Dead, but Not for Long (15 page)

“Boys, we’re not cooking for a bunch of GIs now. We’ve got to tweak our menu for some old, sick
folks. Use your imagination,” Snake suggested. “I’m going to get a head count.”

~*~

Walking around the side of the house, Eric saw a car in the driveway. Avoiding the mud, he
continued around back and peered into a window. He looked for signs of life but
saw no one. He thought about giving up, but a thought occurred to him. What if she was trapped inside, scared and alone?

He could almost see her, huddled beneath a table as several of the infected searched for her in
the house. She would be terrified, shaking with fear. They would sense her fear
and slowly turn toward the table as they zeroed in on their prey. That’s when
Eric would come leaping through the window in a cascade of broken glass, sword
in hand. He would make short work of the infected in the room without even
breaking a sweat. Cheri would rush to him, and he would crush his mouth to hers in a searing kiss.

Anxious to rescue her, he tried several windows, but they were all locked. He had gone
this far and he wasn’t about to quit now. He grabbed his sword and thrust it
through the bedroom window and cleared most of the jagged glass from the frame.
He eyed it for a moment, contemplating how he’d leap through it. He tried
jumping in place once, just to see how high he could get. He was pretty sure it
wasn’t going to be enough, but maybe once he got his momentum going, it would
work. He made a run for it, but stopped when he saw that there was still some
glass. Sighing, he brushed away the remaining glass then heaved his bulk up
onto the window frame. It took him a couple of minutes to maneuver his body so
that he could get his legs inside, but finally he dropped to his feet inside
the bedroom. As he stood upright, he felt a terrible pain as a baseball bat
crashed across his head. He fell to the floor, barely conscious. Looking up, he
could see Cheri wielding a bat, ready for another strike.

“Cheri!” he yelled. “It’s me! It’s Eric!”

She hesitated and squinted her eyes at him.

“Eric?” she stammered. The next blow knocked him out.

~*^*~

Eric struggled to escape the fog he found himself in. He dreamed of his mother. He dreamed
about his new undead friend. He heard children laughing and talking. Slowly, he opened his eyes and saw two small forms in front of him.

“Mom!” one of the children yelled. “He’s awake!”

Eric’s head throbbed when the child yelled. He went to rub his eyes, but couldn’t move his
hands. He couldn’t, in fact, move anything. As the fog lifted, he could see
that he was tied up on a small bed. Two children sat nearby watching him. He
heard footsteps approaching and he watched as Cheri entered the room. She
looked different than he remembered. Her hair was shorter than he’d ever seen
it, and she looked much older. Still, a decade of being apart from her had done
nothing to heal his broken heart. There was something about her that mesmerized
him. His heart started to pound and he started feeling that longing all over
again. He thought she looked like an angel as she opened her mouth to speak.

“You idiot! You broke my window. You probably led half the population of Michigan to my house.
And where did you get the police car? Did you steal it?”

Eric tried to rub his head, but the ropes prevented him from doing so.

“I’m a cop,” he lied. “Really, I just came to check on you.”

“That’s funny,” she stated. “Your uniform says St. Mary’s Hospital Security. I suppose you stole that too.”

“No, I got blood on my uniform and didn’t want to scare anyone. Could you please untie me?” he asked.

“The safety of my children is a little more important than your comfort right now. You’re just lucky I didn’t have a gun.”

Eric thought about it, and he did feel lucky. She could have shot him when he came through the window.

“Cheri,” Eric tried to reason with her, “I’ve never been dangerous; maybe persistent, but not
dangerous. I’ll fix your window. Just please untie me.”

“Don’t do it, Mom!” one of the children said. “It’s a trick! Hit him with the bat again!”

Cheri looked at Eric and shook her head.

“Don’t worry,” she reassured her children. “One thing is true; he’s never been dangerous, just obnoxious.”

She untied the ropes.

~*~

Lindsey and Autumn had followed the bikers down to see if they could find something for Autumn to eat with her medications.

“I don’t know where to start looking,” Lindsey said, surprised by the size of the kitchen.

“I’ll check over here,” Autumn said, yanking open the door to the walk-in freezer. As she opened
the door, she let out a scream. A body had fallen against her, and she struggled to stay on her feet.

Snake raised his pistol and fired a well-placed shot into its head, which splintered into small pieces.

“You okay?” he asked the girl.

“Yeah,” Autumn replied, visibly shaken. “Good shot.”

“Probably not necessary,” Snake said, examining the frozen body.

Lindsey ran over to see what was going on. The headless victim was in a nurse’s uniform.

“Someone was either locking somebody in or locking something out,” Snake said. “Either way,
it didn’t turn out well.”

Lindsey looked at the frozen body. “Maybe the dead outside will freeze like this when winter comes.”

Gunner shrugged and said, “Let’s hope it’s all over by then, and we don’t have to find out.”

~*~

After being untied, Eric rubbed his wrists. They still had the rope marks from being bound
so tightly, and he was surprised that his circulation wasn’t cut off.

“I have some sheets of plywood outside,” Cheri said curtly. “You’re going to help me board
up all the windows, so I don’t have any . . . any other morons breaking in.”

Eric rubbed his head.

“Can I get an aspirin? My head really hurts.”

Cheri grabbed the bat again and started to bounce it into her hand.

“Okay,” Eric quickly got up and walked outside. He thought about jumping into the car and
leaving, but he was finally with Cheri again, the real one. It was worth the pain.

She showed him the plywood, a saw, and a cordless drill, and told him to get to work.

He started with the window he had broken. Measuring it, he cut the plywood about a foot larger.
He saw the hard brick exterior and reasoned that he couldn’t drill into it.
Bringing the plywood inside, he located some finishing nails and secured it to
the drywall surrounding the window. As he was putting the last nail in, Cheri
stepped into the room. Eric beamed with pride as he stepped back to show her his handiwork.

She shook her head and walked out the door without saying a word. He followed her to the
outside of the window and watched as she pushed on the plywood with very little
effort. The board fell with a thud onto the floor. Cheri turned and glared at
Eric, who sheepishly looked down to his feet. She pointed at the hole where the window used to be.

“The object is to keep whatever it is out there from getting in,” she said sarcastically. “It
would be my guess that they would be pushing from the outside. That’s why I told
you do attach it from the outside. Do you get it this time?”

Eric desperately tried to piece his ego back together.

“You can’t drill these screws into brick,” he explained.

“See this wood around the window?” She pointed at the window casing. “Drill into that.”

“But what if they try to unscrew . . .” He thought about what he was saying and stopped himself. “Got it.”

Eric moved the materials back outside and fastened the plywood the way Cheri had shown him. He
repeated the same for the other windows until the entire house was secure. As
he was gathering up the remaining tools, he saw a plume of dust chasing a truck on the road leading to the farm.

“Cheri, we’ve got company!” he yelled.

They watched as the truck got closer. Cheri’s eyes widened as she recognized the vehicle.

“Kids!” she yelled into the house. “It’s your dad!”

“Miguel,” Eric muttered under his breath as a look of disdain crept across his face.

The truck sped into the drive, and a middle aged Latino man jumped out. Rather than the
sagging jeans and the tattoos that Eric had expected, Miguel was wearing a
dress shirt and nice pants. His glasses gave him a scholarly appearance and his
hair was neatly trimmed. He ran to the children and scooped them up in his
arms. Cheri joined them, and they engaged in a group hug that almost made Eric
lose his now-digesting chicken.

“You had me scared to death,” Cheri told him. “I didn’t hear from you and I thought all
sorts of things. If it weren’t for the kids, I probably would have lost it.”

“I’m here now,” he reassured her with a hint of an accent. “It got real nasty up north. The
University was completely overrun. It was awful.”

He looked at the children and didn’t want to say any more. He turned to Eric.

“I’m glad to see there are still some cops working.”

Eric was about to spin a web of deceit, but he caught steel in Cheri’s eyes and decided against it.

“I’m not really a cop. I’m a security officer.”

He reached to shake Miguel’s hand and found himself shaking with rage. Eric had never met
him in person, but had hated the man from afar, blaming him for stealing Cheri.
Sure the breakup had happened years earlier, but until she married Miguel, Eric
had felt that he still had a chance. And now he was shaking the hand that had caused so much turmoil in his life.

“Miguel, meet Eric,” Cheri said.

Miguel immediately withdrew his hand.

“Crazy Eric? The stalker?” Miguel’s mouth hung open like a toilet seat in a men’s restroom.

“It’s okay,” she reassured him. “Really, he’s harmless, uh, aren’t you, Eric? You’re
over that clingy stalking thing, right?”

Eric was silent for a couple seconds too long.

“Heck, yeah,” he finally said, with false enthusiasm. “I’ve even got a girlfriend now. She’s
kind of quiet. We never argue, and she’s crazy about me. She can’t keep her eyes off of me.”

Cheri wondered what type of woman would find him attractive in his present state but she never
would have guessed the truth about Eric’s new girlfriend. When they had been
together, he had at least been fit, he hadn’t been ugly, and as for his
intelligence, well, she thought, he hadn’t been ugly. Now he had let himself
go. He was flabby, unkempt, and when his pants hung down far enough, she could swear he wasn’t wearing underwear.

“What brings you out here?” Miguel inquired.

“My Aunt has a home not too far from here,” he lied. “I was checking on her and saw Cheri
outside, so I asked if she needed help.”

He prayed that Cheri wouldn’t rat him out.

As Cheri was contemplating the pros and cons of telling Miguel the truth, one of the children,
a six year old girl named Marie, blurted out, “Mom hit him with the bat!”

Miguel smiled at Cheri and looked back at Eric. “Well, I guess you know your place.”

Eric did his best at faking a grin as he imagined thrusting his sword through Miguel’s heart.

Cheri chuckled under her breath.

“Actually, he was just leaving,” she said, hoping Eric would get the hint.

“I think Eric and I need to have a little talk.” Miguel motioned for Eric to follow him.

~*~

It had been a long time since Keith had had to empty a bedpan or change a colostomy bag and
he’d forgotten just how unpleasant it was. After thoroughly scrubbing and
donning new gloves, he checked each patient again. When he reached the room of
a patient named Lenny, he noticed a bandage on the man’s shoulder that he
hadn’t seen before. Lenny was asleep, so Keith peeled the bandage back and
noticed a wound that looked suspiciously like a bite mark. It didn’t take him
long to realize that Lenny wasn’t just asleep. He was completely unresponsive.

“Marla?” Keith asked, sticking his head out the door. When she didn’t reply, he went to search
for her. He found her in a patient’s room, poking under a bed with a broom.

“Do you know anything about Lenny, the patient in room 306? He seems to have a human bite on
his shoulder, though there’s nothing about that on the chart.”

“Oh,” she said, thinking about it for a moment. “Oh, now I remember. You know how he always
likes to go for a walk? Well, he came back just before I went on break and he
asked for a bandage. He said someone bit him in the cafeteria.”

“And you didn’t think that maybe this should be mentioned, especially under the current
circumstances?” he asked, stunned. “I even had you check our patients for bites.”

She shrugged. “You can read the chart, can’t you?”

“It isn’t on the chart,” he reminded her.

He returned to the nurses’ station to get the gun, Marla right behind him.

“What are you going to do, shoot him?” she asked.

“I may have to,” Keith sighed. “For now, I’ll just watch him. You’re going to have to handle the
other patients for a while.”

He sat down in the chair across the room from Lenny and waited for the inevitable.

~*~

Eric and Miguel walked to the hay barn in the back, where Miguel sat on a bale of hay outside
the door. Eric stood with his arms crossed in a way that revealed his lack of trust in the other man.

“Any other day,” Miguel started, “I’d have you out of here so fast your head wouldn’t have time to spin.”

He grabbed a blade of hay and put it in his mouth and started to chew on it like a miniature cigar.

“Today’s different. Today, the world changed. Some things that used to seem important
just don’t matter now. Other things we took for granted matter more than ever.”

Eric rolled his eyes, not interested in hearing Miguel’s philosophical musings.

Miguel pulled the blade from his mouth and threw it to the ground.

“I’m going to need your help, Eric. If my family is going to survive, they’re . . . we’re going to need help.”