prison, since this all started.

The first zombie to emerge from the darkness and into the door walked with an unsteady gait, like a baby making their first unassisted steps. It was a tall young man, his face made up of a series of sharp angles, some I imagined were there even before he became an emaciated thing. He wore a tattered flannel shirt and frayed, dirt crusted jeans that were held up by a belt with an impossibly big belt buckle that had long ago lost its shine. Filthy cowboy boots skidded along the floor in a hiss against the linoleum until it made its way through the door and ground against the concrete sidewalk. Despite the darkness that the zombie had been immersed in for so long, it didn't react to the bright sunlight in its eyes like I would have. I didn't know what it saw when it looked at each of us, or if I was just imagining that it saw anything at all. It turned to face each of us, as though it were assessing who would be the best meal. When it seemed to realize there were four untainted food sources in front of it, the zombie cowboy lifted its leathery arms and moaned as it began to move faster. He stepped towards Tyreese, the closest person to him by inches, and increased his stumbling steps from the speed of a sloth to the lumbering run of Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Ty positioned his hunting knife in his hand and with a sharp step forward, bridging the gap between them while sinking the blade to the hilt into the forehead of the dead man. Ty twisted the knife from its vertical puncture to the right and when it sat perfectly horizontal, he pulled the knife out. Rivers of gore leaked from the hole as he fell forward, landing on his knees before he hit the ground with a smack. As he was going down, two more zombies crossed through the doorway. Trent and Lucas lured the newcomers out of the bar and ended their existence with a flash of metal.

Over and over, these dead things came through the door. It seemed interesting that so many people made the bar their bug out place. I wonder how many came to drink out the end of the world and how many saw this building as a potential place to ride out the wave of zombies. With the high, dark windows, there was definitely potential in being able to secure the place. I could imagine people thinking that if the cluster was just passing through, then this bar was as good a place as any other. I wondered if someone had gone inside after they were bit, either unaware they were infected or so afraid of being ripped to shreds that they came in anyway, only to infect everyone else. Finally, the last zombie emerged from the open door and we pushed inside. We were more careful this time. We were reminded that every corner had to be examined while in the caf
é, and that was not a mistake we were about to make twice.

Our vigilance paid off this time. We found a couple zombies trapped in the bathroom stalls as well as, based on his extreme amount of injuries, what had to be the last meal standing. Now that the zombie apocalypse hit, almost everyone could do some basic forensics. Again, we piled the dead into the truck, and started another pile in the road for a return trip. I knew that there would be a lot of dead, but it was different seeing the truck bed filled and a second pile in the road.

When we cleared out the mercantile, I felt like we were playing a macabre game of hide-and-go-seek. The mostly bare shelves were just tall enough that I couldn't see anything on the next aisle over. I heard moans echoing off the walls that I had a hard time placing. Tennis shoes chirped on the tile floor as the dead shambled across the store. We traveled in a tight formation so nothing would have the capability of showing up out of nowhere, but even still, we were caught off guard. We hit an aisle that was more narrow than the others, and Lucas was closer to an end cap than we would have liked. In a flash of knocked over paper towels, a pair of gnarled hands pushed through and latched on to Lucas. I was the closest to him so I reached the owner of those twisted fingers first.

The virus that turned people into monsters was not one to discriminate. It didn't matter if the person was a child, a healthy cowboy, or in this case, a little old lady. I would have bet money that in her alive days, this lady would have used a walker and been incapable of getting out of her own way. Her spine was hunched and twisted, making her much shorter than she would have otherwise been. Arthritis was clearly set into her joints and she wore a simple snap closure dress. She looked like she was probably in a great deal of pain in her before life. Being dead at least gave her more freedom in her movement, and she didn't need a walker or cane to navigate her endless shopping trip anymore.

It wasn't often that I paused before killing a zombie these days. The mini zombies were still hard, and they probably always would be, but in an adult, I no longer had any qualms, unless it turned out to be this little old lady. I tried to be as quick with this as possible. I didn't want to see her anymore. I didn't want to think about who she used to be. With that reminder in my head, to not think, I pushed my knife into the base of her skull.