Transformation (11 page)

Lisa read it quickly. “Oh no. No way.”

Ana took the handwritten note and started reading.

Ron leaned against the wall to look out over the city. He was blank, numb, and for the first time in his life, wanting to die.

Ana read the letter out loud.

Ron,

I hope you can understand that my actions were for the good of the group. Maybe you can explain it to the others for me. Some people are bad no matter how decent they look on the outside. There are more evil people out there then you can accept, and they do evil things that you can’t even imagine. It feels like the only people that survived the end of the world are the evil ones.

I know my actions seem extreme but they were necessary. You need to watch your back and be more careful about who you let into the structure.

I hope you learned your lesson. You should have listened to me.

Dale

“What the hell does this mean?” Ana handed the letter back to Ron.

“It seems like he’s saying he caused the explosion.” Ron let the letter drop to the ground.

“No. I don’t believe that.”

“Neither do I.” Ron was looking out over the city. “But . . . “

“Hey folks. Do I smell coffee?” It was Weed. He hobbled up to the table and poured a cup.

Ron turned around. “Oh good, you’re OK.”

“Why yes, I am. Shouldn’t I be?”

“Maybe you can help us make sense of things.” Ron handed him the letter.

Weed took the letter and looked at it for a second but then lowered it.

“Who am I fooling?” He held the letter out for Ron.

“I’m ashamed to admit that my eyes ain’t so good and my letters is worse.” Damn he was getting good at the helpless old fart routine.

Lisa snatched the piece of paper.

“Here, I'll read it to you.” She read him the letter.

Thank god for his beard and moustache as they hid the fact that he was biting the shit out of his lip. The effort caused tears to come to his eyes. Ana put her arm around his shoulders.

“Poor fella,” he said and shook his head side to side.

“I guess we never knew what he was really like. He was kind of quiet and almost paranoid about our safety.” Lisa said.

“I guess this is why he made such a show of blaming Francis for the explosion.” Ron barely faced the group. “I can’t believe anyone could do that. Who was he trying to kill? Sal? Alvin? Donna!? Who the fuck does that?”

“I prayed for him last night,” Weed croaked out. “My momma always said that the harder someone tries to hate you, the harder you have to pray for them cuz’ they are lost and hurting.”

Lisa patted his shoulder, “Your momma was a good woman.”

Ha! My momma was a dirty whore who dumped me the second I dropped from her coot.

“I guess he lost it,” Ana said. “Maybe he thought Alvin was a threat?”

“I just can’t believe Dale could do that.” Ron hadn’t turned to face the group. He just looked out over the city.

“I can believe he did it more than I can believe Francis did,” Lisa said.

Weed just nodded and hung his head in a look of sorrowful contemplation.

Goddamned fish in a barrel Francis.
Weed closed his eyes and fought so hard not to laugh his body convulsed. He covered his face with his hands.

Jeff came around the corner from the living room. There was a three sectional sofa set up several yards from the kitchen on the opposite side of the structure. The original common area was just lawn chairs and stacked boxes and had grown and become what was now called the kitchen. They set up what they called the living room just a few yards away in the other corner of the structure. Since this side of the structure was front-facing towards the massive parking lot, it was considered the front of the building and had walls that extended from the corners for about forty feet. There was still a large section between the two areas that had no wall, but these walled corners made it easy to disguise the two areas where the most activity occurred.

“We have a problem.” Jeff said. “The blast attracted a lot of them. I think they are still a good two hours out, so I am going to go lead them away.”

“You have to leave the garage?” Lisa was grateful for the change of subject.

“Yeah, one of the units failed.” Jeff kept walking.

“You want company?” Lisa yelled after him, but Jeff just waved and kept walking.

Jeff jumped in a car and headed out to the rooftop setups he had spread across the area. Basically, they played a recording of the human voice and Jeff could turn them on and off remotely. They played old news casts, audio books, whatever. The zombies didn’t care about the content just that it came from a source of fresh meat. Turning on the units attracted all the zombies in the area, turning it off and then turning on the next one led them away. He’d used them several times already.

The unit that had failed was the second to last one. Jeff wanted to not only fix the unit but move the last two units out to the main road. As he drove, Jeff kept looking at the stuff in the car. It was nagging him. It was common to have stuff in the vehicles, he’d put most of it in them personally. But this was stuff he didn’t recognize. He took another quick look at the items on the seat next to him. It looked as someone had prepared the car for a long trip.

The red sedan jumped the curb, plowed over a small shrub, and came to rest in the front of the building where the failed unit was located. He could see a few shambling corpses in the distance. He checked all angles before opening the door, and then he was out. He jogged to the side of the building and leapt onto the dumpster using two hands to pull himself up as he jumped and swung his legs sideways. A shimmy up a pipe and he was on the roof.

“Bad battery,” Jeff mumbled. Good thing too. That was the easiest thing to fix. The solar panels that charged the car battery, and all the other parts, were a bit harder to come by.

He took apart the unit to move it. Solar panel unplugged, speakers disconnected, antenna pulled down, All the rest of the electronics were in a plastic storage bin. The antenna was nothing more than a long length of heavy speaker wire pulled apart at one end and tied up high and in a direct line of site to the structure. This formed a large V shape. The antenna worked amazingly well boosting the signals sent and improving the reception of signals received.

Jeff lowered everything on a rope. There was already a small crowd of the dead waiting for him below and there were more coming. He ran to the back of the building and then down and around. He was ready to take out all the dead before more came.

As he rounded the corner, he was faced with three corpses. They were nude and displayed the trauma their bodies had suffered as was usual. The strange and unusual wounds never ceased to amaze Jeff. There was always something new to turn the stomach. This time it was the woman before him. She had one eye popped out and it dangled and bounced as she walked. It threatened to go in her mouth as she opened and closed it, but the fleshy strands, arteries and optical sheaths, weren’t long enough. The eye distracted Jeff momentarily. The woman had been obese in life and in death her flab had turned blackish from the lack of blood. Her legs were totally black, and she had a smell more foul than any other corpse he had come across.

He gagged almost the instant he turned the corner, saw the eye, and paused for a split second. As he started to turn, she lunged forward. Jeff almost slipped as he bolted. But the woman hadn’t lunged at him, she had tripped. The black skin of her legs fell away in large pieces, looking almost like a pair of pants falling off. A blob of fat hung down from her waist as she lay rolling on the ground, trying to get to her feet again. As she did, innards fell from the torn abdomen, fat squished out along with blackened and congealed blood. She slipped and fell and her body continued to deteriorate as the massive globs of fat and bloated organs tore through her flesh. She fell to pieces like a loaf of bread that had been soaked in water. Jeff lost it and vomited a gush of burning sickness that he had to avoid as he ran away.

“Jesus,” he hissed and fought the compulsion to puke again. Now he had to work his way around the car because the woman blocked his path to the equipment and the car door. He pulled out his new favorite weapon from his coat. He had a found a ball peen hammer with a long wooden handle, the head of the hammer was literally ball shaped. The long handle gave him a farther reach and made it easier to get the head shot while the rounded head rarely got stuck in the skull. He whacked the first of the dead on top of the head, the next got a forehead smashed, and the third was another top shot. He’d tried to fight two-handed like Sal, but just couldn’t do it. Sal had been swinging hammers in one way or another for decades.

Another three down, more on the way. Jeff loaded his gear quickly. The woman was dragging her shredded body towards him, the smell getting worse by the second. Suddenly several corpses came around the corner of the building. They were followed by more and more. The woman was by the driver’s side door, almost at Jeff’s feet. This was a huge crowd that Jeff could not handle alone, plus he didn’t want the car to get blocked in by the sheer numbers so he jumped into the backseat. The equipment was all there, but there was also a very full, large backpack in the rear seat. He’d noticed it earlier and seeing it again reminded him of the fact that the car looked like it was prepped for a long trip. He had to keep moving into the car to close the door.

He had to hold himself awkwardly over the top of his gear, trying not to crush anything or crack the solar panel. The backpack bothered him. The more he thought about it the more he wondered who it could be that was planning the trip. Was it Dale? But that would mean he either packed two cars or took another car and left the packed one behind. Was someone else planning a quick exit?

He managed the front seat as the first of the dead crowded around the car and started pounding on it. He started the car and took off, but he was itching to dig in to the pack and try and figure out whose car he had accidently taken.

He backed the car up, cutting the wheel so he smashed the fat woman’s head then shot forward. Several bodies bounced off the car, a few flipping over the hood. When he found a safe location, he stopped and pulled the backpack into the front seat. But stopped. He really needed to get the job done before the dead swamped the place. He unloaded all the gear and threw the end of the rope, weighted with a small rock, up and onto the roof of a one story building. He chose this building because it was part of a mall where the roofs were all stair stepped up to about three stories. He repeated the process of climbing a few times and was soon high above the ground, he could see the parking structure in the distance. He set up all his gear and had to run down to the parking lot to fetch a new battery.

About an hour later he was ready to leave and all but forgot the backpack. When he got in the car he saw it and decided to dig a little. He quickly determined it to be Dale’s. The clincher was the knife Dale always carried and his gun and holster. He headed back, wondering what it meant that Dale was gone, but the pack and car were all ready to go and just sitting there. Maybe Dale was still at the structure either hiding or injured. Or maybe dead. He skipped moving the last unit and returned to the structure. He parked in the same place and walked along the first level, then circled the outside of the structure. Nothing seemed out of place. He looked out over the area around the structure and saw nothing of interest. Then he checked his emergency entrance, the black twine he had hidden in the seam of the concrete. The twine was hanging free from the second level where the rope was waiting to be pulled down. Someone recently used this entrance, was it Dale?

Normally the twine was pulled down and between the thick slab that functioned as the second level floor/first floor ceiling. Then it was run down a vertical seam on the column below it and around the column using a horizontal seam. It was then wrapped around the base of a large bolt embedded in the concrete on the interior side of the structure. It was invisible unless you knew it was there. In fact, even if you knew it was there, it was mostly impossible to see.

Jeff knew old Francis was an asshole. He’d been around some of the biggest assholes imaginable. The more he thought through the situation the more sure he was that old man Francis was up to some serious shenanigans. He’d always known that Francis wasn’t as feeble and doddering as he presented himself to be. At first he thought it was to avoid work, but now he wondered if it wasn’t for some more devious reason.

Jeff heard what Dale had to say about bikers and thought the explosion was no accident. Things had to be specifically setup for that explosion to take place. Jeff started hiding the twine again. He wouldn’t ask the others about it, instead he would wait and see if anyone else mentioned it.

§

Weed watched the kid from the third level, tailing him as he walked around the entire structure. He seemed to be looking for something. When the kid spotted the hanging cord, Weed watched as he contemplated it then hid it again amongst the wide seams. His eyes narrowed,
now why is that little minnow sniffing around there?
Weed thought maybe it was just part of the kid’s routine. But maybe the kid was putting things together.
Maybe the kid was too smart for his own good.