Dove: A Zombie Tale (Byron: A Zombie Tale Book 2) (19 page)

“Stuff it, Jake. The sooner this dunderhead gets right with the fact that we’re in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and riding inside some monster’s stomach, the better. It ain’t going to help none if he thinks we’re joshing him.” Sammy’s voice carried in the cavernous space.

A moan drifted up from somewhere deeper in the darkness.

I scanned my surroundings. “Sammy! Quiet down. I think you’re attracting attention.”

He pinched his face and snarled at me, but quieted down.

“Does anybody have anything to defend themselves with? I would hate to think we’re completely unarmed, here.” My question went unanswered as a chorus of moans and groans came from all directions.

“I lost my club when I got pulled from the tunnel,” Sammy whispered. I reached to my back and found my sword still there in its scabbard. Jake shook his head and looked at his empty hands.

“It looks like I have the only line of defense,” I groaned. Turning my attention to Roger, I stared at him expectantly. “How about you?”

“This is all I got,” he responded as he pulled a claw hammer from his tool belt. “We don’t generally carry a lot of tools when we come down here. The less of a profile we have, the safer we are when the trains come through the tunnels. Less a chance of damaging something or someone.”

“Okay, so we have a sword and a hammer. Great. Let’s just hope we don’t have a great zombie horde to deal with.” I stared up toward what I hoped would be the sky. “If there is a God above, I hope he hears my prayers and helps us through this!”

chapter fourteen

“Puppy or Demi-God
, I don’t care. We need to get our friends and loved ones back, right?” I stared at each of them in turn as they nodded their agreement. “So, I say we move onward and follow this damn thing until we can figure out a way to kill it, and recover them.”

Evan’s pale face turned a slight hint of green. “I’m not sure that’s the best course of action. You saw them get snatched. They’re probably eaten. Why kill ourselves trying to save someone who is more than likely dead?”

“Hey,” I snapped at him, “That’s her niece, his father. Wouldn’t you want someone to do everything in their power to save you if you were in their shoes? We don’t even know if they’re actually dead or not. And I, for one, am not giving up until I’ve at least confirmed that as a fact. So stop your crying. If you want to keep going and leave them behind, then you go on alone.”

A dark shadow passed over Evan’s face. After being frat brothers, I could tell that anger boiled within him. He froze in place and stared at me, his fingers curling and uncurling. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, pinching his face tight and narrowing his eyes at me. I read it in his face—he knew he needed me if he wanted to save his parents. He wouldn’t be able to survive on his own out in the world, especially not in this psychotic new world.

He sneered. “Fine,” he mumbled through grit teeth. “We’ll follow this thing until we find out they’re dead. Then we get the hell out of here.”

John’s hand lashed out, smacking Evan int he back of the head. “That’s my father, you jerk!”

Esmerelda shouted as well. “You don’t know if she’s dead. She’s tougher than you are, you scrawny little—”

“Stop!” I yelled, trying to intercede before things escalated beyond control and people did things they would really regret. “Fighting is not going to help anything right now. We have bigger fish to fry.” I stepped in close to Evan, jabbing my finger in his face. “You need to get yourself under control. You’re being a tool and a scared little brat.”

His eyes bounced all around my face, moisture welling along the lower lid and in the corners.

“I know you’re scared. So are the rest of us. God! I’m dead, Evan. You don’t think this scares the hell out me? What if we beat this thing and these colonies keeping my body alive die? We’re all scared here. I get it. But you don’t have to abuse your friends and companions. Find a better way to express your feelings and stop being a prat!”

He lowered his face, kicking his foot in a circle. “I’m sorry.” He breathed the words out as if reluctant to say them.

“Not accepted. When you’re ready for a real apology, we’ll be waiting. Until then, we have things to do.” I turned my back on him and walked toward one of the tunnel walls to examine it.

“John, what do you make of these walls?”

“I don’t know what to think,” he replied as I heard him approach.

“They’ve been melted,” Esmerelda called out. “The bedrock in this area belongs to the Fairmount Member of the Wissahickon Formation. It’s a metamorphic schist formed through heat and pressure over thousands of years. The sediments in the parent material have melted and become glassine. It takes extreme heat to do that—over 1,400 degrees Farenheit. What I don’t understand is how the rock cooled so fast. It makes no sense.”

“How do you know all this?” John asked, his jaw hanging at little.

“I have a Master’s degree in geology and a conscience. I didn’t want to work for some environmental firm trying to develop half-hearted solutions to pollution, nor did I want to pollute the groundwater and start earthquakes by working in fracking. So I ended up a geologist without a home and wound up taking a job in a restaurant after Sabrina came along.”

Evan inched over, still hanging his head like a beat puppy.

“Since we all saw this thing on the monitor in the prison, I think it appropriate that we head down. It must have come from the street above.” I pointed away from the sharp drop from above. With my enhanced sight, I could discern some faint light from that direction. “Down should be this way.” I pointed toward the sharp curve. “If you keep the light at my back, and stay a few paces behind, I can run point and scout ahead.”

Evan nodded as I pushed past him and trotted down the center of the tunnel. Our feet clopped across the floor and I scanned all around as I went, trying to find any signs or ways to track the monster that had our friends.

Around the sharp curve, the tunnel straightened out for a while before it merged with another tunnel. The still smooth walls in this new tunnel appeared in rougher shape than in the previous tunnel. “This is a much older tunnel,” Esmerelda called out as she ran her hands along the stone. “The stone has exfoliated through peeling and flaking.” She rubbed her fingers together. “There is a significant amount of water also seeping through the stone from behind. We must be close to the Schuykill River, which means we’re heading west. We’re also heading downward. I don’t know if you all noticed that, or not.”

“Yeah, I noticed the downward slope, it kind of propels you forward a little,” John responded.

“That’ll be a little more challenging on the return trip,” I added, “in case we need to make a quick getaway.”

“True. But it also suggests that these creatures have been burrowing beneath the city for some time and prefer to stay in places where the temperature is much more stable.”

“How long do you think these tunnels have been down there?” I asked.

“Judging solely by the deterioration on the stone, I would guess at least one—maybe two—thousand years.”

~ ~ ~

Shapes formed from the darkness, shambling toward us like hobbled children toward the ice cream man. I shouldered my sword and Roger held his hammer up in front of himself with both hands like a scared child. The first Goner came into view. Most of the skin on her face had sloughed off and what remained hung to one side. Her sinew and muscles were blackened from rot and decay. Bone and teeth pierced what little protection they had and stood out. The rest of her body fared no better. The clothing dangled in tatters, like frayed rags draped over a school skeleton. The milk-clouded eyes in her head rolled in random patterns as her jaw clacked shut against itself.

I stood my ground as she approached, waiting for others to make their appearance. Her moans resonated louder than the others. Stepping forward, I thrust the tip of my sword through one of her clouded eyes, piercing her skull and stabbing her brain. The lifeless hulk of her corpse fell to the ground, dragging my sword with it. Pushing against her head, I wrenched the blade free and spun toward another Goner whose hands hung close to wrapping around a fear-frozen Roger.

“Jake! Take the hammer from him.”

The former prison guard extracted the tool from the man’s grip and swung it side-handed at the first skull coming near him. A satisfying bone-crushing crunch resounded from the blow. Jake tensed and swung again, striking head after head as I turned back to my own side of the fray. Two more Goners approached, outstretched hands reaching to grapple and grip their prey. With a figure-eight motion, I sliced the skull cap from one, brought the sword upward and drove it down through the neck of the other, severing its head. Both bodies fell to the ground. Beside me, Sammy slammed the butt of his flashlight into another creature.

Jake, Sammy and I formed a circle around Roger, protecting him against the advancing creatures. The hammer crashed into skull after skull while my steel hacked and slashed through joints and muscle, piercing eye sockets. Sammy’s flashlight flickered one too many times before he handed it to Roger and started using his hands against the beasts. But they kept coming. Five at a time. Ten at a time. How could so many of these things be in here?

“Where are these things coming from?” I shouted as my sword jabbed through the side of a skull and into a gelatinous brain. “Given the ones stuck inside the goo, how could these have survived?”

Nobody answered because we were all busy fighting. Except for Roger, who sat there behind us all and cowered like a frightened baby.

I kicked him on accident and he yelped, scampering out between me and Jake and heading for the nearest wall. By sheer, dumb luck he found the one path with the fewest Goners in his way.

“Over here,” I yelled as I worked my way in Roger’s direction. “Let’s all stay together.”

There may be safety in numbers, but we found ourselves overwhelmed beyond comparison. The Goners kept coming and coming.

By the time we reached the wall where Roger stood quivering, our arms ached and we needed rest. But the onslaught did not relent in the slightest.

We must have dropped a good two or three dozen of the creatures into the digestive goo, and still more came. “How many do you think he ate?”

“Probably all of Pennsauken, New Jersey, at least. Maybe some of Conshohocken.”

I chuckled. “I guess when you’re as big as this guy here, you get a little hungry now and again.”

As two more fell to my sword, I took note of the clothing covering their decayed skin. It seemed off. One man wore a wig resembling a sheep’s wool, while a tri-corner hat adorned another’s head.

“Looks like he swallowed up some Independence Hall re-enactors, or something.” Jake put voice to the thought in my mind. “What’s next Ben Franklin?”

Styles of clothing varied more. Some appeared more recent. Some resembled the flappers of the 1920s, while others wore the mid-nineteenth century vests and cravats of high society.

“How old do you think this thing is?”

A woman approached, her black hair braided with beads. Her dessicated skin clung to her bones like papier-machet and the tan buckskin tunic wrapped around her hung like a burlap sack. I recognized some of the attire she wore from my high school text books. “At least a couple hundred,” I said and I plunged the tip of my sword through her collapsed nasal cavity. The blade emerged from the back of her skull with a loud pop.

“This is crazy,” Sammy shouted as another person dressed in Native attire grappled for him. “We’re stuck in this things belly with centuries-old zombies. What the hell? What—the—hell?” He wrapped his hands around the man’s head and twisted, spinning the neck around on its spinal column. It cracked like crispy cereal. The sound sent a chill up my spine.

As I drew my sword back to hack into the skull of another approaching Goner, the blade sliced into the leathery flesh of the stomach wall. The floor shook and the world leapt around. A deep, horrific growl, muffled by the beast’s fleshy body, exploded somewhere in the distance. The gelatinous goo at our feet liquefied a little and my feet sank in. A handful of the shuffling creatures fell to the ground, their arms and legs penetrating the goo and sticking as it solidified again.

“My God!” I shouted, whipping around to face the wall. “Sammy, get my back!” I sliced again at the stomach lining and the world broke back into the chaos of violent motion. “That’s it! Everyone hang on to the hairy walls! I have an idea.”

Roger clung to the wall like a baby orangutan to its mother. Sammy hunched low and wrapped one arm around me while grabbing the wall. Jake did the same with Roger, trying to keep him pinned.

Moans crept closer, persistent, though much fewer in number. I raised my sword over my head with both hands and with all my strength stabbed it through the monster’s stomach lining. As laser-sharpened steel pierced the alien flesh, the world around me dissolved into madness.

~ ~ ~

“You really think this thing has been down here two thousand years?” A mix of fear and awe spilled through in Evan’s question. “Underneath the feet of all those Native Americans. Creating havoc in this world around the same time as Christ’s emergence onto earth?”

“You never struck me as a religious person, Evan.” Now John sounded awed.