Dawn of the Dead (23 page)

“This must have been for a touch-up,” Fran said as she carried an old can of paint out from one of the washrooms. In her excitement, she nearly tripped over the vast array of hardware and power tools that were scattered around the gardening cart.

She held the can up to the hallway wall, matching up the paint spilled along the sides. “It looks perfect.”

Peter grabbed the can and pried its lid open quickly with a screwdriver. Then he dipped his finger into the liquid and smeared some onto the new wall where it butted against the corridor. He smiled and nodded affirmatively toward Fran.

“Anything else you want before we close it off?” Steve asked her.

“No.” She stared down the corridor toward the mall proper thinking about Roger. He had acted like a child in a candy store in the mall, frolicking around, yelping like a puppy. And now he was upstairs dying a terrible death. Fran swore to herself that she wouldn’t go that way.

She could see the corpses that had littered the hallway piled together at the mouth of the corridor on the balcony.

“No,” she repeated, turning away from the grisly sight.

She stepped back through the unfinished partition and leaned against the framework. Suddenly, her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gag. Steve sensed her discomfort and ran up behind her, but she felt another wave of nausea and darted for the washroom. Concerned, Steve set down his hammer and quickly followed. She had been really marvelous through all of this, never once complaining. She hadn’t mentioned the child inside of her since the time of her outburst. He had often wondered what she was thinking and how she felt about it. But he was afraid to question her. It was her private terrain, and he feared to tread upon it.

When he reached her, she was kneeling on the floor, propped up by her hands on the seat of the toilet, vomiting. He approached her quietly, his hands falling on her back.

“Leave me alone,” she said without raising her head to look at him. “It’s all right . . . It’s my problem.”

“Frannie—”

“Just get outa here, Stephen. I don’t want you here.”

She made the statement so simply and yet so determinedly that Steve was stunned for a moment. He let the words sink in, not wanting to believe them, not understanding them.

Fran saw the confusion in his eyes and reached up and took his hand. She clutched it tightly, trying to show him that she wasn’t angry, but just wanted to be alone.

“I don’t want you to see me this way—” She had barely got the words out of her mouth when she retched again.

Leaning over the toilet bowl she told him, “Please go . . . I’m all right. Please . . .”

He stood up reluctantly and then drifted out of the room.

Fran clutched the side of the toilet bowl, waiting for the next wave. Then she retched again but she was dry. She tried to swallow and take a deep breath. Then she rolled over and leaned against the wall separating the two stalls and held her stomach. She fumbled with the flush handle and depressed it, the rushing water making a gurgling, ugly sound.

She stood and looked down at her stomach, which was beginning to show. She wondered what effect all this horror was having on her unborn fetus. She had read that the child could pick up vibrations from the mother even while it was in the womb. Many times she had thought of trying to abort. If they ever got out of this alive, children would be the only salvation for earth. Maybe with this child, and others, a new generation could start, one that would not know the despair of its parents.

Stephen walked slowly out of the washroom and toward the unfinished framework.

“This place is gonna be rotten,” Peter said as he walked by. The trooper was gazing down the corridor at the pile of corpses. “We gotta clean up, brother.”

Peter walked past the staring faces of the dead creatures on the balcony to the enormous safe in the president’s office. He put his hands on the large round hatch wheel.

“They’re usually on a timer,” he told Steve. “Opened at nine, locked at four. Keeps the bankers honest.”

He spun the wheel, and the giant door creaked open.

Inside was the huge safety deposit vault of the bank. They stood in the glittery room in awe for a moment, stupefied by the clean metal walls that were lined with drawers and doors where depositors had stored their valuables. At one end of the room there were stacks and stacks of paper bills. The men approached the piles of money and stooped down.

They both had never seen so much money in one place at one time. It was ironic now, because it was really only worthless paper. They flipped through the stacks of tens, twenties, hundreds, all crisp and new.

“You never know,” Peter said with a smirk and started to stuff several packets into his knapsack.

Steve looked at him quizzically and then realized that the trooper was being optimistic. But he didn’t want to miss out if there was even a glimmer of hope. He too took several stacks and stuffed them into his kit as well. “Don’t ya wonder what the archaeologists are gonna think,” he said thoughtfully, looking around the enormous vault. “Guys in the future . . . diggin’ this place up. Imagine all the stuff’s in these boxes . . . jewelry, cash people stash to avoid paying taxes. Maybe they’ll figure it’s all some kind of offering to the Gods . . . like in the pyramids . . . a burial chamber.”

“That’s exactly what it is now,” Peter said and turned to the decomposing pile of bodies awaiting them.

They braced themselves and started to shovel the corpses into the cart. They each used big snow shovels and lifted one corpse from opposite sides and threw it into the cart. They wore elbow-length industrial gloves and had tied handkerchiefs around their noses and mouths, but the stench was still terrible.

They wheeled a cart filled high with bodies across the lobby to the bank. Then they guided it into the vault and unceremoniously dumped the bodies on several others that had already been deposited. The corpses lay askew, their arms and legs protruding as if it were a giant centipede that they had come to bury. Stacks of money were knocked off the shelves and mingled with the extended limbs. When the last body was disposed of, Peter and Steve shut the vault door and the automatic timer clicked on. Then the two of them silently and slowly walked back across the concourse to the maintenance corridor. Peter went over to the controls for the Muzak and reactivated the switch. Steve was grateful that they didn’t speak. He was too choked up, and he knew that if he opened his mouth, it would only be to wail.

While Roger slept fitfully, Fran, Steve and Peter ambled through the barricaded building, drifting in and out of the stores and dropping various items into their shopping carts. Understandably, the novelty of having anything they wanted just for the taking had worn off. Like sleepwalkers, they moved through the aisles. Fran rummaged idly through the cosmetics department. Peter looked through a bookstore, picking up paperbacks and hardly noticing the titles. Stephen played the pinball machines in a huge games room, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Soon, Fran motioned Steve over to another corner of the store toward a big mechanical barber chair. She trimmed his hair in silence, both of them avoiding each other’s eyes in the mirror.

Then Fran brushed the hairs off Steve’s shoulders, and he got out of the barber chair. She put the scissors away and wandered over to the pet store to play with the kittens and puppies. She changed the soiled newspaper and kitty litter, filled the water bowls and gave them all fresh food. She watched with a wan smile on her face as the little animals lapped up their food joyfully, oblivious to the desecration around them. Then she ambled over to the tall cage in the concourse and threw bird seed to the tropical birds that fluttered and flapped about, screeching loudly.

A half an hour later, the team regrouped on the upper balcony. They still had their weapons and survival kits, but Peter was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and Fran sported a new mink coat. They looked wearily down the main concourse to the deserted and ransacked stores. It was empty of corpses, but they could still hear the moaning and pounding at the main entrances. It was extremely dark outside, and so the group could not see the creatures there. But their persistent sound was evidence enough of their presence.

“They’re still here,” Fran said wearily, scanning their realm.

“They’re after us,” Steve replied. “They know we’re in here.”

Peter fiddled with the brim of his hat. It looked outlandish with his trooper’s uniform.

“They’re after the place.” He turned to Steve and Fran. “They don’t know why . . . they just remember . . . remember that they wanna be in here!”

“What the hell are they?” Fran’s eyes darted nervously. The noises at the entrance seemed to rise to an eerie crescendo pitch.

“They’re us, that’s all,” Peter droned on, his voice barely above a whisper. “There’s no more room in hell.” His face was set in a grim expression, his eyes downcast.

“What?” Steve spun around, not believing what he had just heard uttered.

Peter took the wide-brimmed hat off his head and wiped his forearm across his sweating brow. He leaned against the railing and gazed long and hard at the couple.

“Somethin’ my grandaddy used to tell us. You know Macumba? Voodoo? Grandaddy was a priest in Trinidad. Used to tell us, ‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth!’ ”

The room spun around Roger. He reached his arms out for some stability, but they only thrashed about in the air—there was nothing to hold onto. He felt as if he were in a madly tilting Ferris wheel. His mouth opened and he emitted an urgent scream, which came from deep within him and seemed to echo long after his mouth clamped shut. He felt clammy and wet, as if he had been immersed into a pot of cold water and left to dry in a draft. His face, which was ashen, contorted in pain as the needlelike stings traveled up his black and swollen leg. His arm, which was wrapped but oozing, was all but numb.

A distant voice reverberated through his pounding head.

“Get more morphine in him,” Steve determined as Fran fumbled with one of the hypodermics. In her haste, she dropped the vial of serum, and it shattered on the floor. The sound was like thunder to Roger’s ears.

“Get another one . . .” Steve urged, struggling to hold the wildly thrashing Roger in place. “Come on . . .”

Fran rushed into the other room to the medical supply area, which had been organized with little cabinets and a small refrigerator. She took a new vial of serum from the refrigerator.

After the crew had built the fake wall in the maintenance corridor, they had decided to give each other more privacy and built separate rooms.

The huge storage area was now arranged so that there was a central living room in the middle, with three bedrooms and a general room, which contained the medical supplies and a workbench with tools, surrounding it like the spokes of a wheel. They had managed to drag up fairly large pieces of furniture, including mattresses, tables and chairs, lamps, and a few sectional pieces that formed a couch in the living room area. This was in addition to the television, the microwave oven, and other large electronic pieces that they had brought up earlier. Although there were still many cartons scattered about, it was beginning to look more like a home—or at least a college dormitory—than a storage area.

Downstairs, Peter was intent on checking the covering at the floor base of the fake wall when he heard the violent screaming emanating from above.

He ran into the far office and climbed up a rope ladder that dangled from the ceiling. Scrambling through the grille-work in the ceiling, he entered the duct. Then he pulled up the ladder and closed the grille. Wriggling through the tight space for a few feet, he came to another opening and dropped through that grille into the washroom. Then he moved around the back of the finished partition, and through the wooden framework, into the fire stair. It was a circuitous path, but one that would not be detected by unwanted intruders.

As he rushed up the stairs, several steps at a time, Roger’s screams became more and more agonized. As Peter charged into Roger’s makeshift bedroom, he could see Fran withdrawing a hypodermic from Roger’s good arm. The man kicked his legs and whipped his arms around with abandon, striking anything or anybody within reach. Steve tried to wrestle the man still, but even in his sickness, Roger was exceptionally strong. Peter ran over and clamped his big hands onto the other trooper’s shoulders. Whether it was his powerful arms pressing down, or simply his presence, Roger miraculously relaxed. Fran watched for a moment with tears in her eyes and then drifted out of the room.

“Go on,” Peter said to Steve after Roger had settled down enough to allow the drug to take effect. “I’ll stay with him.”

Steve gave him a long, hard look, as if to say, “I know what you’re going through,” and left the room.

In the living area, Fran was sitting in an inflatable chair, which was molded to her body. She felt safe in that chair, as if she were in a womb, and often found refuge in it when things got rough. Steve came up to her and put his arms around her neck from behind. She cupped his hands with hers and held them tightly. He rocked her gently back and forth as she sat staring off across the room.

In Roger’s room, a heaviness fell over the air. He caught his breath and looked up at Peter.

“You . . . you’ll take care of me, right, Peter?” he asked, feeble and childlike. He licked his lips and tried to speak coherently. “You’ll take care of me . . . when I go?”

Peter stared directly ahead, his eyes focused on a nail in the temporary wall. “I will.”

“I don’t wanna be walkin’ around like that, Peter . . . not after I go . . .” Roger tried to sit up to better make his point, but Peter merely applied slight pressure and the blond trooper lay down again. “I don’t wanna be walkin’ around like that . . .”

Roger’s eyes were terrified. Like a frightened deer, he looked this way and that at the walls, the ceiling, at Peter—but he couldn’t focus. The spinning started again and he felt nauseated.

“Peter?
Peter?
”

“I’m here, trooper,” Peter said, almost mechanically.