DeadBorn (3 page)

A groan resounds from the hallway. It's hollow and gurgling, like a boiling pot with a crooked lid. Scratching sounds precede an arm, then two, that slip inside the hole in the door and reach for us. Holly's dad, Bart Arget, is standing up with only half a head, like a busted watermelon. He's making keening noises and glowing like a damned sparkler. Only this isn't Fourth of July. Right now, we're in Hell.

“
Holly!” I call, but she isn't listening. There isn't much of her left in her own face. It's gone blank and slack. I slap her though I don't know why. She wakes up, blinks blue eyes at me and fires again at the door. It goes right through the wood and hits her father's chest with a slurping sound that I know I'll replay again and again in my confused mind. He doesn't stop though; he's still reaching, fingers beckoning us. He gurgles again and half his mouth plays a sound that mimics Holly's name. She sobs, wails, and throws her hands up, fires four more shots into the wood.

Mr. Arget finally stumbles back and I can hear a scraping noise as he slides to the floor.

Holly is whimpering and sobbing and shaking as she digs boxes of ammunition out of the safe and reloads the revolver. She then raises a finger and points at a bag that's slung over her father's chair. Without a word, I dump the comic books out of it and toss it to her. There is more moaning and shuffling outside the door now, like the howling of the wind in the trees. Only the wind doesn't gurgle. Or smell. I start gagging and I don't stop until I throw up all over the carpet. Holly ignores it all.

“
Pick up the baseball bats,” she tells me as she stands and opens one of the desk drawers. Inside of it are bags of chips, candy, sunflower seeds, and pretzels. Holly loads these into the sack and turns towards the brown door that blends into the wood paneling around it. It's a garage door that the Argets never use, and I remember suddenly and uselessly that there's a shelf behind it, blocking us in from that side. This doesn't deter Holly. She hands me the bag and our eyes meet. Hers are red rimmed and frightened, full of fear and melancholy but also this desperate need to survive that I both respect and admire. Holly is fucking incredible. “Stand back.”

My girlfriend unlocks the door and in a move that's motivated by both adrenaline and rage, she slams her shoulder against it and I hear a crash from the other side. The door swings open and I see that the garage is covered in bright lines of blue, red, and yellow paint. “Come on,” Holly instructs as she pauses for just a moment and untangles the teeth from my hair, tossing them to the floor where they bounce and clatter like a windup toy, like a joke.
But this is no joke,
I realize as I follow Holly down the steps and into the garage, avoiding the paint like it's blood.
And it's not a fucking dream either.

I pause for just a moment to shut the door behind us, cutting off the sounds of growling and sputtering for a short time. For a very, very short time.

Chapter 3

Redoubtable

One Hour After …

Holly's parents don't believe in cars, so there's nothing for us to hop into and drive away with. I think immediately of my bike, but it's on the front porch with the … My thoughts pause, get stuck on that word:
zombie.
It's a word for comic books and video games, not for real life.

“
Now what?” I ask, wanting to climb into a closet and hide. Eventually the police will come or the military or something. If we hide out, somebody will save us. But Holly's not the kind of girl that gets saved. Holly's more about saving herself. And me. Even in the turmoil of the moment, I get a surge of feelings for Holly that make it hard to breathe. She's willing to do anything for me. I raise my face and catch her staring at me. She looks bloody and sad and for a split second, hopeless. Then she pulls herself together and puts her hands on her hips.

“
We have to get out of here,” she tells me confidently. Her father is dead and probably her mother, too, and I understand because I went through the same thing. Then again, my father withered away in a hospital bed and when his eyes closed, they never opened again. He never came at me with half a head; I never had to shoot him.

“
Holly,” I begin, reaching out for her.

“
We don't have time for that,” she says, slapping my hands away and dropping her robe to the ground. Underneath it, she's wearing only a thin, white camisole and a pair of pink shorts, but I can see why she ditched it. The robe is soaked in blood, making it heavy and sticky. She's better off without it. I take off the sweatshirt I'm wearing and even though the sleeves are shredded a bit from the skeleton's hands, I put it over Holly's thin shoulders and help her slip her arms inside. Once I have her zipped up, I look around the garage for ideas. There's a door directly in front of me with a small, dirty window. Already, there are zombies outside it. I didn't notice them at first since they've smeared the glass with blood and … other things. It made it difficult to see them. Holly looks over her shoulder and sighs deeply, like the whole world is sitting on her shoulders. And maybe it is? “How fast can you run, Galen?” she asks as she stares me down and tears dribble over her lips. I brush them away with my thumb and try to focus on her blue eyes and not on the rotting faces outside the door. A crash draws my attention back towards the house. The zombies have made it into Bart's room and now only a few inches of cheap wood separates them from us. Holly reaches up, takes my chin and turns my head back to face her. “Seriously Galen,” she says and she tries to smile. It's the fakest smile I've ever seen, but I smile back and try to breathe through my mouth. The smell, even in here, is bad enough that I think I might throw up again. “Tell me your skinny ass can run faster than you did on the field last night.” Holly laughs, but it turns into a sob halfway through. “Because we're going to have to run for our lives and I need to know that you'll be behind me the whole time. Can you do that for me?” I nod although I can't make any promises.

“
If I don't make it,” I tell her, trying to ignore everything around me for just a second, so I can absorb that pretty face and brush back that blonde hair. I kiss Holly's lips hard. “You'll go without me, right?” Holly nods but doesn't promise me either. I guess we're both just big liars.

“
I'm going to open the garage door. As soon as we can, we're going to duck under it.” Holly pauses and puts the revolver in the bag before reaching out a hand for one of the baseball bats. I hand her one and keep the other. “Don't stop for anything, not other people, not cries for help, nothing. Just run.” Holly takes a massive breath and wipes hair off her forehead. Blood smears across her pale skin. It's not hers, thankfully, but it still makes my stomach churn. I lick my finger and wipe some of it away from her pale eyebrow. It tints it pink and smears it, but she hardly looks clean. “Let's go to Dawson's house,” she says, referring to her ex-boyfriend. They only dated for two months and they never kissed, Holly assures me, but I still hate him. The situation though is too dire for me to argue with her or even care. “He has a gun collection that I think might come in handy. Besides, his family has four cars. We're bound to be able to get into at least one of them.” I don't ask what Dawson and his family will do when we come storming into their house at six something in the morning, but I hope they're angry and well and that they lock us in a bedroom and call the police. That's better than the alternative. I don't know how widespread this zombie thing is, but if it's anything like the movies, then I could be facing an apocalypse. “Ready?” Holly asks and I nod.

Seconds later, the garage door is groaning and sliding up the metal rails to the ceiling. When there's three feet of space, Holly grabs my hand and pulls me under. My head hits the door, reminding me that I bumped it on the safe and it hurts like hell. Combined with the strain from the skeleton monster we encountered, I'm seeing stars again. I stumble after Holly surprised to find myself surrounded by a crowd of rotting, stinking monsters. They're everywhere now, covering the neighborhood like a disease. People are screaming and dying and there's a lot of blood, some of it human and some of it from the zombies. Holly drags me right through, past reaching fingers and snapping jaws. Whatever animates these things makes them fast and they take off after us.

“
Come on, Galen,” Holly cries as my breath sucks into my lungs like a vacuum and bursts out again. I can't seem to get enough air and wish I'd been on a sports team like Holly. Hands reach for me and try to grab me, but they don't grab Holly. In fact, unless I'm seeing things, the zombies seem to be moving for Holly, spreading apart like a rotten sea. When Holly slows a bit for me, things get even better. When she grabs my hand, the creatures stop biting at me, stop grabbing at my clothes.

Holly and I explode out of the crowd and turn the corner onto a fairly empty street. People are standing outside in huddling groups and whispering. I can see lights in the distance and the sound of sirens is echoing around the neighborhood. The police have no idea what they're in for. I wish I could warn them, but there's no time. Holly and I cut down an alley and sprint across gravel that digs painfully into our bare feet before we come out the other side and onto Dawson's street. When I look over my shoulder, I see that there's a stream of monsters coming for us, jogging like an undead SWAT team. They don't seem like they're actually trying to touch us, more like they're just following.

Holly keeps me going by tugging my hand and leading me to a house with white siding and an American flag painted on the front door. We don't go up the steps to the porch and instead, Holly takes us around the back and through a gate that's well disguised by some hedges. This makes me wonder how she knows this and I get jealous. Then I feel disgusted with myself. With all that's happened, how can I even dream of having that emotion? Jealously is a luxury, something you can feel when there's nothing else to feel. Right now, there's so much more.

Holly takes us to a sliding glass door and opens it with a gentle push. An alarm system goes off, but she doesn't care. She takes us straight to a door next to the kitchen and opens it. Holly's ex-boyfriend, Dawson Isaac, is sitting up in bed and yawning. When he sees us, he screams and then snaps his mouth closed when he recognizes Holly.

“
What are you doing here?” he asks as Holly moves past him and opens his closet. She starts grabbing gun cases and throwing them back at me. I stare at the collection in shock. Holly wasn't joking. Dawson really does have an armory in his closet. “What the fuck?”

“
Dawson, are you okay?” a woman asks from outside his bedroom door. It isn't long before she starts to scream. Dawson leaps out of bed, completely nude, and goes for the stairs, only to be stopped by Holly. In her face is a horror I understand. We led the zombies here. We killed Dawson's parents. Holly doesn't apologize though. I don't think she even realized what she was doing. I know I didn't. I feel really bad about being jealous and try to explain.

“
Don't open that door,” I say.

“
Fuck you,” Dawson growls. Holly lifts up her baseball bat and smacks him in the back of the head, not hard enough to kill, just enough that he slumps to the floor, unconscious. Her eyes are wide, like marbles and she gags on the stench as blood leaks under the door and drips down the small flight of carpeted stairs that lead into Dawson's bedroom. Holly's mumbling something under her breath, but I can't hear her, so I just stand there and stare at the poster that lines the back of Dawson's door. It's a nude woman with stickers over her nipples and a teddy bear between her spread legs, hiding anything questionable from view. I'm looking at this woman, but I'm not really seeing her. I'm seeing what's happening on the other side of that door in my head. I'm putting together whimpers and growls and moans and shuffles with my imagination and it leaves me shaking. I collapse to the floor next to Dawson, overwhelmed with a fresh surge of fear. I've pushed my fucking emotions back like I always do and now they're catching up with me. My life flashes before my eyes in snippets and I'm not happy with what I see.

“
Dress him,” Holly says and her voice cuts through my thoughts like a knife. She hands a gun to me and I stare at it. I've never fired a gun before. It feels cold and heavy in my hand. And dangerous, too, very dangerous.

“
I don't know anything about guns,” I say. Holly ignores me and opens Dawson's dresser. She pulls out a shirt and some pants.

“
Dress him then dress yourself. See if you fit into his shoes. You have two minutes.” Holly stalks to the window next to Dawson's bed and looks out. There are no zombies there yet which is good. I hope that the low basement window confuses them and they stay away long enough for me to put on some of Dawson's sneakers. If we're going to keep running, we're both going to need footwear. “After you've got him dressed, try to wake him up.”

“
Why?” I ask, stupid as always. I still don't know why Holly agreed to go out with me. There isn't anything about me that's exceptional, a few things that are good, and a whole host of bad things.

“
Because he's coming with us,” she says as she grabs Dawson's backpack from the end of his bed and empties it of last year's notebooks. “I didn't want to take anybody with us, but I … ” The thought remains unfinished which is okay because I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to even say aloud the thought that we're responsible for any of this. We might've led the zombies here, but we didn't make them or curse them or infect them or whatever. I think of the strange black light I saw under the door in Bart's room and the skeleton creature. Whatever is going on, I don't think it has anything to do with a disease.