The Dead Don't Bleed: Part 1, The Outbreak (33 page)

Garrett looked at Calvin who simply shrugged, "Id do what the little lady says, wouldn't hurt to have some water on hand as well. We didn't think to pack anything to drink."

Garrett was in and out of the store in under a minute, his arms full with the requested case of water and packages of wrapped sandwiches and donuts, whatever was on the way and easy to grab. He dumped the entire pile on the floor board behind his seat where Miranda could easily reach it. She flashed him a smile that once again caused a flush to start building up in his cheeks and he managed a quick smile in return before closing the door and climbing back behind the wheel before she noticed his blush.

"Ok,
you’re driving, where to?" Asked Calvin.

"Unless anyone else has a better idea,
I am thinking about skirting around the center of town, outside the traffic areas, and see if we can find any patrols or roadblocks.”

There were no suggestions from Calvin or Miranda and Garrett took that as an agreement to run with his plan. He dropped the truck into gear and pulled back out into the thick traffic, trying to work his way down three blocks to the start of side streets he hoped were less congested and would let him take a roundabout route out of that part of town.

"Officer, officer." Kyle heard the voice and felt the shaking of his arm. He sat up slowly in the chair realizing that he had dozed off and wondering how long Shellie had let him sleep. He was about to ask her when he saw the fearful look in her eyes as she knelt beside him tugging at his arm.

"What happened?" He asked as he was still taking in his surroundings while recovering from what must have been a sound sleep.

She said nothing and instead pointed towards the front door where they had entered the building.

"SHIT," he exclaimed and slid down onto the floor beside her using the overstuffed lobby chair for cover. The far end of the parking lot was already partially full with close to thirty or more zombies and he could see even more converging on the complex from the football field just across the service road they had used to circle the buildings when they first pulled in. He wasn't sure how they had tracked them down, but he had little doubt that it was the two of them they were coming after. At the moment they seemed to just be moving around in an apparent aimless pattern, slowly closing in on the buildings but not
appearing to know exactly where to look for them.

"What do we do?" Whispered Shellie.

Kyle considered their options, they could make a run for his car. The chances were good that they would make it before the first of them reached the front of the parking lot. They would then have to drive directly into the crowd to make it out of the lot, he didn't like that idea as he remembered how he had almost lost control back at the fire station when forced to do the same thing driving through even less of their numbers. If they wrecked the car trying to push their way through, they were finished, there would be no way to fight off that many of them once they swarmed the cruiser. They could run further into the building and hide somewhere to wait them out. If they could find an attic or somewhere else on the second floor that they could isolate, they should be able to keep themselves safely out of reach. The problem with that was that he had no idea how long these things would hang around and continue trying to reach them, for all he knew they were capable of staying on the hunt until hell froze over. His other concern was that right now there were already a lot of them, but if they went to ground in the building and the zombies stayed put to wait them out, there was a good chance that many more would be attracted to the same area. With that thought in mind he decided that their best option was to make their move right away while they were still only dealing with two or three dozen instead of being trapped by potentially hundreds.

"We are going for the car and getting the hell out of here,
that’s what we do." Kyle replied. He double checked that both his rifle and pistol had a round in the chamber and were ready to fire and instructed Shellie to top off the load in the shotgun. Once they were ready, he stood and walked towards the door being careful to keep close to the wall and out of sight. There was no need to verify their presence until the last second.

It was only about a hundred and fifty feet down the sidewalk to the cruiser. When they had walked the path earlier on their way into the building it had seemed like a pleasant stroll along a grass and flower lined path. Now it looked like a mile long dash through hell as they watched the zombies continue to fill the distant parking lot and adjoining football field. For the moment they seemed content with just
keeping to the far parking lot and none of them had started moving any closer to the building yet.

"Ok, I think this is as good as
it’s going to get, ready?"

Shellie nodded her head in reply and Kyle pushed the door open and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He made it a total of five feet
before he was knocked to the ground from behind. The zombie was a girl, no more than fourteen or fifteen, she was topless and wearing only a pair of stained and torn pajama bottoms on her lower half. She had been working her way around the perimeter of the building after coming from her neighborhood just beyond the sports center. The smell of nearby prey had her foaming at the mouth by the time Kyle stepped into view. She only weighed ninety some odd pounds and under normal circumstances Kyle could have easily overpowered her and pinned her to the ground. As it was, she had hit him with such speed, surprise and uncanny strength that his head had nailed the hard packed dirt next to the sidewalk hard enough that he saw stars before his eyes and went completely weak in his upper body. He was lucky though, another five inches closer to the building and his head would have smacked solid concrete and more than likely either knocked him out cold or killed him on impact. The girl had come at him with her mouth open and jaws snapping ready to tear free the first bit of flesh that she came in contact with, but she must not have anticipated her attack sending both of them flying to the ground and her first attempt at a bite overshot Kyle completely resulting in her chin bouncing off the dirt next to Kyle's shoulder. Zombies lost any ability their bodies had to register pain as soon as they died before their rebirth, but the impact on her chin did stun and disorient the girl for a moment and she lost the momentum of her attack. With his head still swimming in a daze, Kyle lashed out with his forearm and caught her across her naked breasts sending her tumbling the rest of the way over him and rolling several feet beyond where they had fallen. He worked his way up to his knees and turned back towards her just as she recovered and sprang at him like a cat pouncing on a mouse. This time her teeth connected with his chest and had it not been for the underlying bullet proof vest which he kept forgetting to remove, she would have contacted skin and been able to rip away a healthy mouthful. Her teeth sunk into the fabric of his uniform and buried into the vest, when she shook her head from side to side and pulled back away from him all she managed to gain was a mouthful of torn uniform shirt and a small strip of the outer layer of Kevlar that made up his protective vest. He had never personally been shot or stabbed in the line of duty and only knew of the protective qualities of the vest from training and stories from other officers, but for the first time that it served its intended purpose in saving his life he would have never imagined that it would do so against a bite from a half-naked teenage girl. Before she could turn back towards him and press forward for a second attempt to chew into his flesh he launched a solid punch that connected square on her temple and sent her rolling off of him again. Kyle's hand had just landed on the butt of his pistol and was about to draw it from its holster when Shellie stepped into view, without a second of hesitation she pressed the barrel of the shotgun into the girls open mouth and fired. The explosion of the shot obliterated the back of her head and embedded the remains in a shallow rut dug into the dirt by the blast as the exploding gun powder and buck shot escaped the crater in the back of her head. The upper half of her face from the top of the nose to the bridge of her forehead were all that remained intact and without the remainder of the face and more than half of the surrounding skull she suddenly looked as though she was wearing a poorly constructed Halloween horror mask. As her body dropped to the ground her eyes stayed fixated on Kyle as though she was still struggling to salvage some last spark of life.

Kyle stood the rest of the way up, swaying unsteadily as his head continued to swim from his collision with the ground. He had dropped his rifle when the girl had collided with him and now reached over and retrieved it from inside a nearby bush. When he turned back around towards his patrol car he saw that the brief struggle and roaring blast from the shotgun had alerted the undead at the far end of the parking lot to their presence and they were now racing towards the two survivors already covering almost half the distance in just a few seconds. Kyle grabbed Shellie by the
back of her arm and roughly pushed her forward down the sidewalk as he broke into a sprint in a mad race to reach the car.

They reached the cruiser and jumped inside only seconds before the first four zombies covered the distance and propelled themselves onto the hood to immediately begin pounding on the windshield. The third blow sent a
spider web of shattering glass streaking across the windshield and it was clear that one or two more hits and it would implode into the passenger compartment. Kyle cranked the engine while popping the car into gear at the same time resulting in a spine tingling grinding sound as the transmission roared back in protest. His foot slammed down on the accelerator before the zombies on the hood could deliver the next blow to the thin shield of cracking glass. The sudden forward movement of the accelerating car tossed the four zombies off to the sides and clear of the tires as Kyle spun the wheel hard to the right aiming for one side of the entry drive that looked like it was less congested with the creatures as they raced across the pavement towards them. Even on that side of the drive he was still colliding with zombies every few feet along the way. Pushing his speed up to close to thirty miles per hour he hoped that the extra power he was trading for safe driving would better propel them over and past any bodies that fell underneath the car. The added speed compared to when they were escaping from the fire house and running down zombies along the way was making it a much more difficult ride. Each impact with the steel guard along the front bumper pushed the car slightly to one side or the other and that rocking motion was threatening to put them into a spin or simply send them off over the concrete curbs marking the boundary of the drive. Shellie screamed as a face suddenly loomed directly against the glass of her window, the zombie managed to get a single punch towards her face before he dropped out of view behind them, leaving behind a dirty smudge stain on the glass in the shape of a fist.

The end of the drive was approaching must faster than Kyle had anticipated, he had sped up to almost forty miles per hour along the last stretch of the parking lot and had been focused more on dodging zombies and keeping them facing straight ahead instead of judging the distance and preparing for the turn. The corner going to either the left or right out of the drive and onto Lewinsville road was constructed on a significant grade that had exiting cars pointing uphill as they stopped at the sign and prepare
d to make their turn. The road in either direction was also fairly narrow right at the entrance to the sports center, making it a difficult exit even under the best of conditions. Kyle braked and turned the wheel hard to the right at the same time to swing them onto Lewinsville road towards Spring Hill road so they could take that quick right and escape into the rural countryside leading to the outskirts of Mclean. The combination of speed, aggressive turning and the upward grade tested the laws of physics and in this case the patrol car failed that test. Two wheels left the ground for a split second and when they once again returned to earth the car had partially turned making them hit the ground and slide sideways. Kyle overcompensated for the change in their direction and inevitable spin and sent them careening into the soft mud on the shoulder of the far side of the road. Had only two tires hit the mud the powerful engine with a police package to include twice the horsepower of a civilian car would have had no problem pushing them through it and back out on the road with only a coating of mud on the body of the car. Unfortunately for Kyle and Shellie, all four tires hit the mud and drove them an additional five feet further off onto the shoulder. He knew what was coming as he felt the heavy cruiser sinking into the mud but tried desperately to use their last little bit of inertia to continue driving straight ahead in the hopes of reaching a patch of grass that would give the wheels a little something to bite into and maintain traction. Their forward motion stopped fast enough to throw Kyle hard against the steering wheel and to send Shellie smashing face first into the glove box. Kyle hit the wheel with his chest and was mostly uninjured save for what would later develop into an ugly half-moon shaped bruise. Shellie was not as lucky, her head bounced off the glove box trailing a shower of fresh blood from a broken and crooked nose. She slumped down in her seat against the door unconscious. In an added twist of just pure shitty lucky the engine sputtered and died a second after they came to a complete rest.

Kyle realized they were in a much worse spot now than they would have been if they had just sought a hiding place inside the sports center. The zombies he had raced to avoid in the parking lot were already rushing headlong towards them and would be on top of the car in seconds. The car had stalled and would take at least another minute of gently working
the gas pedal and bumping the ignition to fire it back up and then even after that, he was still faced with the fact that they were stuck in the soft mud that probably came half way up each tire. Given enough time he might be able to work them loose by easing forward and backward repeatedly, but he didn't think the zombies running towards them would be willing to sit back and let him work in peace to get them unstuck. They could have made a run for it, but the closest place to go was back to the sports center, after that the only other source of shelter was a subdivision of high end houses at least a hundred yards away. Between them and the houses there was a field that was overgrown with weeds chest high in places and no doubt full of hidden ruts and other ankle breaking surprises. Assuming they managed to make it through the field without injury, they would then have to scale a tall wooden privacy fence that he guessed was fourteen to sixteen feet high with no sign of a nearby gate or entry into the housing area beyond. With Shellie out cold and bleeding, if they were to make a run for it he could have to carry her or leave her behind. He dismissed that last part instantly, there was no way he would ever consider leaving someone behind like that. Trying to outrun that many zombies through the obstacle course he would have to navigate while also carrying Shellie over his shoulder was just not going to be possible. He resigned himself to staying put and continue trying to get them moving again, as futile as it was he knew that if they died here in the next few minutes he would go to his gave knowing he had given it his all. Pulling his pistol from its holster, he set it on the seat between them, one thing that he knew for certain, if it became clear that zombies were going to reach them, he was going to put a bullet in each of their heads before they suffered the unimaginable horror of being eaten alive.