Read Blood of the Dead: A Zombie Novel (Undead World Trilogy, Book One) Online
Authors: A.P. Fuchs
No other sound came.
Was probably me
.
He put his hand on the steel horizontal door handle and pushed. The handle went down and in, but the door didn’t open. He tried again then a third time. Same thing.
“Oh,” he said at the silver and black key-coded lock box beside the door.
He examined the tiny silver buttons on its face. They were numbered 0-9.
“It could be anything.”
Four- or five-digit combos. Maybe more.
He punched in a couple just for the hey of it. You never knew. He glanced up. “Wanna gimme a hand?” He closed his eyes and the numbers 2, 5, 3, 7 and 9 appeared one at a time in his mind’s eye. He tried them. No go. Those numbers were just him.
“Thanks anyway,” he breathed. Staring at the lock box, he added, “You send me out here then hightail it when I need a hand.” With a grin, “Hmph. Sounds familiar. Moses had a time of it, too. Not that I’m him or anything.” After a chuckle, “Don’t got a beard down to my feet.”
He thought for a moment. “I could blow the lock.”
Yeah, but if something’s on the other side, how’re you gonna lock it again?
“Okay, fine. I’ll leave it for now. Bring something up to reseal it later.”
August went down the stairs.
* * * *
By the time August reached the bottom of the stairwell and stood before the door that opened up into the Square, he could barely stand.
Going down is worse than going up
. And he had to leave the elevators on the higher floors.
If
an undead or two were in the other elevators, they were now trapped between the floors. Thank goodness for elevator control on the security level.
August leaned forward slightly and caught his breath. His rifle suddenly doubled in weight. He set it down and did a few stretches before picking it up again. It was a little lighter.
His stomach growled and the inside of his skull felt hollow. He’d have to get some food soon.
“Now You’re making me fast, too, huh?” he said. A sharp ache pierced his heart. Before, he wouldn’t dare take a shot at God; he knew far better than to aim an arrow at the Throne. This was the one thing that, throughout his entire Christian life, he still had a hard time dealing with: trusting Someone he didn’t see. He wasn’t stupid. A Christian’s life was one where your faith would be constantly tested. He knew the prize. But he also knew the cost: “Take up your cross and follow Me,” Jesus had said nearly two thousand years ago. He just wished Jesus would have emphasized how
heavy
that cross would be sometimes.
Checking his rifle over, ensuring a bullet was in the chamber, he opened the door.
The wide hallway beyond was empty; stepping out into it was like planting yourself into the middle of a field with nothing for miles. The walls and doors lining the hallway held no meaning.
“Let’s go,” he said, “one at a time.”
And August began his hunt for anything or anyone alive.
Or dead.
16
Along the River
More than once Billie stopped and put a hand to her eyes, trying to conceal the tears.
Des was gone.
“Yo, Billie!” Joe shouted from several paces ahead.
“In a minute,” she said quietly.
Brown and dry leaves crunched beneath his feet as he neared her. He pulled her hand away from her face. “Look, I know it’s hard, but we can’t sit and mope right now. You don’t want to be caught out here with the dead walking around.”
“Think I don’t know that?” she snapped, sniffled, and stormed past him. A moment later: “Why are we taking this route, again?”
“The river’s our best bet. So far as we know, they don’t like water. The nearest zombie is probably two hundred meters that way.” He nodded to their left, beyond the trees and bush, to what was left of Henderson Highway and the houses and neighborhood alongside it.
“Yeah, but we got no boat. If one of those things comes for us, there’s nowhere to go. Can’t just jump in the river, man. The undertow’ll suck us down to the bottom.”
She glanced at the river rushing by at a good clip beside them.
“At least we haven’t seen any of them. That’s a good thing, ain’t it?”
“I suppose.”
They walked in silence, stepping over and around trees that had fallen over or been bent at obscure angles thanks to the river’s seasonal rise and fall from melting snow. The funk of stale water hung on the air and more than once Billie longed to go up to street level and get a lungful of fresh air. Not that that was any better, though. Having the dead walking around for a year had polluted the air so badly that it was a wonder she and the other survivors hadn’t come down with any diseases. It still had yet to be discovered why they hadn’t been affected the day the rain came and why, a year later, the disease—if it was a disease—still hadn’t harmed them.
The duo walked on. It was slow going, the uneven debris-covered ground making the trek toward downtown difficult. When she asked Joe multiple times why they had to go into the city, his best answer out of all he offered was, “You saw them before we hit the river. They’re coming down toward the Haven. Can only presume they’re emptying downtown. The safe zone’s being switched. Besides, we can get off the ground when we get there, clear a floor or two in either the Richardson or CanWest Global. Maybe even one of the hotels.”
Joe seemed to be lost in thought because he didn’t say anything for a long time. Not that he really said much at all, but despite living alone and being so secluded for so long, Billie still wasn’t used to silence. At least when Des was alive, she had him to talk to once in awhile.
Oh, how she missed him. Despite how annoying he could be, he was the most down-to-earth person she’d ever met, a guy who didn’t care what people thought of him. He wasn’t a looker, by any means, but on the inside? Yeah, she could really go for that.
She could really go for that right now.
“You never told me where you got your gun?” she asked Joe just as they ducked under a low-hanging tree branch.
“The X-09. Didn’t ‘get it’ anywhere. I built it.”
“X-09? Mean anything?”
He pursed his lips. “‘X’ for ‘extreme.’ Wrong spelling, I know. The nine . . .”
It appeared he was going to say more, but he didn’t.
She didn’t want to pry any further so asked, “Where’d you learn to do that?”
Joe paused before answering. “The Net, before I got rid of my connection.”
“You still never said why you did that.”
“And I’m not going to.”
“Oookay. So, what, you looked up a gun-building site and got lucky?”
He glanced back at her and offered a cool stare. “No.” Then, “Well, kinda. You’d be surprised what you’d find on the Web. Just about anything.”
“Oh, believe me, I know. Trust me. I spent most of my life on there. It’s how I survived, actually. You know, getting plugged into other people and all that. You hungry?”
“Not really. Used to going without food.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Something caught her foot and the ground rushed up to meet her. Palms out, she stopped her fall, but something small and pointy jammed into her palm.
“Billie?” Joe said, coming over. He knelt down beside her.
“Aaarrrghhh,” she growled and shoved away from the ground, accidentally pushing whatever was in her hand in further. She sat back on her knees.
“You okay?” he asked.
Her palm was smeared with blood. At its center was a shard of broken beer bottle.
“Of course,” she said and not in answer to his question. Why would she expect this little jaunt downtown to go smoothly? Carefully, she pulled out the shard. Blood bubbled to the surface of the wound, leaked out, and dripped onto the ground.
“Oh man, that stings.” She looked around for something to wipe her hand on. There wasn’t anything out here and the river was too filthy to rinse it in. And as far as she knew, it could be loaded with dead bodies, their germs circulating through the water like salt.
“Here.” Joe tore off a strip of fabric from the bottom of his shirt. He offered it to her.
“Thanks,” she said and, taking a deep breath and holding it, wrapped the fabric around her hand.
She was able to wrap it around her hand three times before Joe reached over and helped her tie it.
“The second we find clean water, we’ll wash it up, okay?” he said.
“Yeah . . .” she breathed and stood, cradling her hand.
They walked even slower, the vibration from each thump of her footfalls aggravating the wound.
She nearly bumped into Joe when he stopped suddenly in front of her, his hand up. “Wait,” he said.
“What?”
“Something’s out there.”
17
Empty Square
The bulk of Winnipeg Square had been covered and by the time August sat down on the steps leading up to the catwalk, which were near the food court, he was ready to pass out from fatigue.
The shops were empty, the only dead a few dismembered limbs. Where the rest of the people had gone, he could only guess into the creatures’ stomachs.
With each pass into the shops, the side rooms, the bathrooms and beneath stairwells, he kept a sharp ear out for whatever it was that had been making noise last night.
But Winnipeg Square had proved empty.
He had made sure the doors leading outside were secure every time he encountered some and all were boarded up save for a pair that opened up onto Fort Street via the Royal Bank building. Those he secured by simply locking the door and stacking desks and paper-filled boxes from the bank offices in front of them.
The next order of business would be to block the stairway where he now sat with whatever he could find and maybe line the top of the barricade with pots and pans from the food court so that, should something try and get through, the kitchenware’d tumble to the floor and raise a sound he could hear all the way down by the vault door.
He just needed to catch his breath first.
Boy, was he starving. He had put off scouring the food court for any canned goods on purpose until he verified he was alone down here. Now that he was fairly sure there was nobody around but him, his heart leapt in delight at the prospect of finally getting some grub. Maybe, just maybe, there’d be power in one of the kitchens and some coffee and he could boil himself a cup.
August got to work. It took awhile, but eventually a makeshift barricade was set up along the bottom of the non-running escalator and the flight of stairs that ran up alongside it. He dragged heavy tables from the restaurant next to the barricade and piled chairs on top of it. Then, as planned, put the pots and pans in place, some acting as a base, others half-on-half-off, so that any jostling of the chairs and tables would force them to fall.
“Not bad,” he said, hands on his hips as he surveyed his work. “Ain’t Fort Knox but it ain’t out in the open anymore either.”
Stomach growling, he went to the food court and worked his way through the various eateries, seeing what he could find. All the perishable stuff was rotten, stinking and covered with so much thick green fuzz that he couldn’t even look at it.
“How’s that? Can look the dead in the eye but rotten tomatoes make you gag.”
What a time to live.
Some of the places had freezers, many of which still had a few slabs of meat, stuff which had been left behind by previous ransackers for some unexplained reason. Didn’t matter though. There was no power circulating down here and the meat was all grayed-out and, even though still wrapped, stunk so incredibly bad it made the zombies smell like roses.
One of the last eateries had a series of cupboards in the back, lining the grills. A few cans of mushrooms, one of tomato paste, three tuna and four canned wieners remained.
“Mmmm, lovely,” August said. “So what’s it gonna be? Fungus grown in crap? Ketchup paste, dead fish or meat scraps?”
He opted for the meat scraps and dined alone in the dark at a corner table, putting away two cans of wieners. Even though he was still hungry, he put the other cans in his pockets for later, already choosing a one-meal-a-day plan unless other food options presented themselves.
There was still no telling how long he’d be here.
As he slowly chewed his food, one question hung over him: what was on the roof?
18
Good Doggies
If this were a normal day, it would already be getting dark. But these weren’t normal days anymore.
The city skyline loomed not too far away.
Joe waited a moment for Billie to catch up from behind.
“Doesn’t seem this long a hike by car,” she said.
She came up beside him.
“We’re almost there. Big thing is we gotta get over the overpass. Not sure if you’ve ever walked those humps, but they take awhile.”
“Know where we are?”
“Sort of. Should be a street or two’s worth to go. Can’t really tell from down here. We have two choices: we either follow the river and head up by the bridge or we go up now and take a chance with the streets.”