The Most Uncommon Cold I - Life in the Time of Zombies (15 page)

     I looked over to see that Glen was watching the
ladder as closely as I was.  I could not tell what he was thinking, so I whispered, “It sure looks like they’re sleeping.”

     “I guess it would be too much to ask that they just died,” he whispered back.

     “Died from boredom?”  I snickered, and now it was Glen’s turn to give me a dirty look. 

    
We both caught sight of movement on the ladder and turned to look.  A stocky young guy in a dark blue sweat suit was moving his head around wildly as if he had suddenly become enraged to wake up on a ladder.  He continued to twist his head and then entire body until he finally lost his grip and simply slid down the ladder to the ground where he stayed in a crumpled pile.

     Neither of us made any comment for quite a while as we watched to see if any of the others started moving.  After a few minutes, Glen turned to me and whispered, “I win.”

     I started to reply but was distracted by more movement on the ladder.  Both an old woman in a fuzzy green sweater and a boy with long black hair turned to look at us.  They were sort of growling but also moving their mouths as if they expected words to come out.  The noise awoke others around them and soon the garble and growling grew louder.  Every once in a while an intelligible word or phrase would pop out of the noise.  I caught “there” and “go”. 

     “Looks like we woke them up,” Glen stated the obvious without whispering.

     “Well, now we know that these things seem to sleep.”

     Glen quickly added, “And we know that some of them can talk.”

     “Okay, they sleep and some talk, but what the hell are they?”  I was doing my best to stay objective on the subject, but it was not easy as the images of Bonnie and the others came flooding back into my mind.

     Glen must have noticed my
difficulty because he moved a little closer to me and said, “That’s the real question, isn’t it?  The only thing I can come up with is... well... maybe they are the...the shells that are left behind after God takes our souls up to heaven.”  The young minister pushed away the brief smile that curled his lips at the thought of his clever explanation.

     I was thankful for the
distraction and smiled as well.  “Shells?  Well, I guess that’s as good as anything else.  So why do you think these shells picked this time to start coming back and killing people?”

     He was
quiet for a long time before answering, “I guess... Hmm...If I was a fire and brimstone type, I suppose I’d give you a quotation like ‘For God did not spare even the angels who sinned. He threw them into the gloomy pits of darkness, where they are being held until the days of judgment’, Peter chapter two, verse four.”

     “So you
’re saying this is judgment day?”  I asked with a shake of my head.

     Glen shrugged his shoulders and answered, “I said
‘if I was a fire and brimstone type’ not that I am. I have never followed that line of thinking.  It is the belief of God as a vengeful being willing to punish any of us who fail to follow his commandments.  I believe that our creator has too much love for us as his children to punish us with eternal damnation.”  Now it was his turn to have difficulty holding things inside as his face quivered and he started to cry.

     Being a modern male, I was
totally unprepared to deal with this kind of emotional display.  In my discomfort, I turned back to the ladder.  The shells were clearly awake and agitated.  They stretched toward the roof but were much too far away to reach it.   Their eyes appeared to look without seeing.  I wondered what exactly was going on within their heads. 

     I jumped when I felt the hand on my shoulder. 

     “Sorry about that,” Glen said with surprising cheeriness, and I wasn’t quite sure if he was apologizing for crying or for scaring the crap out of me.  “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to find a way off this roof.”

     I was still a little thrown off by his sudden cheerfulness but was unable to stop myself from sharing his
mood.  “Sounds like a good idea.  Got any thoughts about how to do that?”

     “Not
really.  The only way--” He was interrupted by the sound of a body hitting the floor of the alley.  We looked down to the bottom of the ladder at a newly-smashed body at the bottom of the ladder.  Glen made eye contact with me.

     “Yeah, I know,
The Cross and The Switchblade
,” I said as something caught my eye from the top of the ladder.

     The shells were still grouped at the top of the ladder in a
mass of bodies.  But now I saw a guy with a shiny bald head and a black beard fling himself out from the group across the twelve foot gap between the ladder and the roof.  Well, not actually across the twelve foot gap.  He made it about ten feet of the gap.  With his arms wind milling like crazy, he dropped through the air and splattered on the ground below.

     Now it was my turn to look at the young minister.  “Make that
The Cross and The Switch-blade
and a six-pack!”  I exclaimed. 

     He looked at me and curled his
mouth into a fair attempt at a smile.  “I guess now that we woke them up they’re going to keep trying to get to us,” Glen’s voice was shaky and sounded as if he was exhausted. 

     With a twinge of guilt, I wondered for the first time whether or not he had gotten any sleep last night. 
I could certainly understand how someone might have difficulty coming to grips with this new reality.  It was now a reality in which these shells of people, people who we once knew and people that we passed in the street, acted on apparent instinct alone.  That instinct told them to kill us and devour our bodies.  Hell, I was exhausted myself when I thought about it like that.

    
Glen’s quiet voice brought me back to reality. 

     “I don
’t want to see any more of this,” he said as he walked toward the edge of the roof.

     Before anything else occurred to me, I saw him walking straight off the edge of the roof.  Then I saw myself standing there looking down at his crumpled, broken body on the pavement below.  In the next instant, I realized that I had not moved and that Glen was walking slowly along the edge of the roof looking down.

     “There must be some other way off this roof.”

    
I almost laughed out loud when I reali
zed he
was looking for a literal way out rather than the figurative one I had imagined him taking.  Some part of my laugh must have slipped out because Glen turned and stared at me for a few seconds before going back to his quest. 

    
I walked closely behind and asked, “Isn’t there some kind of entrance from inside the building?  I mean, how else did they get all the stuff up here?”

    “
Hmm,” he commented.  “I never thought about that.  I’ve never seen any sort of door inside.  But you’re right. There must be some other way down.  I sure don’t see anything this way.”

     I looked around the roof at piles of cardboard that had once been
boxes and a few old, broken wooden crates.  Aside from the storage shed and numerous white spots of bird shit, there was not much else.

     “Is there any chance that there is an old trap door somewhere on the roof? Maybe under the cardboard?” 

     “One way to find out,” Glen announced as he trotted over to the corner of the roof where the cardboard was piled. 

     I started after him and then stopped as I heard the sound of another body hitting the ground beneath the ladder.  This time the
body must have hit the ladder on the way down since there was a sort of ringing sound like a gong had been stuck.  The sound caused Glen and me to look back reflexively.  The sound seemed to have gotten the attention of the shells as well since every single one of them was focused on the ground.  They were no longer moving at all.

     I moved closer to Glen and whispered, “Looks like they
’re completely distracted by loud noises.”

    
“Yeah, it looks like they forgot all about us.  I say we try not do anything that will remind them.”

     I nodded and directed him to check the ground around the cardboard while I checked the area near the shed.  Neither of us was
quite sure for what we were looking, but we hoped to get lucky.   Glen spent fifteen minutes or so shifting the pieces of cardboard around and carefully studying the surface underneath.  Meanwhile, I had slowly begun searching for any possible break in the surface of the roof around the shed.  After finding nothing of interest, both of us met in the middle of the roof with expressions of disappointment and frustration.

     “Any other ideas?”  I whispered to a
totally dejected-looking Glen. 

     He
simply shook his head.  I am not sure if it was the action of shaking his head or if the idea was brought on by something else, but Glen was suddenly jogging over to a large metal box near the back of the roof.    The box was about three feet high and three feet wide and looked as if it had not been touched for quite some time.  He walked around it and back and forth in front of it.  All at once, he threw his sizable form against it.  The box rocked back a little and then fell back with a bang.  I looked back to see some of the shells were stirring and looking in our direction.  Then there was the sickening sound of a few more bodies hitting the pavement beneath the ladder.  I ran over to where Glen stood.

     “What have you
got?”  I asked.

    
“I think maybe I heard something about the building owner sealing off the way up to the roof.  Something about not wanting kids to mess around up here,” Glen whispered.  “It seems to me that the best way to seal it off would be to set something heavy on top.”

      “Well, let
’s see if we can move it,” I whispered back.

     We both pushed on the lower portion of the metal box with all our
strength and got it to start sliding.  But with the movement, there came a loud scraping noise that acted like a wake up call to the things on the ladder.  I looked at the foot or so of the roof that we had uncovered and saw that Glen was right. It did look like some sort of metal door had been covered by the box. 

     “You were
right!  Now we just have to get this thing off of the door.”

     Glen beamed at the fact that he had been
right, but the light went instantly out of him as he looked at the ladder.  The whole mass was squirming wildly. We watched as a teenage girl in some sort of fast food uniform dove in our direction but found only air as she fell to the ground with a splattering sound.  But that wasn’t the worst part.

    
I looked down to the base of the ladder to see that the flow of those things had begun again.  It was like now that we had shown ourselves again they had regained their enthusiasm. 
Enthusiasm
might not be the best word for it, but they seemed to be re-energized in their mission to get to Glen and me. 

     Glen looked on with
horror as more shells climbed upward and toward their end.  He looked about to say something but instead spun around toward the door and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

      I grabbed the crowbar off the ground near the edge of the roof and headed after Glen.

     He was already pushing against the large metal box as if his will alone was enough to move the thing. 

     I did not say anything as I moved beside him and started pushing. 

     The grating sound made as the metal scraped the cement of the rooftop was not much different than the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.  The noise had a clear effect on the shells as they became even more active.  The sound of bodies hitting the pavement was continuous like a downpour.  With each impact, Glen winced and then pushed harder.  

      We were managing to move the metal box inch by inch off of the metal door.  It was almost off when we saw him.

     The very pale man in a police uniform was walking quickly toward us from the edge of the roof.  It wasn’t until he turned his head slightly to the right that we saw that his left ear and everything around it was gone. 

    
I tightened my grip on the crowbar and turned to meet the cop-thing.  He had moved faster than I realized and was much closer than I expected.  Before I had the crowbar raised, his cold hand had caught hold of my arm.  The long, thin, pale face was only a few inches away.  The dead gray eyes looked at me and through me.  I could not tear my own eyes away.  Everything was silent.  Then the face was knocked away.

     Glen stood in front of me still holding the end of the pipe with the claw hammer lodged in the cop-thing
’s head. 

     He looked at me with
amazement. I am still not sure if the amazement came from the fact that the shell made its way on to the roof or the realization that he had just sunk a tool into its head.

     “I
’ve got no idea how that thing got up here, but maybe the noise we made got them so riled up that--”

     Glen interrupted me by flatly saying, “We need to get off this roof.”