Dove: A Zombie Tale (Byron: A Zombie Tale Book 2) (3 page)

“Yeah, and it’s just a lamp, right?”

I grimaced and stuck my tongue out at him. “Don’t be a jerk.”

“Hey lady, you’re in my house. Don’t call your host names.”

“House? Are you God? Last I checked, we’re in a House of God. And you don’t look like no zombie messiah to me.”

“Touche!” Sammy grinned. “Now let’s go get steamed up so we can play in some poop!”

I glared at him. “You’re gross, man. You can go play in poop all you want. I’m heading out of here so I can go find my aunt and save her from the Goners.”

Tightening the grip on my bat, I stepped out into the corridor. Examining the doorways, it became evident that one did not cast light into the hallway. Sammy stepped out behind me. I pointed the doorway out to him. “I think that door is our target. There’s no light coming from it. Should be the stairwell.”

“You got a flashlight?”

“Of course I do. You think I’m some kind of hack? I’ve been doing this a while now. What kind of explorer would I be without a flashlight?”

“Do you really want an answer?”

I mocked his words. “Mee me mee mee me me mee me? You get yourself to a library, Sammy. I’ll show you my videos. I’m a professional, not a hack.”

A deathly thin head popped out from a doorway. The petite woman had once possessed that Jackie O kind of beauty, but it had faded with age and sickness. Now large bald patches covered the top of her head and gruesome sores, trimmed in necrotic flesh, exposed the white of her skull beneath. No way this woman survived the infection.

She slid through the doorway with amazing speed, covering the distance between us in two broad steps. She bared her teeth in a feral snarl and swiped at me with her claws.

I leaned back, away from her attack, letting the claws slice the air millimeters from my skin. Before she could recoil, I brought aluminum death to bear on her fragile skull. It popped like a high-fly ball over left field. The woman collapsed like a marionette with cut strings.

~ ~ ~

“Head for the stairwell!” Sammy yelled. Two more Goners filtered through a classroom in the other direction.

I ran, pulling a flashlight from a cargo pocket, and leaped through the doorway into the stairwell. Graffiti covered the concrete block walls. Running, I crashed into the steel railing and catapulted myself down toward the basement, taking two steps at a time.

Sammy stomped down the well after me. “Keep going! They’re coming after us.”

As we reached the first floor landing, another Goner snapped at me. I cracked it in the head with my bat and kept running, never slowing my pace. Sammy crashed down behind me.

At the basement landing I slammed into a steel door, turning the handle to no effect. “It’s locked, Sammy! What do we do?”

“Didn’t you plan for this? Aren’t you a professional? What would you do if you found a locked door in any other abandoned building?”

“Don’t mock me,” I yelled at him while bringing the bat down onto the handle, snapping it off. I stepped out of the way, readying myself for the monsters storming down the stairs. “Now jimmy it with your knife.”

Sammy slid past me, jamming the end of his knife into the handle opening. “I got it,” he yelled, tossing his weight against the door until it budged. The first bone-thin leg struck the landing ahead of me. Shoving my back against him, I followed him through the door, keeping my bat straight out in front of me to stave off any would-be attackers.

As Sammy slammed the door shut, we fell into absolute darkness, thick and viscous like black paint. Not even the faint trickle of light from the stairwell could pierce the black curtain inside. I wedged my back against the door and flicked on my flashlight.

Dust motes danced in front of the flashlight lens. Its beam illuminated stacks of old desks, piles of rags and cloth, buckets and cleaning supplies. “We need something to prop this door shut.” I focused the light on a nearby roll-top wood desk. “Think you can push that over here?”

He crashed through some old paint cans as he wound his way around the far side of the desk. Their clatter echoed off the ceiling above. The stench of thinner stung my nostrils, making me woozy. A tortured screech fill the air as the old desk moved inch by painful inch across the floor. The door bounced against my back from the Goners’ incessant pounding. I jerked forward with each of their blows.

“Hurry the crap up!” I shouted over the desk’s noises.

“This thing ain’t as light as it looks, Freakshow! You want it moved faster, then get over here and help me push.” He could barely talk, winded by the exertion of pushing the heavy furniture.

“I can’t. Until that desk gets here, I’m the only thing stopping the Goners from getting in here and biting us. So shut up and push faster.”

Another massive thump at the door bowled me forward a few inches. I threw all my weight back and slammed hard against the door. Its slam resonated through the dark. The grinding of wood against concrete began again with renewed purpose.

“I’m going as fast as I can. Hold onto your underwear,” Sammy complained.

Something bumped against my hip. Swinging the flashlight beam, it illuminated the side edge of the desk. “Hey, watch it, bub!”

“A little light here would be nice.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Keep your sorries, and shine the damn light.” I swung the beam back in his direction. “Not in my eyes! Either shine it at the desk, or where I need to go.” He crossed his hands over his face, squinting and pinching it tight.

I swept the light back to its original place. “Got it.” I lurched with another massive thud. With the edge of the desk a few inches across the opening, I jumped around next to Sammy and helped him push it into position. Each slam of the Goners against the door moved the desk away from it.

Sammy’s eyes grew wide as the desk wandered. “The desk is not enough to hold them,” I stated the obvious.

“Then let’s move a few more. Set your light on this one and point it to the ceiling, it should give us enough to see by.” He scrambled to another heavy wood desk and started pushing. With a couple bookends, I propped the flashlight upright and shoved my weight along beside him. The additional weight seemed to stymie the door’s movement.

“Let’s do one more for good measure,” I said as the pounding continued in earnest.

Sammy rubbed his shoulder, then straightened his back. “Sure thing, boss. I can move these all day.”

I shot him a hairy-eyeball. “Listen, you want to be Goner food, go right ahead. I want to stay alive, thank you very much.”

“Ain’t gonna be much of a life if those things have spread through the city. In fact, I reckon it would be damn near hell on earth.”

“Reckon?” I slogged over to another desk and shoved with all my weight. “Come on, Pardner.” I laid on my thickest Texas accent. “Let’s mosey on up to the desk and move her on out!”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re a pain in my neck.” He rubbed his shoulder again. “Literally!”

“Hey, I’ve got to play to my strengths. You know how many years of cultivation it took to be this annoying? If they’d had a program in bugging people, I would have actually stayed in college instead of dropping out.”

“Why does that not surprise me? A college dropout.”

“Yeah. A college dropout who makes a nearly six-figure income by walking through old buildings and taping them.” I tapped the camera on my head, then remembered it still rolled. “Reminder—edit that last part before final post.” As the third desk slid into position, I grabbed my flashlight.

“Do you think there are any Goners down here?”

“I don’t think so, Sammy.”

“Oh, and why not, Miss Professional?”

“Because with all the racket we just made moving those desks, I think we’ve woken the dead over in Fair Hill Cemetery.”

“Nah. Them Ol’ Quakers don’t wake for nothing! They enjoy their afterlife.”

I gave him a smile, then pointed the beam into the dark to seek out what we came here for—another way out.

~ ~ ~

We tried as much as we could to silence our footfalls, but the debris accumulated on the concrete floor made it impossible. The cellar appeared much larger than I expected, seeming to extend beneath the entire parochial school.

“Where do you think we are?” Sammy piped up beside me.

I tried to chart our location in my head. “I’m not sure, maybe underneath the road.”

“You know, you might be right. I used to pester Father Thadeus all the time about this place and how it was built. Usually he’d loosen his lips after a little of the sacramental wine. If I remember what he used to say, there are tunnels connecting the church to the convent on the other side of the road. I always wondered how those nuns got about without anyone seeing.”

“We may be in one.”

He looked around. “Not much of a tunnel.” One eyebrow popped up as his face turned back toward mine. “You think they have another flashlight down here?”

“You kidding me? I wouldn’t doubt it. I’m actually surprised they left all these desks, blankets, cots, and other things down here. Let’s look around.”

As we continued through the wide tunnel, we crossed a threshold into a plain, open room with tables scattered about. “Looks like a cafeteria,” Sammy blurted.

“You’re right. It does. And in a basement cafeteria, there is probably a kitchen. That might be our best bet to finding a flashlight. Cooks need to see in case of a power outage.”

“Good point.”

We drifted off our course toward a doorway standing next to a counter. The wall above the counter had been cut away to provide a window for passing food through. “Looks like where I used to have coffee hour at church as a kid.”

“You went to church?” Sammy sniped. “Was the chapel smote by lightning, or something.”

“Don’t be a jerk.”

We riffled through cabinets in search of another light. “Is that the best you got? Smart-mouthed girl like yourself ain’t got no better comebacks.”

“I’ve learned that my mouth can get me into more trouble than it can get me out of.”

“Oh, ho,” he chided. “Sounds like someone with a past. Maybe a juvie past?”

I glared at him as he pulled something out of a cupboard. Banging it against the heel of his palm, a bright beam skewered the dimness between us. He directed the beam right in my eyes.

“Hey, get that out of my eyes.” I blinked to clear the red and white spots dancing in my vision. “I had a little bit of trouble as a teenager. Then again, who hasn’t. Only problem is that I got caught, and not my friends. The reason I have a juvie record is that I wouldn’t snitch on them. Prosecutors and judge threatened to throw the book at me if I didn’t give them names. But I wouldn’t betray my friends like that. Turns out the judge wasn’t bluffing. He put me away for a year in juvie.”

“What did you do?”

“Stupid crap. We thought it would be a good idea to vandalize some town sculptures.”

“What? How?”

“I grew up in and around Boston. The town I lived in, we had this giant sculpture of Paul Revere’s ride because he came through there or something. So my friends and I decided he’d be better as a headless horseman. You can fill in the blanks of what happened from there.”

Sammy couldn’t contain his laughter. The packed kitchen filled with brays and guffaws. “Headless horseman? That is classic.” He clapped his hands as he spoke. “You know, I almost thought you to be more of a poser. You know, someone who pretends to be something they’re not. But you—you’re the real deal!”

“I wish my parents found it as funny as you did. They were furious and we got into a big fight over it. I said a lot of things that night I wish I could take back.”

“Why can’t you?” The smile still clung to his face. “Call them up. Too stubborn, or something?”

“No. A drunk driver crashed into them head-on as they came to bail me out.”

The smile snapped off his face. “Damn. I’m so sorry. That’s rough. No wonder you ended up in jail. You probably weren’t in your right state of mind.”

“You could say that. I punched a couple corrections officers, screamed, yelled, thrashed about. I wanted others to hurt like I did. They locked me in a mental ward for a few weeks while they processed me through the corrections system. But since my parents’ death didn’t occur until after the incident they arrested me for, they wouldn’t let that change their verdict or sentence.”

“So then what happened?”

“Juvie sucked. I got out and my aunt took guardianship. She’s the only family I have left.”

“I see why you don’t want to leave her.” His eyes scanned the room, then settled back on me again. “I don’t think there’s anything else useful for us in here. Let’s get a move on, and find your aunt.”

I flipped open a few more cabinets. Somebody left a large chef’s knife in one, and I slipped it into my belt before closing the door, being careful not to cut myself. A small first aid kit sat in the last cupboard. “Place is picked pretty clean.”

“Yeah. Not even a can of baked beans, or corned-beef hash.” His melancholy voice made me laugh.

“Nobody can be that sad over canned goods,” I chuckled.