The Most Uncommon Cold I - Life in the Time of Zombies (12 page)

     “Shit!”  I yelled as I grabbed the
pipe.

      They were moving up the ladder and sounded
extremely close. 

    
We pulled on the pipe, but the bolt remained stuck. 

     “This can
’t be happening!” Glen cried. “I’m not getting killed because of some goddamn rusted bolt!”

     As soon as he said that, Glen threw himself against the pipe.  The squeak of the bolt echoed around the roof.  I spun the wrench and quickly pulled the
bolt out.  I turned to drop it on the roof.  When I turned back to the ladder, I was looking into the cold, dead eyes of a bald man with a full black beard.  Reflexively, I stumbled a few steps back from the ladder.  The man kept moving up the ladder until he was about to come onto the roof. 

     All of a sudden, Glen pushed me to the
side and rushed forward.  I could not see what he had in his hand until he swung it forward.  The claw end of the hammer stuck in the bald head with a hollow thud.  The guy seemed not to notice for a few seconds as he continued trying to move off of the ladder.  Then suddenly he froze and fell backwards down the ladder.  His fall worked out well as he came down clearing the others off the ladder.  They landed with a dull plop.

     “Good work!” 
I said, turning to Glen to find the young pastor near to tears.

     “I don
’t think the church would agree with you there.  I just killed...”

     “Glen, I don
’t think there’s time to discuss morality right now,” I said and indicated the things beginning to climb the ladder once more. 

      I stuck the ratchet wrench on the other bolt at the top left of
the ladder and grabbed the pipe.  Glen’s hands appeared next to my own, making me thankful that he had recovered from his paralysis.  This time the bolt moved rather easily, and we had it removed quickly.  The next pair of bolts was about eight feet down the ladder. 

     “What do you think?”  I asked Glen.  “Think I can get down there and take out those bolts?”

     He looked irritably at me and answered, “Don’t be stupid!  Those things would be on you before you got one of those bolts loose.”

   “Tell me what you really think, Glen,” I said with a totally inappropriate grin.

     “Sorry,” he replied.  “But I think we’ll be okay with the top of the ladder unfastened.”

     Without saying anything else, he went over to the top of the ladder and began pushing it away from the building.  It came away slightly for a gap of a few inches.  I was
immediately next to Glen, pushing on the ladder.  With some effort, we managed to widen the gap until the ladder was a couple of feet from the building. By the time we finished, the things were about half way up the ladder.  

     “So now what?”  I asked.  “Do you think that we got the ladder far enough away from the roof?”

     “Well, I guess, we wait and see,” Glen said softly.  The answer did not instill a lot of confidence.

     The things continued slowly up the ladder.  The only sound was the scratching and banging as they climbed.  We watched them moving up for a minute. 

   Suddenly, the image of the half-eaten waitress crawling toward me returned. It was immediately followed by the memory of a man showing a mouth full of teeth covered with blood and flesh. There were other images streaming through my brain, but the only thing I remember is the overpowering sense of panic.  The absolute certainty that we needed to do more.  I yelled,  “We need to get the ladder further away!”  Maybe it was terror.  This was probably the first time in my life that I felt pure, genuine terror.  Not like worrying about having money for a car payment or anxiety that comes when the doctor wants to do a biopsy on the mole on your neck.  This was more like mindless panic that shoved aside any rational thoughts. 

     “We need to get the ladder further away!” I repeated.

     Glen looked at me with disbelief.  “It’s too late.  We just have to pray that it’s far enough.” 

     He may have believed that his words would be enough to stop me, but they were not.  I rushed
forward to the ladder. I leaned over from the roof, wrapped my hands around the top rung, and shoved. The ladder did not budge, but that did not stop me as I put all of my focus and thought into willing it to move.  Everything I had was concentrated on getting the ladder further away from the building.  This is why
Tim
was able to scramble up and grab my hand. 

Chapter 9

     The tall thin man in dark green coveralls with Tim embroidered in gold thread above his right breast had a firm grip on my hand as I stared into his eyes.  Even at moments of fear, it is astonishing the details which are remembered.  I noticed his eyes were not as cold and dead as those of the others and that he had dirty oil under his fingernails. Another thing that struck me was the coldness of the hand that was pulling me forward.  It felt like ice. 

   “Let me up,” Tim croaked.  “Up!”

   I was doing my best to free my hand from the cold grip but not succeeding.  Fortunately, Glen came to my aid. He reached out and tried to pry the cold hand from mine.  After a few seconds, he gave up on this and disappeared for a moment.  When he reappeared, he amazed me by swinging the monkey wrench to hit Tim’s wrist just below where my hand was.  I am not going to say that the shock of the blow did not hurt.  It did.  But it felt better to be released from the icy grip. 

     “Let me up!”  Tim screamed even as the monkey wrench crushed his wrist, and he was forced to
release my hand. 

     Glen
further amazed me by swinging the monkey wrench at the place where Tim held the ladder with his other hand.  The fingers seemed to disintegrate beneath the wrench.  Tim fell backwards even as his mouth moved as though he was forming words. 

     “Thanks, Glen!”  I said loudly.

     He looked at me for a second as if evaluating my condition and then said, “Well, I think we just learned a lesson about the importance of staying alert.”  He smiled almost despite himself.  I smiled back as I realized that as quickly as the panic had swept over me it had left.

     “The
good news is you swing a mean monkey wrench.  The bad news is that those things keep coming up that ladder.” I observed lightly.

   
More and more of the things moved around Tim’s body to grab hold of the ladder and begin climbing. 

      “You know, it might not be bad news after all,” Glen said
, nodding toward the gap between the ladder and the building.

     “Looks like the weight of these things is pulling the ladder away from the wall!”  I exclaimed like some excited kid.  “We need to get more of them up here!”

      “Hold on, Kevin.  I can see that you have some sort of plan, but do you honestly think it’s wise to attract them to us?”

     I
certainly understood Glen’s reluctance.  It did sound crazy to draw those things toward us. 

     “You and I are not strong enough to push the ladder away.  But if we can get enough of them on the ladder at the same time, it should
bend it further away from the building.  Look how much the ladder moved just from Tim’s weight.”

     Glen showed a flash of
confusion at my use of the name but just nodded.  “Okay, we can try that.  Not like we have a lot of other brilliant ideas.”

     “Besides,” I added with a look down the ladder, “it looks like they already know we
’re here and are coming.”

     The things were
clearly not giving up on getting to us.  The crowd appeared to have grown. They were bunched up at the bottom of the ladder, crowded so tightly together that it appeared to make it tougher for them to get up the ladder.  Every once in a while, one of them would seemingly be pushed from the pack and up the ladder.  One of those to appear was the blonde in the pink bathrobe.  An inexplicable smile found its way to my lips. Glen’s reaction was another expression of confusion. 

    
“Am I missing something?”  he asked.

    “No, I...
uh...nothing,” I answered, actually feeling a little embarrassed. To change the subject, I quickly observed, “We might want to think of how we can keep them on the ladder long enough for it to bend.”

     “I guess I can slow
‘em down with the wrench,” Glen said without much enthusiasm.

     
“Good,” I said as I picked up the pipe.

     We stood on either side of the
ladder, watching them climb.  As they neared the top rungs, I raised the pipe and Glen did the same with the massive monkey wrench.

     At the last moment, I looked over at Glen and said, “Remember, we don
’t want to knock them off the ladder.  Just slow them down enough so they group up and put more weight on it.”

     Glen nodded quickly and turned to
swing at the tall black woman nearing him. The wrench hit her in the shoulder and knocked her back toward the center of the ladder. She paused there as a short, pudgy man in a white dentist’s uniform climbed past her on the right side.  Just before he reached the top of the ladder, I swung the pipe like a baseball bat.  Unfortunately, I swung high and struck the man on the side of the head. A sharp pop rang out, and his head snapped to the left and hung on his neck at a strange angle.  He froze. I watched, disappointed and expecting him to let go of the ladder and fall to the alley below. 

     I turned toward Glen with an apologetic
expression and said, “Sorry, I guess...”

      “Look!”  He yelled and pointed to the ladder.

     The white metal ladder had begun to bend back from the building, and as I had hoped, the things just kept climbing higher.  Even better, the dentist that I had hit managed to hang on and continued to stare at me with his head held at that unnatural position.  The top of the ladder was becoming a cluster of bodies.  With the increased weight, the ladder continued to bend back-wards.  A long-haired, skinny guy in cutoffs and a blue t-shirt tried to jump from the ladder to the roof but misjudged the distance and instead slapped the side of the building before falling to the ground. 

     The
stream of bodies continued to travel up the ladder and add to the weight.  I watched the things looking out from the top of the ladder, confused that there was no other place to go.  They stretched their arms out as if hoping to grab something out of the air.  After a minute of this, an Asian man in a dark business suit simply stepped off the ladder and fell to the dark alley below.  There must have been a dumpster down there because a loud metallic crash rang out.  As soon as he hit the ground, several others of those clinging to the top of the ladder followed suit and simply took a dive. 

    
I wondered if this was part of the things’ pack mentality.  Did they simply follow one another without question?   Were they just a bunch of sheep?  I thought of all the bloody attacks I had seen during the day and surprised myself with a giggle.  It was the thought of my comparison between these cannibalistic creatures and docile sheep.  Not hardly. 

     I expected to
see the things simply continue to follow one another off the ladder and splatter to the floor of the alley below.  But for some reason, I couldn’t understand why they stopped dropping from the ladder and instead clung there motionless like roosting birds.

     Glen appeared to be studying the
scene with the same curiosity I had. 

     “So why do you think they stopped jumping off the ladder?”  I asked.

     He jumped a little startled from his meditation on the scene.  “I was just thinking about that.  Maybe they have some rudimentary logic skills.  I mean they seem to be darned primitive in their movements ... behavior, but maybe they can figure things out with reason.”

     “So you think after seeing a few of their buddies hit the pavement they decided to stick with the ladder?” 

     “That would be my guess.   And, like I say, it is just a guess,” Glen answered. “Now, if you had to make a guess, what do you think the rest of them are going to do?  Will they climb back down the ladder?  Will they simply stay where they are until they grow weak and fall?  Or will they make an attempt to reach the roof?”

    “Interesting questions.”  I am not quite sure why the
matter seemed important, but it did and I considered the questions carefully.  “From my limited observation of these things, I’d have to guess that they will eventually make a desperate attempt to reach the roof.  And with the ladder continuing to sway farther away from the roof, the longer they wait the less likely it is that they can get anywhere near the roof.”

      Glen considered my answer carefully as if weighing every
side of the issue.  After a moment of what appeared to be serious thought, he said, “Nope, I bet they’re going to just stay there until they fall.”  He looked at me as though he expected an answer. 

      “Okay, Glen, you
’ve got a bet,” I answered.

     He flashed a devilish grin at the
mention of betting.  “So what now?”