This Dying World: The End Begins (23 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chris stared at the two story home from the front seat of his pickup.  Joe sat next to him shaking his head.  Lexi was in the backseat looking over her rifle and refusing to look at another monument of the dead’s insatiable hunger.  Even in the darkness, with only the stars and sliver of moonlight in the cloudless skies to illuminate the area, the evidence of yet another desperate struggle was plainly visible.

Another home, another last stand.

The front door had been ripped from its hinges, coming to rest on the stairs leading to the wrap around porch.  A torso’s skeletal remains lay face down across the door.  Its skull was shattered like an egg shell.  Every ounce of meat that once covered or filled its body had been stripped away, leaving nothing but dried, bloody stains where this person had died.  The dead had broken the limbs free to feed, evidenced by the splintered bones jutting out from sockets.

Fully dead corpses of those killed for a second time littered the area.  A body splayed across the steps, its leg caught in the railings held it upside down.  The distorted grime covered face of a man in a business suit stared back at them, a cleaver buried deep into its head.

A pile of still smoldering bodies lay below a large open window.  Next to the mound of burnt dead lay a bright red fire extinguisher.  Scorch marks rose along the aluminum siding towards the open window.  The charred remains of a woman had been pulled through, its bottom half still inside the house.  Her skull had been burnt black, most of her upper body devoured.  Entrails hung like morbid birthday ribbons, stretching down to the earth below from her corpse.

The scene told the story.  She attracted a group of the dead and set them ablaze, but panicked when the creatures got too close.  Their proximity threatened to burn the whole house down so she tried to extinguish the flames. But she wasn’t high enough from the ground.  She was pulled halfway outside the window and devoured while the ghouls burned themselves, and their meal, to death.

This was the fifth stop on their scavenging trip, and every place told the same grisly tale.  Defenses smashed, fortifications overwhelmed, followed by the inevitable last stand.  It all ended the same way, the living succumbing to the numerous dead.

“You think it was the same mob that hit us?” Joe broke the silence.

“Probably,” Chris replied.  “This is the direction they were heading.”

“How are we even alive?” Lexi mumbled.

“We knew it was coming, thanks to you guys.” Chris looked at her through the rear view mirror.  “We hid before they got to us.  The zeds didn’t know we were there.”

“These people didn’t have any warning,” Joe said, almost as if he were speaking to himself.  “What happens when we don’t have any warning?”

“Then we fight.” Chris shot Joe a hard look.  “What choice do we have?”

“I don’t want to be left in the car,” Lexi quickly changed the subject.  “I’m going inside this time.”

“You sure you want to do this?” Chris turned to look at her.

“Yeah.  I need to,” she said as she finally surveyed the grisly scene less than twenty feet in front of them.

“Alright.  Dan’s going to kill me for this when he wakes up, but you’re with me.  Joe, same as before.  We clear the first floor, then the second.  Lexi and I will handle the kitchen, you get anything useful upstairs.  Focus on medical supplies first, everything else is secondary.”

Everyone nodded and silently exited the truck.  The crisp wind did little to mask the stench of burnt and rotting flesh.  The second Joe’s feet hit the ground, so did his dinner.  He doubled over as he expelled the remains of his spam and eggs.  Chris and Lexi waited on the other side of the truck for him to finish.

“I’ll never get used to that,” Joe finally said, wiping sticky drool from his lips.

“You good?” Chris said in a hushed voice.  He was tense, his pistol raised as his eyes darted from shadow to shadow.

“Yeah.  Let’s get this over with,” he whispered back.

“Alright.  Lexi, you okay with that rifle?  It might have a little more kick than a .22.  Not to sound cliché, but that ain’t your daddy’s shotgun.”  He cringed as soon as the word ‘daddy’ left his mouth.

He turned to apologize, and found Lexi slamming the rifle bolt home.  In under a second, she raised the rifle and fired.  Thunder erupted a few feet in front of him as the bullet sizzled past Chris’ cheek.  Instinctively, he dropped to his knee and locked his pistol sights on the girl.

“Drop it!”  Chris’ finger inched towards the trigger.  The girl didn’t move, instead she looked back at him with a cold stare.

“Chris...buddy,” Joe said calmly.

“I said drop it!”  Chris stayed locked on Lexi.  Calmly, she took her hand away from the trigger, and slipped her arm into the shoulder strap.  She clearly was not going to release her weapon, but it posed no immediate threat slung across her back.

“Chris!”  Joe said more forcefully than before.

“What!”  Chris shot back, chancing a quick glance over to his friend.  He saw Joe with a flashlight pointed towards the house.

“Look,” Joe replied.  “On the other side of the house.  Before you turned off the headlights, I looked down that hallway.  It was clear.”

Chris stood, moving behind the teen before he felt safe enough to take his eyes off her.  She didn’t move or protest, other than to cross her arms and sigh.  Once behind her, he dropped his pistol slightly, and looked into the house.

The open doorway appeared to lead into a hallway that spanned the length of the house.  At the other end of the hall, he could make out another door that he assumed led to the back yard.  In the middle of the hall, Chris saw two feet pointed towards the ceiling, as if the person had just lay on his back and died in the middle of the hallway.

“You’re right,” Lexi spoke up finally.  “This isn’t a .22.  This is a Ruger Hawkeye Compact .308.  We owned the full sized model.  And my
daddy
doesn’t own a shotgun anymore, because my
daddy
is dead!”  She turned and looked at Chris.  “Any more questions?”

“I’m sorry.  You’re right, that was a stupid thing to say,” he said lowering his pistol.  “But that was reckless of you.  I could have killed you.  I need to know I can trust you with that gun, and right now I don’t know.  For now, you keep it slung unless you need it.  Understand?”  Lexi nodded.

“Alright then.  Let’s move.  We’ve made too much noise already, so in and out.”

Chris took the lead, carefully stepping over the remains of the permanently dead.  Lexi stayed a few feet behind him, with Joe taking the rear.  He held his Desert Eagle in his right hand, and panned his large Maglite around with his left.  The intense light showcased the carnage in a detail that none of them wanted to see, so if it didn’t move when the light hit it, they ignored it.

They moved into the house, stepping over the feeding frenzy remnants on the porch steps.  The smell outside did not compare to the gut churning reek inside.  The main dining room was to their right as they entered, and the relatively untouched kitchen to the left.  They found the back half of the human barbecue as they moved into the dining room.  Everything from the waist down was still intact, with only a few scorch marks around the waist of her dress.  Decay had just started to set in, the freezing temperatures slowing the process dramatically.

They moved deeper into the house until they stood in the living room.  There they found the very last stand.  Sofas and chairs were moved into what could only be described as a child’s fort.  Much like a child’s fort, it offered no protection.  Skeletal remains were scattered in all corners of the room.  Blood smears stained every wall.  No part of the room had been spared the gore from the slaughter.

“That’s all they had to defend themselves?”  Joe whispered when he cast his light on the floor.  A detached hand still wrapped its gnarled fingers around a nickel plated revolver.  A short distance away lay a single load shotgun.

“Looks that way.  Poor assholes,” Chris said shaking his head.  “Let’s get what we came for and let the dead rest in peace.”

Slowly they crept out of the living room and back into the hallway, emerging close to the back door.  Chris stopped, running his finger across a pinky sized hole in the door that he guessed had come from Lexi’s rifle.

“God damn!” Joe said behind him.  “Buddy, you gotta see this.”

He turned and walked over to Joe, who was standing over the body in the hallway.  A greenish sludge surrounded its head like a halo.  The sizzle that Chris was growing accustomed to had stopped.  He kneeled down to examine the neat hole that ringed the dead center of its forehead.

“How ‘bout that?” Joe chuckled.  “Right between its eyes!”

“How the hell did you see that?”  Chris looked up at Lexi.

“The crescent window in the back door had some light coming through,” she answered.  “I saw a shadow and took the shot.”

“Okay then,” he stood, putting his hand on her shoulder. “You’re a good shot, I’ll give you that.  Just don’t prove it that close to my face again.  Deal?”

“Deal!”  She smiled back.

“Joe, you think you can handle the upstairs?” Chris nodded towards the steps next to the front door.  “I’m not comfortable with how long we’ve been here with the noise we made.”

“No problem,” Joe smiled, pushing his wire framed glasses up with his middle finger.  “I’ll be back down before you know it.”  He turned and made his way upstairs, his heavy boots shaking the walls as he climbed.

“Can you believe that is him being quiet?” Chris rolled his eyes and smiled at Lexi.  She laughed as they made their way back to the kitchen.

Chris produced a smaller version of Joe’s flashlight from one of his many coat pockets, shining it into the inky dark kitchen.  It was a typical kitchen, hung cabinets wrapping around the room, an electric range, refrigerator, and sink.  Against the outside wall and underneath a boarded up window sat a small chest freezer.

“You start on the cabinets, I’ll try the fridge,” he said, handing her a plastic grocery bag from another of his pockets.

She nodded and went to work, opening and searching the first of several small cabinets.  Chris opened the refrigerator, immediately closing it again.  His face scrunched up, he waved the air away from his face as if he was swatting a horde of mosquitoes away from his nose.

“Smell bad?” Lexi giggled.

“Want to check for yourself?” he asked, blowing his nose on a bit of paper towel left on the butcher-block countertop.

“Nahh, I’m good,” she replied.  “Hey, Chris.  Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot,” he said.  “No, wait!  No more shooting.  I mean, yes, go ahead.”

“You sure?” She shot him a mischievous look from behind a cabinet door.

“Positive.” Chris leaned back against the counter.  “What’s on your mind?”

“Why does Dan always rub the scar on his hand?  I see him do it sometimes.  How did he get hurt?”

Chris’ eyes fell to the floor, as if the answer to her question would pop up from the blood stained tiles.  He pursed his lips, letting out a deep sigh before looking back at Lexi.  He crossed his arms, listening to the thumping and shuffling of Joe on the floor above.

“Look,” he started after some time.  “I shouldn’t be telling you this, and really it’s something you should ask him yourself.  It took be a long night of heavy drinking before he told me, so if you say anything to him I’ll deny it.  Did he ever tell you he was an EMT?”

“I don’t even know what that is,” Lexi replied.  She was still shifting items around inside the cabinets, but Chris could tell her heart was only half in her work.

“Emergency Medical Technician.  He used to work on an ambulance.”

“He never told me that.”  Lexi now turned completely away from her search and leaned against the cabinets much like Chris.

“I’m not surprised.  He was doing what is called a ‘ride along’ with the Chicago Fire Department one night when they drove up on a car crash.  He told me that a drunk driver had driven his van into the side of a compact car and had flipped it onto its roof.  He climbed into the car to take care of the driver, who happened to be a teenage girl.”

Chris turned and opened one of the cabinets above the countertops.  He was rewarded with a half a box of fruit loops and an unopened container of oatmeal.  He stuffed them both into his bag and continued to search as he talked.

“Problem was,” he continued.  “They were the first one’s there.  It was just him and two other paramedics trying to control the situation in a busy intersection.  Someone blew the red light and hit the car with Dan and that girl still inside.  He was still pinned inside when the car caught fire.  He got out with a broken and burned hand.  But the girl, she died in front of him.”

“That’s horrible!  But there wasn’t anything he could do, right?”

“You can’t tell him that, he won’t listen.  Survivor’s guilt I guess.  He said she was begging for him to save her, but he couldn’t get to her.  They got them both out, but the girl died on the way to the hospital.  He didn’t last long in that job after that.  It still weighs on him though.  I’m sure when he saved you, that girl was in the back of his mind too.”