The Dead Don't Bleed: Part 1, The Outbreak (29 page)

Violence was not in her nature, she could remember the one real fight she had ever had in her life and that was back in Middle School when a pair of black girls had singled her out for no special reason to start picking on one afternoon in the lunch room. She had tried her best to ignore them but her lack of response to their insults only egged them on even more and before long they started slapping and spitting at her. Miranda could see where the altercation was going and when she realized that no one was going to step in and stand up for her she decided that she wasn't about to let those two ghetto bitches take her down without a fight. She had beat both girls down bad enough that they had spent the night in the hospital and she had spent several hours at the police station with her parents arguing the case against a detective and school administrators that it was
self-defense. In the end a deal was struck where no charges would be filed but Miranda would have to finish that year and the following year at a Middle School in a neighboring county. That had been her last real physical altercation but from that one incident she always knew deep down that when push came to shove she would do whatever needed to be done to defend herself.

Jumping down from the back of the dumpster with the
length of rebar in her hand, she moved into a small cluster of bushes separating the row of trash containers from the street behind them. She checked again on the group of people on the far end of the strip mall and thought that it looked like their numbers had grown in that last few minutes, but they still appeared content to remain in that one area for the time being. Looking down the opposite side of the street she saw only empty cars and barren store fronts, nothing that seemed to pose any threats. The weight of the metal bar in her hands gave her an extra boost of confidence and with a couple deep breaths she stepped from the row of bushes and darted across the street dodging in between abandoned cars as she ran. She had made it to the last lane of traffic before reaching the edge of the gas stations parking lot on the opposite side of the street when movement inside a car she was just about to run past caught her attention. It was a newer model small SUV, the inside was adorned with high back leather seats and a pair of drop down television screens for the entertainment of passengers in the back, she had approached the vehicle from an angle that let her see one of those screens was still on but only showing static at the moment. What had caught her attention was the figure still strapped into an over the shoulder seat belt in the back seat just behind the front passenger seat, it was a young man, Miranda thought maybe in his early twenties or very late teens. He was dressed in a smart looking suit along with what looked like a very expensive silk neck tie. He had clearly seen Miranda as she was making her way across the street and it was likely that her movements were what had caught his attention. Struggling against the seatbelt he was reaching out with both hands clawing at the air while snapping his teeth like an angry dog, streams of frothing white bubbly drool were running down his chin from both sides of his mouth and Miranda could just make out his irate snarls as he tried desperately to break free and reach out for her. She watched him for several moments and realized that whatever it was that had made Mrs. Carpenter and the others turn into demented cannibal killers, this is what the face of that illness must look like. All the kid needed to do was unlatch his seat belt and open the door and he could have been on top of her in seconds, but she understood while watching him from several feet away that he no longer possessed even an ounce of intellect that would allow him to figure those steps out on his own. Miranda side stepped around the SUV keeping her eyes trained on the young man still struggling to reach out for her from the back seat, as she moved in an arch around the front of the vehicle he continued to turn his body in line with her, never letting up his efforts to grab for her. Only when she felt her feet strike the curb at the edge of the sidewalk did she allow herself to turn her back on the pitiful scene and resume a faster paced walk towards the front doors of the gas station.

The double glass doors were both standing open, the glass having been completely shattered from the frames was laying in crushed piles both inside and outside the store entrance. Peering carefully through the glass front window she swept her eyes across the interior of the store b
efore moving closer to the door. From her vantage point she could see no one moving around inside but there was also several places including behind the counter and the freezer area where surprises could easily be waiting for her. Grasping tightly to her metal bar she held it against her shoulder like a bat ready to swing it viciously at the first living creature that tried to surprise her. The broken glass from the door crunched under her feet and for the first time she realized that without the sounds of Monday morning traffic, customers coming and going as well as the normal everyday din of life, it was unnervingly quiet all around her. While the thought of the missing noise of civilization going on about its normal course of the day was somewhat disturbing, she realized that it also gave her an advantage. If the people afflicted by whatever it was causing them to go insane were just as mentally dull as the young man she has watched stuck in the back of that SUV by a simple seatbelt, then odds were good they would not be making any efforts at a stealthy attack or a planned attempt to remain out of sight if there was someone threatening still inside the store. She stopped in her tracks just inside the door and listened closely for a full minute, the only sound she could detect was from the humming of the refrigeration units and a slight electrical buzz from the overhead fluorescent lighting. Moving slowly she rounded the first aisle of salty snacks and sugary cookies on her way to the counter, as soon as she spotted the pair of legs jutting out from a point just around the far end of the aisle she froze once more while swiveling her head from side to side searching the farthest reaches of the shop for signs of life. She continued to hear nothing moving or any other sounds that an attacker may be lying in wait somewhere nearby. The legs she had seen remained perfectly still and lifeless and she finally convinced herself that she had more than likely discovered a dead body, the thought sent a wave of nausea coursing through her that she fought hard to repress. She actually found it unsettling that after all she had witnessed in the last hour that a single lifeless body would be the one thing that triggered her body to act with such revulsion. Under any other normal circumstance coming across a corpse would have more than likely resulted in that expected response, but she had seen folks actually eating people alive not long ago and she figured that if she didn't spew last night’s dinner at that sight, then she could handle whatever it was she was about to see around the corner of that rack of chips and cookies. As she moved closer, more and more of the body became visible and after her fourth step forward she saw the first signs of pooled blood spreading out from the body on the floor in a growing puddle. She saw that it was a man, she guessed a migrant worker from the tattered jeans and telltale flannel shirt that was out of season and many years out of date, he was face down on the ground so it was impossible to tell much more about him, but when she saw the size of the exit wound blown from the back of his skull she was eternally grateful not to see the ruined face where the bullet entered. There was something distinct about his skin tone that she now realized was different than the crazy ones she had seen, his skin had the normal suntanned brown that you would expect from someone who spent most of their time working outdoors. The others she had seen who had shown signs of being sick and crazed had all had a yellowish sickly color to their skin, something she hadn’t really recognized until seeing the man lying dead at her feet right then. She believed that he had probably not been like the others and instead been shot by mistake by someone in a moment of panic. From the angle the man was laying and judging by the location of several pock marks in the wall behind him from apparent bullet strikes, she guessed that the shooter had been standing near the cash register on the counter. Seeing many shelves that were bare of goods, a display rack knocked completely over resulting in cans of beer strewn up and down two other aisles and the smashed front doors, she thought that she was seeing the end result of a looting and this man had most likely been shot by the store clerk in an attempt to defend his store.

Miranda walked over to the doorway that led behind the counter and peered around the corner expecting to see either another body or a scared
clerk hiding just out of sight and holding a large hand gun pointed at her head. She found the counter empty instead. There were signs of a struggle though, the cash register had been pulled from the counter and was laying smashed and empty on the ground alongside another generous pool of drying blood. The racks of cigarettes that had been stored behind the counter were almost completely empty except for several brands of menthols and she also noticed that the magazine rack with the adult’s only logo on it had been emptied of its contents as well. She found herself stifling a laugh as she thought of how stupid some people could be, coming into a store to loot it in the middle of a major crisis and taking things like porno magazines.

The little laugh at the absurdity of the situation went a long ways to helping Miranda feel a little better about her situation. She
up righted the overturned stool behind the counter and pulled it further back down the back side of the work area where she could sit out of sight from the front of the store while still able to observe in three directions if anyone started to approach. After situating herself to keep watch of her surroundings she pulled the phone from the wall receiver and dialed the emergency line, hopeful that a land line would somehow have better luck than her cell, it rang only once before only an insistent busy signal greeted her. She slammed the receiver back down in frustration, one of her biggest hopes in reaching this store was that she would be able to contact some form of authority for help. Rifling through the drawers behind the counter she found a junk drawer with a local area phone book buried under an assortment of tools and parts. Miranda opened the book to the inside front cover and found it full of local emergency and non-emergency numbers for all the various services in the region. It took her over fifteen minutes of trying to go almost all the way through the list calling each number in turn before giving up. A mix of prerecorded messages, unanswered lines, voice mail and constant busy signals was all she got from the numbers she tried. A feeling of isolation and despair was rapidly starting to sweep over her as the realization took hold that whatever she had witnessed happening in this small section of town may actually be a much more wide spread and ongoing problem than she had anticipated. She flashed back to the scene at the airport just after her arrival, the sick passengers and the gunshots ringing out through the terminal building. The theories of the shoppers watching the television news reports outside the electronics store the day before and how one of them had bellowed on about a possible act of terrorism. That theory had struck her as a sensationalist type of view mixed with a degree of paranoia when she had first heard it, but now she thought that it might actually have a certain ring of truth to it. They were close enough to Washington, DC that any large scale attack on the capital could easily spread into the townships nearby. She knew little about chemical and biological weapons but the symptoms she had witnessed so far could possibly be explained by weapons of those types being used in this region. She now started to worry that she had also been exposed to the same germs that was making everyone else go crazy, but she felt fine and thought that it was possible she had some kind of natural immunity to the illness. Shaking her head against the flood of thoughts that she had allowed herself to delve into she told herself she was not going to go down that path, what if's and maybe's could quickly turn her into a blabbering idiot incapable of fending for herself. There was a rational explanation for the situation as well as why she was not affected like everyone she had seen so far, the authorities were likely out in the community working on the problem and thus unable to respond to phone calls. She felt that at the moment she was relatively safe from discovery and had a good position to watch for potential threats or even rescue as long as she just stayed put. She settled in against the back of the chair while keeping a tight grip on the metal bar in her hands and began slowly and methodically scanning the approaches to the store. She would stay put for as long as she could and just hope that someone who could help would eventually come along.

Garrett and Calvin had spent the last couple hours discussing their options, keeping an eye on Kimberly and moving from one room to the next staring out the windows watching for any activity nearby. On two occasions they heard the low distant rumble of
explosions and could still see plumes of smoke rising into the sky in different directions from fires that seemed to be burning out of control. The phones still worked and they had but repeated attempts to reach emergency services had continued to prove futile. Trying different news outlets on the television they either got nothing but snow and static or stations that displayed their operating ID along with scrolling text stating that they were experiencing technical difficulties. The fact that news station were not even broadcasting emergency broadcast messages spoke to them about just how fast the outbreak must have swept across the nation. They also realized that it would not be long before they lost electricity and water service as well. With most of those services already as automated as it was, the first outage to occur would leave them in the dark without water and no one on the way to fix the problem. Garrett knew that even when the local utility companies were on top of their game, it was common to lose power in that area at least once or twice a month for one reason or another. They were probably looking at two or three days at the most before all their services came to a standstill. Garrett felt that even with the possibility of a couple more days of available service, there was a good chance they would not be able to remain put long enough to see it finally fail. The region he was living in near the shopping district of Tysons Corner had a population of just over 20,000 people with the surrounding towns boasting in excess of well over a million inhabitants. The majority of the county population was pressed up tightly along the outskirts of where he lived as people preferred housing with easy access to Washington, DC. What all those people were doing right now was anyone's guess, but sooner or later they would start moving around outside in search of help, other survivors, as well as food and supplies, and when that started happening it was not going to be in any of their interests to be trapped inside that small townhouse.

It was early afternoon when Garrett started hearing noises outside his townhouse, from the amount of cars still parked around the complex it had been obvious that many of his neighbors had never left for work that morning so Garrett knew they were still a lot of people in the surrounding units. Looking out from the narrow window next to his front door
, he saw the source of the commotion just a couple houses down. He actually wasn't surprised that the first sign of trouble in his neighborhood after the incident with Steve and his wife would come from Carlos and his damn band of troublemakers. It was the sound of smashing glass that had carried to them inside the house, as Garrett watched from his window he saw figures emerging onto the lawn from the broken windows of the living room in that particular home. It looked to Garrett like an individual had jumped through the window and that had started a chain reaction of everyone else inside the townhouse climbing awkwardly out and stumbling into the yard as they went. When Steve's wife and son had made their second floor exit from their house it had been obvious in hindsight that they had done so because they were intent on reaching Steve and himself. In this case Garrett was unsure what it was that had attracted Carlos and the rest of roommates to make a sudden break from their home. It wasn't too hard to tell by the lumbering manner in which the small group of six men moved as they stood and started to walk, that they had all fallen victim to the outbreak and turned into undead. But he couldn't see anything in sight that would account for their sudden interest in breaking out into the neighborhood. The men all moved slowly in meaningless circles taking them to the edge of the parking lot and then turning back towards the row of townhouses as they slowly followed a path to a home just two doors down from their starting point. Every few moments they would stop in their tracks and turn their faces skyward while jerking their heads from side to side as if they were trying to pick up the scent of something on the air and it suddenly dawned on Garrett that was exactly what they were doing. Some kind of smell must have attracted them and lured them outside and they were now following the odor to its source, and from what he could see, that source was the home they were now standing in front of just three houses from Garrett's own. He couldn't hear them making any sounds from inside the foyer where he was watching, but something must have passed between them as they all turned as one and rushed towards the front of that particular townhouse. Bypassing the door either because they realized they wouldn't be able to open it easily or because they lacked even the basic knowledge that it could be a way inside, they simple ran into and through the glass of the front living room window at the house they were interested in. Since those windows on the bottom floor did not drop all the way to the ground there was a foot high base consisting of wooden frame and then solid brick that the first of the men through tripped over, sending them flying like rag dolls into the window and out of sight inside the townhouse.

"What the hell are they doing?" Calvin called out from his observation point at a window in an upstairs bedroom.

"Not sure," Garrett replied, "Something in that house got their attention though, and it looked to me like they were following a scent of some kind."

More movement at the far end of the row of homes caught Garrett's attention, "Shit! More company just down the block." He yelled out to Calvin.

Six more of the creatures moved into sight as they rounded the side of the last home on the buildings, they were all running at a steady jog and heading directly for the same house that Carlos and his buddies were working their way into through the window. Just before they reached the lawn of the house, the front door burst open and two figures rushed through it and out onto the opposite side of the lawn. Garrett recognized the woman, she was black, about forty or so and heavy set, he had seen her coming and going from the house in the past and thought she lived alone. The man who had rushed out of the house with her was also black and close to her age, he was in a little better shape and was leaving her behind with every step they took as they tore through the lawn and into the parking lot. It looked to Garrett like the man was fumbling with something in his hands and he thought it might have been car keys, they must have been trying to make a break for one of the cars in the lot. Following only a few steps after them, Carlos and three of his friends burst from the open doorway in hot pursuit of the couple. The remaining zombies in the yard still working their way towards the window now all turned and began rushing across the lawn bound to cut off the two before they could reach whichever car they were heading for.

Garrett heard the drumming of fast moving footsteps as Calvin bounded down the stairs, joining him at the front door window his voice shook as he asked, "Shouldn't we do something?"

Even though Calvin was far from a coward he knew when a situation was just too far out of his hands to handle and the value of living to fight another day, "there are too many of them. If we walk out there and start shooting up the place, even if we manage to get them all, we might as well paint a target on ourselves for any others within a mile of here."

The chilling scream of a woman from just outside echoed throughout the complex. Both men watched in stunned silence as the black woman was hit full speed by three of the charging zombies and knocked the rest of the way across the lawn and sent crashing into the side door of a minivan. The force of the impact against the van left a dent four feet wide across the door as the four figures dropped in a heap to the ground alongside the van. From their point of view it
looked like the woman had been dazed by the violent collision. Her head was still visible to them from the snarled mass of intertwined bodies and she was shaking her head from side to side in an effort to recover from the blow. The zombies on top of her suffered from no such impediments and whether or not they had also been dazed from their forceful tackle and subsequent sudden stop, they didn't show it. No sooner had the four bodies hit the ground then the zombies scrambled over top of the woman like ants covering a morsel of dropped food and the frenzy began. Her screams radiated across the lawn and as they watched they could see her arms and legs flailing uselessly against her attackers. Less than thirty seconds after hitting the ground one final scream rose and was quickly cut off in a gurgling cough while at the same times the woman’s arms and legs went slack and fell to the ground. The three men on top of her never slowed in their attack, even after her body when limp they only pressed in further, fighting against one another for more room as they dug and claw into the her body.

While the assault on the woman was taking place, her male companion had merely glanced back over his shoulder when his lady friend was hit from the side by her assailants.
Her screams galvanized him to run that much faster and in seconds he had reached the passenger side of a late model sports car. Ripping to door open he dove across the bucket seats and Garrett and Calvin could see him struggling to sit up behind the wheel while stabbing desperately at the ignition trying to get the key in place. Those zombies who had not zeroed in on the woman pressed forward towards the man and reached the back end of the car at the same moment that the first stutters of the engine turning over could be heard. The guy just may have been able to make it if he'd had enough sense to close the door behind him when he dove into the car. With the passenger door still standing wide open, two zombies managed to squeeze through the door side by side at the exact same time and were on him before he could hit the gas. It did seem that he had managed to get the car into reverse before the attack commenced because at the same moment that they two zombies grabbed onto him the car started rolling slowly backwards until it finally banged into the front bumper of a small truck backed into a parking spot directly across from it. The collision between sports car and truck was minor and not enough to interfere with the vicious attack still going on inside the tight confines of the small sports car. It was difficult for Garrett and Calvin to make out details through the windshield, all they could really see was a blur of motion, but the splattering of blood that shot out to smear the inside of the car’s windshield told them all they needed to know.

Garrett turned away from the bloody carnage as zombies ravaged the remains of the unlucky couple.
More zombies were appearing from different areas around the rows of townhouses and he saw that two other homes across the lot from his now also had the empty remains of broken glass surrounding the large window frames of their front rooms, evidence of the occupants following Carlos and his boys lessons in just crashing out into the wild. Garrett was even more astounded when he saw one of the doors on another home that was hanging freely by only a single hinge where it appeared that someone had crashed through it from the inside. The doors on all of the homes in this block were just like his own front door and that was very solidly constructed, he would have thought it highly unlikely that anyone could force their way in, but he had not considered how much force would be necessary for someone already in one of these homes to break through the door given that they would be going against the door hinges. These things were much stronger than he would have anticipated and with the damage they were capable of withstanding, even one on one they were extremely formidable, he now counted well over thirty of them within sight of his front door. For the most part those not already involved with the gruesome task of tearing the older black couple to shreds and consuming their remains seemed content with just wandering about through yards and the parking lot. Every now and then one or more would stop and appear to test the air as if starting to get a whiff of something interesting but then it would be gone and they would continue on with their mindless tasks. Whatever type of scent they were attracted to seemed to come and go, but after seeing Carlos and his little bunch bust out of their home specifically to go after that black couple, Garrett thought it was possible they were able to pick up the smell of living humans and track them effectively and if that was the case it was not going to take long with all of them just outside his own home before they realized there were three other tasty snacks nearby. As luck would have it just as that thought was crossing his mind of all the creatures outside at that moment Carlos just had to be the one to come just to the edge of the small plot of grass of Garrett's front lawn with his nose sniffing wildly in the air as he scanned the windows of Garrett's and the neighboring home. The damn pot smoking pain in the ass must be catching the smell of something he liked because he moved a little closer to a spot just between the two homes while continuing to study each structure with intense interest. Garrett thought that he noticed an actual smirk cross his just an instant before he let loose with a monstrous cry that attracted the attention of six or seven of the closer zombies. As a group, the zombies moved directly to the front of Garrett's home and looked to be on their way to the front door. Garrett and Calvin dropped back into the kitchen where they each grabbed an AK from the table and stood firmly in the hallway ready to start hosing down zombies as they poured through the door and front windows.

When almost a minute passed and none of the creatures had forced their way into the house, Garrett carefully worked his way down the short hallway from the kitchen towards the front door while motioning for Calvin to remain in place where he had a clear shot of both the door and the outside windows into the living room. Reaching the edge of the small coat closet just before the front foyer
, Garrett was able to look out one of the narrow windows running alongside the front door and breathed a quick sigh of relief at what he was saw. Backing his way back towards the kitchen he returned to Calvin's side.