There was no Trasker and no John Brown in the index for volume 36.
Doc sang, “In the joyous … days of childhood … we’re often told … of wondrous love … pointing to a dying savior … now they dwell with him above …”
I pictured myself climbing out a broken window and fighting a zombie quietly, so that the man that called himself John Brown wouldn’t discover me. I pictured myself climbing out a window as my mom screamed for me to go.
I closed volume 36 and opened volume 35. John Baker was only on one page. I opened to the teacher pages. He was wearing the same shirt with a different tie and he was still the chemistry teacher. There was still no Collin Trasker or John Brown. I closed volume 35 and opened volume 34.
Doc yelled out, “I got you!”
I dropped the book and it popped loudly as it hit the floor.
He walked out and held up his aluminum bar over his head. He just stared at me and then held it out to show me. I didn’t get what he was trying to tell me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the book with the living John Baker that possibly died in Doc’s mystery house.
Doc shook his head and then swung the bar through the air in the room. It whistled as it cut the air in ways I had heard a hundred times before on this trip. He twirled it in his hands and almost dropped it. He poked the end at the tile floor and pretended to lean on it like a cane.
“I thought you would be more impressed, Mutt,” Doc said. “I feel like my old self again. Nothing cracks a zombie skull like old faithful here.”
He picked it up and kissed the metal.
He said, “That will be the last time I get to put my lips on her before she goes into service, right?”
Then it hit me that he had dropped his aluminum bar back in the store parking lot. This was another one. He knew it was here. This was another mystery room. I started wondering if the doors opened from the inside without the keys like the ones back at the Complex had. I became aware that Doc was closer to me than I was to the door.
He stepped even closer.
He was looking at the floor. Doc poked at the book with the end of his pole.
He said, “Mutt, what are you reading? You find anything good in there?”
Doc leaned down and picked up volume 34 as he stood directly in front of me. He set it on the table, opened it, and began leafing through the pages one by one.
He said, “You find some cheerleader spreading her young, muscular legs for you captured in mid air? The senior section is in color, by the way, if you want to see what color they made the bloomers. You missed out on all that since high school closed down for good when you were just a kid, huh, Mutt?”
He kept flipping. He paused on the cheerleader pages. Then, he kept turning. He was standing next to my knees facing the table. I couldn’t get up without knocking over the stool. I saw the two guns stuck in his belt just under his hands. One of them was loaded. He had a hunting knife to match the one just under my hand. Both our knives were marred with zombie filth. A scratch would be deadly in time. If one of us were killed by them anywhere except the brain, we would come back.
As if he were reading my mind, Doc pulled his hunting knife and looked at me. I moved my fingers, but didn’t dare to make the grab. He was even closer to my face now.
Doc lifted the book once he turned to the teachers’ pages. I felt cold inside. He was going to kill me for snooping on him and he was going to show me what I had been looking for before he did it. As I felt nothing, but icy fear, I remembered my mother whispering to me under the bed that everything would be okay as long as I didn’t say a word. That had been my first and only memory of her for all these years. Now this terrifying journey was unlocking more. I remembered her telling me to not use the baseball because it dented the house … and it might wake up my sister.
I nearly fell off the stool. I wasn’t even seeing Doc anymore until he lifted the knife in front of my face. He used it to point to a picture I had seen twice already. John Baker’s round face was smiling at me again from over Doc’s filthy knife. He had on the same shirt, but a third tie peeking out from the point of the knife. The caption said that he was the physical science teacher in volume 34.
Doc said, “The man of the house … the man of many houses, it would seem. The bastard stole my wife after I got fired this school year. You won’t find poor, old John Brown anywhere in here though. You see?”
He waved the knife in front of my face and around Baker’s picture over the other teachers on the page. He kept holding the book up for me as he lowered the blade down to his side. It hovered over my knee and a few inches from my gut.
He said, “I was a cafeteria cook. They didn’t put us in the yearbooks. I got accused of some stuff I didn’t do and then I got bounced. My cooking wasn’t that good back then anyway.”
He smiled in a way that reminded me of when the zombies’ lips drew back right before they bit. I remembered him joking with Chef about being a chemistry teacher. He had said that we could tell from his cooking.
“You can probably tell from my cooking,” he repeated for me.
I bet in that moment that I would find Collin Trasker, if I looked, and his picture would look younger, but familiar to me. I scanned over to the bottom right of the opposing page of teacher pictures, but the last one on this spread was Adam Gilroy, the cafeteria manager. Collin Trasker, the chemistry teacher for volume 34, must have been a couple pages over.
Doc slammed the book making me jump at the noise. My chair squeaked on the floor as the wind blew in my face. He picked up the three yearbooks and threw them back into the closet. He hauled out a couple jugs of water.
He said, “Help me with this stuff, Mutt, I feel dirtier than a fresh zombie.”
I got up and walked toward him on watery legs. I tried not to shake as I took the jugs from him and walked them over to one of the tables. He handed me several cases and loose items as I ported them from the closet to the tables.
After the last one, he shoved the broken carton of yearbooks away from the door and let the door swing closed. He fumbled through the keys until he found the one to the door. He locked up his mess inside and tested the handle twice. Then, the key snapped.
He turned around and held the ring up to show me the broken end of the key.
Doc said, “Man, we’re having a time with keys today, aren’t we?”
I looked at the closet door behind him and shrugged.
We set up the equipment for filters and the boiling of the water. It wasn’t from a pond, but ten years in a plastic jug was a problem. We couldn’t get a fire going from the alcohol bottles in the burners.
Doc said, “I hope we don’t need something else from that closet.”
We poured out the denatured alcohol and poured in another chemical he had brought out in an unmarked bottle. The flame burst up and threatened to wrap around the burner. With a few awkward grabs, Doc got it down to a reasonably controlled burn and we were prepping water.
We changed clothes and cleaned up. After a little debate, Doc decided to take the stomach tablets. I did too after him. We cleaned and put band aids over our smaller cuts. Doc redressed his calf that had reopened with our running. It hadn’t been a zombie bite after all, but a tiny bit of splatter and it would have the same result. He debated heating a needle and stitching it up, but decided against it. He looked at my wrist. His hands on me made me nervous. He decided it wasn’t broken or fractured as he poked at the yellowing bruise.
Doc used tweezers to dig the bits of wood out of his hand. He was a bloody mess when he was done. Wounds on the hands could be a serious problem in our situation.
Wearing a short sleeve shirt made me nervous. I felt like I was inviting a zombie to dinner. I ended up pulling my mud-stained, long-sleeved shirt back over my head even though it stunk with fear sweat.
Doc rolled out fire blankets for us to sleep on. We ended up going down to the library on the first floor and slept on couches in the teacher work rooms. There was no food in the building that hadn’t been chewed up by rodents years ago. We went to sleep hungry.
***
Doc shook me awake early the next morning.
He whispered, “Don’t make a sound and everything will be fine.”
I shivered as I looked up at the dark ceiling expecting to see the springs and boards under my bed as the zombies lifted them off of me.
Doc said, “We’re going to slip out without them noticing. There aren’t that many yet. I don’t know where they got in, but I saw a way out when I went to take a piss. We have to go now.”
I sat up and rubbed my face. Doc pulled me up to my feet.
He said, “There’s no time, Mutt. We have to go now and quietly.”
We stepped out into the dark library. We looked out through the windows by the checkout desk. Some of them were passing, so we ducked down along the wall. Doc put his finger over his lips and pointed to another door across the room. As we slipped away along the carpet, I started to wonder why Doc felt like there were not very many of them.
He opened the door. It revealed raw, wood shelves with televisions, DVD players, and something that looked like a DVD player, but had VHS printed on the front. We walked down the long room and then he cracked open the next door.
Doc leaned back and whispered, “We are going straight across. The door to the lounge does not lock. We need to go in very quietly though because the door does not lock.”
I nodded. We slid out and went across the empty hall. The door was locked. Doc looked around confused.
He said, “Oh, hell, we’re on the wrong side. Catch the door!”
I leaned back to grab it, but it slammed shut. I pulled, but it was locked.
Doc started running down the hall and I followed. We heard them coming. We turned and ran up the other way. He rounded the corner without looking, but had his new bar ready to swing. We ducked up a short side hall and stood by the wall.
The zombies continued up the hall without turning down the path we had chosen for some reason. We could hear them, but they didn’t come out where we could see them. There was a pause and then a few more went by without turning to come after us.
In the next pause, Doc stepped out and I followed. He went down the hall zigging back and forth pulling the doors. One finally opened and he led me into the classroom.
We walked across to the window. He looked out and then opened it. He helped me step through.
Doc said, “Go.”
I remembered my mother saying the same thing as I climbed out a window as she held the ankle of a zombie trying to get hold of me. I was forgetting something else.
Doc broke the train of thought by snapping. “Go, Mutt, keep moving.”
We crossed the empty parking lot and slipped into the trees across the way.
As we went, Doc said, “Now, we find something to eat and then we find Chef and Short Order.”
We spent three days looking. We went back to the Super Max. From across the tracks, we saw the parking lot was still active and the truck was gone.
The wall of bodies was still stacked in a wash of coagulated blood where we had shot them through the truck window when we escaped days ago.
Doc said, “Maybe they did figure out how to use keys. Be sure to see who is driving before we get in.”
I felt like we were forgetting something important as we slipped away from the place where we had started all the trouble in this town.
After all that trouble, we managed to go through two of the next three days without firing a single shot. On the third day, we fired all of them again.
We were in a Christmas store the last day. There were ceramic villages, trees with ornaments, babies in feeding troughs, and giant Santa Clauses staring down at us with dead, white faces. A baby in a feeding trough was not very funny in a world full of hungry zombies. I’m sure it symbolized something else before the zombies, but I couldn’t figure any explanation.
We heard the engine and looked out the front window. The truck rolled slowly by like it was just an ordinary day. Chef had his arm rested up in the caging of the driver’s side window.
We ran around the back and climbed out the window at the back of the store. As we stepped out in the street, the zombies following the slow moving truck reached for us. We turned and ran after it. The truck turned up another street as our shouts blended with the growls of the dead that were after us now.
Doc pulled out the .45 with the hand not holding his aluminum pole as the zombies closed in on us from behind yet again. We were going to need more than six bullets. He pointed the gun up in the air and fired all six rounds one after another.
As we ran, the truck slowly backed into sight again. They opened the back passenger door for us and waved us forward.
We jumped in and I pulled the door closed. I felt like crying when I locked the door and we started rolling forward. Doc dropped his pole and the .45 into the floorboard and melted into the seat.
I could still smell the gunpowder smoke in the interior of the cab.
Doc said, “Okay, you win. Now let’s go. You wouldn’t believe the shit we’ve been through.”
“Tell me about it, brother,” the voice said from the front.
A man I didn’t recognize turned around in the passenger’s seat and smiled at me through his scraggly beard.
Doc sat up suddenly.
I felt a gun rest against my temple from somewhere in the storage section. I glanced over without moving my head and saw the long barrel of a shotgun pressed into the back of Doc’s mane of white hair.
A hand came forward and rested on Doc’s shoulder. He didn’t move. The hand was holding a purple, plastic toy next to Doc’s ear.
The man holding the shotgun and the toy spoke in a shrill, high voice that made my head and stomach hurt.
He screeched. “Pretty Pony says, keep your hands where she can see them or you’re going to feel a kick to the back of your pretty, white head.”
Chapter 8: The Day We Made the Best Burger of Our Lives
They took our weapons one at a time as we rolled slowly forward. I could hear the zombies behind us. They didn’t seem to be in a hurry. The man I couldn’t see kept the gun to my head as he pulled the hunting knife out of my sheath and took it back out of my sight. He was wearing black, leather gloves that matched his sleeves. He never said anything.