Dove: A Zombie Tale (Byron: A Zombie Tale Book 2) (4 page)

“Oh yeah? Think so? Try living out of a dumpster for a few days. Canned food will look like heaven. I guarantee it.”

“Before we start debating the merits and consequences of dumpster diving, let’s see if we can find an access tunnel to the sewer.”

“That is, after all, why we came here, is it not?”

I nodded, not catching the sarcasm in his comment at first. “Jerk,” I muttered under my breath.

“You need better comebacks,” he whispered with a sly grin.

We exited the kitchen, explored the doors off the cafeteria, and decided on exploring a plain corridor leading into the darkness and back toward the road.

chapter three

Though older in
construction than the school-side of the compound, the convent side appeared much cleaner with less debris to step on. However, whitish stalactites hung low from the ceiling and brushed through our hair. Paint peeled from the walls in broad, curling sheets. Chalky insulation dangled from several of the water pipes mounted up in the corners.

“Is that asbestos?” I asked, shining my light at the corrugated paper and powder wrapping.

“Uhm. Yes.” He whipped his face around, holding the flashlight under his chin. “Why do you ask?”

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

He shrugged. “Ain’t killed me, yet. I been living here a couple years.”

“But not down in these basements, right?”

He stared hard at me, then shook his head. “No. I’ve never been down here.” He swept his beam back and forth as we entered another room. “Pretty cool, though.”

I froze as an errant noise struck my ears. It reminded me of…

“Sammy?” I leaned close and whispered in his ear. “Are there any nuns still living here?”

He shook his head. “No. There shouldn’t be anyone in here. Not even domicile-challenged individuals like myself.” He pinched his face tight and raised one eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

I swept my flashlight’s beam in the direction of the sound.

My blood ran cold. Standing no more than five-foot tall, an emaciated form gnashed its teeth in the corner of the room. It stared at the wall, until the light bathed its back. Its clouded eyes drifted along the beam, back to me. She wore the plain black and white habit of a Catholic nun. Her shriveled skin curled back from her teeth, exposing blackened gums. Her jaw distended, then snapped shut with a loud click.

Sammy painted his beam across the Goner as well. “I guess this must be Sister Mary Sadistic. I think I had her in school.”

The Goner’s shrill wail pierced my ears, causing me to lean my head into my shoulder. Its eyes fixated on my movement and the creature leapt for me, its teeth chomping at the air.

Sammy’s golf club crashed onto the woman’s head, exploding it on impact. I could feel spots of the tarry blood splatter onto my clothing and arm. It coated his nine-iron as the creature slipped to the floor.

“Where’d she come from?” he asked.

“I don’t know. You’re the one who said there weren’t any nuns left.”

His eyes grew wild. “Hey, you ain’t pinning this on me. You said that we should be safe because we made enough noise to wake the dead!”

I looked down at her lifeless corpse. A small plastic device lay next to it on the floor. “We did. This one is deaf. There’s the hearing aid. She never heard the noise, so she never came running. And since she faced the wall, she didn’t see the light until the last minute.”

“How the hell long do you think she’s been down here?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. You said this all started about a week ago, right?”

“There about. But there ain’t been no nuns in this place for more than a year. The convent kept running for a while and Roger mentioned the nuns would bring them food over in the old church. But he said that stopped a year ago and all the nuns just up and left one night. They were there one day, gone the next.”

A chill gripped my spine. “Did Roger ever say how many nuns lived here?”

Sammy cradled his chin and rubbed his thumb to one side. “Nope. Never said how many. But a building this size, I would have to guess around a hundred. Why do y—” Realization bloomed on his face, followed by panic. “How many more of them could there be? They couldn’t all have been infected, could they? A whole convent of nun Goners?”

“It would explain why they disappeared over night. Perhaps they were treating sisters with this affliction while others were being bitten. Nuns keep quiet about that stuff. They stick together.”

“Yeah well, I for one hope they didn’t all die together. Otherwise, we just left the frying pan for the blasted fire.”

I chuckled. “Fire and brimstone. Almost poetic for crazed zombie-like nuns, don’t you think? A convent is the perfect place for this to go down. The only problem is how many of these bitches are we going to have to get through to reach my car?”

Something moved behind me. Shuffling. Sliding. Labored movements.

“I don’t know,” Sammy whispered. “But I don’t intend to stick around long enough to find out. Let’s find that access to the sewers and get the hell out of here.”

Masking the heads of our flashlights, we dimmed the light they emitted in hopes the Goners wouldn’t notice. Three doors lined the far side of the room. More movement came from the corridor behind us.

“The access is going to be in here,” I said.

“Yeah? How can you be so sure.” I didn’t need to see his smug expression, it tainted his voice.

“Because, if it’s not in here, we need to get out through them.” I stabbed my thumb over my shoulder and watched as Sammy’s eyes grew wide with fear.

“Dear God!”

“I think he left this place a long time ago, Sammy. A long, long time ago.”

Shoving past him, I rushed toward the doors on the far side of the room. One led to a broom closet, the second to a coat closet. The handle on the third wouldn’t budge. I tapped it with my bat, the sound of aluminum on steel resonating above the shuffling of Goner feet. The creatures took their time in making their way toward us.

“I guess that they know how screwed we are. They’re not even hurrying or beating each other up to get over here. I guess when your meal walks in and plops itself onto your plate, you don’t complain and rush.

“Come on, Freakshow, get the damn door open.”

“I can’t you ugly little troll! It’s jammed shut.”

Sammy shoved me out of the way. “God dammit, I am not dying at the hands of a hundred crazed nuns. There is no way I survived Catholic school to go out like this! Now come on, you son of a bitch!” He threw every ounce of weight he had behind each tug at the door handle. It groaned as he struggled, but didn’t budge.

Spinning around, he shone his light at the crowd of Goner nuns shuffling into the room. “Huh, how’s that irony for you? The ones in front are all holding rosaries. I hate praying the rosary!”

~ ~ ~

One by one the nuns opened their mouths wide with distended jaws, shrieking their abhorrent wails into the darkness. The noise built steady, rising to a crescendo as the last creature stepped forth. They all stopped mere feet from us, continuing their screams. I recognized their call for what it meant—feeding time.

“You know, I always characterized Catholic schools as nuns chewing you up and crapping you out. But this isn’t even funny anymore.” Sammy’s voice shook in spite of his forced joke.

I gave him a wink. “Do you think they’ll say grace?”

The sound started subtle, like a cough, but grew in strides as he belted out full-blown laughter. “Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts!” Soon he laughed so hard he grabbed his abdomen, straining to breath. He wheezed and whined, but couldn’t stop himself.

The nuns stood and watched, their shrieks dying in the face of this new phenomenon—an unafraid foe. A foe who found humor in its imminent demise.

Almost as if they sensed the nature of our jokes, the Goners pressed their fingers and palms together and bowed their heads. We both lost it. The stinging urge of urination pressed on me.

“Stop! Stop! You ladies are going to make me pee my pants!”

Their milky eyes stared back at me without a response. But in their gaze alone I could see something of the former humanity that once lived within.

One hand reached forward with something clutched within its rigor mortis-clenched fingers. At first I thought it to be a rosary, but my heart pounded faster as my eyes and brain registered the object’s true form. A key. The Goner was handing us a key!

“Are you kidding me, right now?” My voice cracked in several places. “They’re giving us the key to leave?”

I stared at the creatures and something within their eyes changed, becoming more feral. It must have cost them every ounce of strength to exert the will they did. But the cost drained them of any power at all. Urgency crossed the face of the Goner with the key. I snatched it from her hands and nodded my thanks.

“Thank you, Sister.” Sammy’s voice echoed the disbelief I felt at that moment.

Spinning, I slipped the key into the knob and turned the handle. Pulling the key out, we slid through the opening into the inky darkness beyond, making sure to lock the door behind us. With any luck this had been their final key.

I panned my flashlight about our new surroundings. “What the hell is this place?”

Sammy flipped his light on as well. “I don’t know, but it sure as hell does not look like any place to find a sewer access.”

Cots crowded the floor with rotting cloth folding walls dividing them. “It looks like an infirmary for the convent. But if that’s the case, it should be upstairs, not down in some basement.”

“Maybe they set it up here because they were ashamed of something.”

Something moved off to my right. I caught its shadow in the beam of my light before it vanished back into darkness. I nudged Sammy, pointing in the direction and sweeping my light around. “We’re not alone.”

Sammy swung his flashlight in wide arcs, trying to illuminate all the corners of the room. High squeals broke the relative silence. My flashlight came to settle in a far corner where a pile of cloth moved. I tapped Sammy’s shoulder again, pointing to the pile.

He gripped his nine-iron with both hands, holding it straight out in front of him. With slow, determined steps he crept along the aisle toward the cloth. His feet barely made a sound. With the skill and finesse of a surgeon, he hooked the head of the club under the cloth and whipped it up into the air.

The surging mass of brown shone bright in the beam of my LED light. Rolling and boiling like a pot unattended, bits of brown shot into the darkness with loud squeals of surprise and fear. The form melted into the seething madness of several dozen spooked rats.

“That’s a lot of rats!” Sammy stated the obvious.

“Well, if they found a way in. Then we should be able to find a way out.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “They are much smaller than us, and can chew through concrete.”

“Listen, pal. I’m trying to stay positive here.”

“I’m positive, all right. I’m positive we’re going to end up Goner food.”

I grumbled. “You’re a ray of sunshine. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“Yeah. And you’re a Freakshow! Anyone ever told you that? I mean, come on. You come here dressed like some uber-goth punk girl with this crazy half-shaved, half-long purple and white hairdo, makeup tips from a raccoon, and a camera to film your exploits. You lead us down into this basement where now were stuck with a damn zombie apocalypse outside, and no way to escape.”

I glared at him hard. “You’re not blaming this on me! You told me yourself these things have been around here for at least a week. And it looks like we may have found the epicenter of where they came from. If there haven’t been any nuns living in here for a while, then why is there a secret infirmary and a group of Goner nuns down here? Somebody hid something. And that something is a dangerous infection.”

Sammy clapped his hand over his mouth. “Yeah, and we’re down here breathing it in.”

I reached into one of my cargo pockets and pulled out a pair of paper masks. “I keep these around in case of dusty places.”

“Why didn’t you pull them out when we were going through asbestos alley, back there?”

“I though you said it wasn’t dangerous! What the hell?”

He snatched one of the masks from my hand and snapped it onto his face. As I slipped my own in place, I watched the rats scurry. Most of them headed for a doorway on the far side of the room. A sizable hole had been chewed through the steel. Using the key, I unlocked it.

“Lucky for us, the nuns gave us a skeleton key.” The door opened and I painted the inside with my flashlight. A long tunnel lined with steam, water, sewer, and electric led into the darkness. “This is it. This is our way out.”

“Really?” Sammy spun, his flashlight beam blinding me.

“Steam tunnel. We should be able to find our way out through here.”

~ ~ ~

Water dripped from overhead, soaking our hair and leaving giant pools on the ground. Our feet splashed through the puddles as we followed the tunnel. Every few hundred feet we passed rungs set into the walls leading up to a manhole overhead.