Dead Stop (34 page)

“Wait a minute!”
she interjected. “You two aren’t seriously talking about going out there.”

“Yep,” Harley
readjusted the hat on his head and nodded towards the time clock. “And we’re
going to do it real soon. It’s five thirty, Doc. We’re running out of darkness,
and we don’t know how much longer it will rain. We need to get everybody and
everything ready and up on the roof. I’ll go get those tables up through the
hatch. Get your patient here…err, Benny…ready to move, and I’ll be back to help
you guys with him in a minute. Oh, one other thing…”

“What’s that?”
Rachel asked.

“We’re not going
to be able to get to your truck…and for reasons I won’t go into right now,
getting to your office in Masonfield is pretty much out of the question too. Is
there anywhere…
anywhere
…else we can get this medicine you want?
Remember, under these circumstances anything goes, so breaking in to get it is
fine. Think hard.”

Rachel nodded,
and desperately searched her memory of the area. A few seconds later the answer
came.

“Yeah!” she
nodded. “If you go about fifteen miles up the highway, right over the county
line and take a right at the cutoff to Lake Cowell, there’s a large rural vet
clinic and feed store about three miles further down the road. Doc Cummings
place. He has a large practice so he’s probably even better stocked than I am.”

“Good, we now
have a destination. We’ll stop at the rest area to get ya’ll off the trailer
and into the car with Marisa, then we’ll head straight there. Deke, I want you
to run back into the store and scrounge up some cigarette lighters,
flashlights, and all the batteries you can throw into a shopping bag. We don’t
know how much longer the power is going to hold, wherever we go. Let’s go.”

“Now?” Deke
asked as he stood up.

“Now,” Harley
confirmed. “And while you’re at it, grab some more of those glow sticks real
quick. When you’re up on the roof, I want you to light them and toss them out
towards the corner of the highway and the county road. Try and make them skip a
time or two. Maybe you can draw these bastards further away from both the truck
and the back, and give us a better head start.

“You got it.”

Deke and Stacey
hustled out of the room.

“Hey,” Grandpa
Tom pulled himself to his feet, then tossed Harley a set of keys. He still
looked pale, but had definitely improved over the past couple of hours. “It’s
the key with the big plastic head. It has power locks, so just push the button
on the key ring before getting out of the car to unlock the doors.”

“Thanks,” Harley
caught them out of the air and pushed them into his pocket. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. Don’t
scratch my truck.”

“Right.”

The old man gave
him the eye for a second, then gave an approving nod.

“Good luck, son.
Don’t get eaten.”

Rachel watched
the sick trucker hobble down the hall, leaving her alone with Harley and
Marisa. Things were happening too fast for her.  Just a couple of minutes
ago they had been getting ready to accept having to spend the day hiding out in
the kitchen and hoping for the best. Now they were about to be going up on the
roof to wait for rescue…

…or watch Harley
and Marisa die horribly in the parking lot below them.

Suddenly the
pair looked very young to her. Every instinct she had screamed they shouldn’t
be doing this.

Yet she knew
they were right. They just couldn’t spend the day sitting back here and waiting
to see if they would die or not. Holing up might be a legitimate survival
strategy, but it required them finding a viable place to do so and preferably
after obtaining the antifungal medication. The Textro, with its plate glass
windows and zombie infested diner simply wasn’t it. Besides, sooner or later
the utilities were going to die and they would be trapped in pitch blackness
amid spoiling food and no running water.

They had to do
this. And the only way she could help was do her job as well.

“Okay,” she
sighed. “Marisa, Stacey told me there were some plastic tablecloths somewhere
the Textro used for special dinners and such. Let’s get one of those and wrap
Benny here in it. That way we can at least keep him mostly dry up there. Then I
guess you two can go save the day.”

###

Resurgence – Marisa

“Are you okay?”

Marisa nodded
her head in the now darkened hallway, fully aware of how silly it was. She
didn’t trust herself to speak yet. Stacey and Deke’s footsteps still sounded on
the ladder up to the roof. Only after hearing the thud of the roof hatch
closing, did the young woman finally allow herself a vocal exhale. She felt
sure it’s shakiness wasn’t lost on Harley’s ears.

She had been
okay, and working herself up to slide out the back door after Harley once they
opened it, but had gotten interrupted. Stacey had come rushing tearfully back
down from the roof to hug her and wish her luck. The anguish in the gesture
affected the young woman deeply, and almost brought her to tears herself.
Marisa would have just preferred that Stacey’s “wishing her luck” didn’t feel
so much like her saying goodbye. All she could do was hug the smaller girl
back, promise her she would be fine, and not tell her what she was really thinking.

You’re my
best friend, Stacey, and I love you like the sister I once lost. I’ll be damned
before I do nothing and let you die too.

Instead she had
finally handed the weeping girl back to Deke with the stern warning to look
after her, and sent the two back to the roof. Knowing the boy had endured the
agony of climbing down the ladder again with his injured shoulder to accompany
her reassured Marisa his feelings for Stacey were genuine. She just hoped he
got his act together fast enough to live up to the rest of the job.

Now she had to
work herself up to doing this crazy stunt all over again.

At least Harley
had the decency not to try and talk her out of it.

“Okay,” he
prompted softly in the dark, “let’s go over it one more time. First of all,
where are they?”

Marisa refocused
on the question and the matter at hand.

“One near the
breaker box. One between that one and the corn field. One was by the light post
but Deke said it went chasing a glow stick. So that just leaves the one back
there near the showers, and whatever might have been concealed by the dumpster
enclosure.”

“Good, now
what’s the plan?”

“The plan is,”
she repeated, “I will ease open the door, and you will go out first. I am to
watch how you do it and then do it the same way. If something out there makes a
move for you, you
will
dive back through this door, slam it shut, and
not worry about apologizing for knocking me down until later.”

“Um, I don’t
remember that last part.”

“I added it,”
she growled. “Deal with it. Now, if we both make it out there alive, then we
are to move slowly towards the shop, hoping the rain and darkness will disguise
us from the zombies for long enough to give us a head start. Once anything does
react, we run for the shop. You will lead, and focus on taking the zombie out
near the showers if it gets in our way. I will run to the shop door, but not go
in unless I have to until you get there. From that point on we make it up as we
go along.”

“Right.”

Marisa nodded to
herself, grateful to have the opportunity to settle herself by going over
things again. Having a plan to recite helped. Now there just remained one more
thing. She hadn’t intended to bring it up, but her brief session with Stacey
had made her reconsider.

“Uh, partner?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s just
one other piece of information,” she sighed. “I didn’t mention it earlier
because I didn’t think it mattered, but I guess this partner thing means I
shouldn’t hold anything out from you either. Sorry about that.”

“Forgiven. What
is it?”

“Umm…the second
one…the one out between the breaker boxes and the cornfield…I’m pretty sure
that one is Vicki.”

Harley didn’t
reply right away.

Marisa could
feel him studying her in the dark, knowing what he must be wondering. She
kicked herself for not bringing it up earlier. After all, trust was a two way
street.

“Is it going to
be a problem?” he asked, his voice betraying nothing.

Was it? Would it
cause her to hesitate at a crucial moment, possibly endangering both her and
Harley?

No.

She wouldn’t let
it.

“Absolutely
not,” she stated with flat finality. “It’s a zombie. All it wants to do is kill
and eat. Vicki is dead.”

Apparently that
satisfied him.

“Good enough.”

He moved around
her in the dark and took the same position at the door he had held before Stacey
had interrupted things. It was go time. Marisa fought to ignore the pool of
acid forming in her stomach. This time it was going to happen. This time they
were going to go through with it, and there would be no further reprieves.

“You ready?”
Harley whispered.

“Hell no,” She
grouched back. “So let’s do this before I come to my senses and change my
mind.” She briefly wondered if that ought to be her battle cry.

“Right.”

With just the
tiniest of clicks, Harley turned the knob and eased the back door open.

A dim yellow
light spilled in, and the splatter of rain hitting the asphalt filled the
hallway. A rumble of thunder rolled in from the night sky, but it sounded
nothing like the cracking booms of before. The storm had abated somewhat. What
had been wind driven sheets now fell as a steady downpour. Having been on the
roof earlier, the cold didn’t surprise her when it came rushing in. But it
reminded her how miserable the others must be, now huddled under plastic
tablecloths on the roof. She had loaned Doc her raincoat, and Stacey her
umbrella, yet she knew they were scant protection from the elements tonight.

But it was a lot
more than she had. Unfortunately for her, the dark red of her uniform was much
more suited to this venture than the bright pink of her raincoat.

Marisa watched
as Harley eased out the door. He took an agonizingly long time to do it, but
she understood why. Due to the arrangement of the parking lot lights, the back
of the building was in shadow. Only the distant lights toward the rear of the
parking lot shed any illumination back here, and that was reduced further by
the rain.

Which was a good
thing.

Harley had
explained the most likely thing to give them away at this stage was motion. So
he crept slowly out the door, he eyes focused down the back wall where she knew
the zombie near the breakers stood. After another moment, he slid out of sight
and she knew his back must be against the wall beside the door.

Now it was her
turn.

Following his
example, Marisa moved in very slow motion. She eased at a glacial pace out into
the storm. Water falling from the roof above splattered on her hair and down
her collar, soaking her in seconds. The shock of the frigid water almost took
her breath away. It was so cold…icy cold. But ignoring all of that was easy.

All it took was
looking down the length of the back wall and seeing the haggard silhouette near
the breaker boxes. She froze as a distant flash of lightning dimly revealed the
skull and grinning jaws. It seemed to stare towards the back and slightly away
from them. Then the light faded and the thing’s shadow stood down there,
motionless. Its black outline framed against the yellow glow of the light
around the corner, it was a silent death machine waiting for something to
trigger it.

And beyond that,
there waited something even worse.

Marisa forced
herself not to look at the figure in the pale dress about thirty feet further
away.

The young
waitress swallowed and fought to keep her breathing slow and steady. Better to
concentrate on the matter at hand. She carefully slid the last few inches to
her place beside the back entranceway, pulling the door almost closed behind
her. Once she felt the slick painted cinder bricks pressed against her back,
she held her breath and squinted across the doorway at Harley.

He simply looked
back at her, his face almost invisible under the shadow of his hat.

She knew what he
was waiting for.

Her hand gripped
the doorknob with knuckles almost white with tension. Now came the hardest part
of all. Her job was to close the door. She and Harley had agreed that if they
didn’t make it, they needed to leave behind a place for the others to retreat
to in case they needed to leave the roof. And the only way to do that was to
close the door behind them…thus cutting off their only means of return.

Other than Doc,
the rest had been too injured to leave downstairs alone. They wouldn’t have
been able to move and climb the ladder fast enough if the dead got in. And
Rachel needed to be on the roof with the others in case something unexpected
happened.

So this was the
way it had to be.

Marisa felt like
punching Harley for making this her job. Mainly because she suspected he did it
so she would have one last chance to change her mind and bail out.  And
dear God how she wanted to…

Every instinct
she had screamed for her to get her ass back inside and put the metal door
between her and the monsters where it belonged. This was all or nothing. This
was insane. She stared at that crack of blackness made by the last inch of
space between the door and the jamb. Whatever she did next, it was what she
would have to live or die with.

Marisa closed
her eyes and took a deep breath.

Hey guys,
watch this!

With silent
care, she pulled the door shut.

The small jolt
of the lock catching felt like the closing of a coffin lid under her hand. Now
there was no going back.