“We sure about this?” I asked, more to myself than her.
“Not really,” she replied. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty
Rosa’s dreams were awash in happiness and terror. She dreamt of her first day at work shortly after she moved into the small community. She saw the ER entrance, bathed in the warm sunlight of the early August morning. The scent of warm soil and healthy vegetation wafted through the country air as she walked into the hospital to the welcoming smiles of her new coworkers, and soon to be friends.
She had taken her lunch outside, sitting on a bench facing the miles of visible rolling countryside. The hospital sat atop a small hill, the land sloping downwards to a small strip of forest that wrapped around the hospital campus. Beyond the trees, tall corn stalks swayed in the warm breeze, like a green ocean ebbing and flowing with the currents of air. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, smiling as she warmed her face in the sun. The breeze caressed her cheeks with feathery tenderness. She was happier than she could remember being in a very long time, and she felt that she had finally found the place she would spend the rest of her life.
Off in the distance she heard a faint thud, like an open palm slap on a wall. The warm breeze suddenly disappeared; the sun light vanishing. She was cold, but it was not a normal cold. She felt a despairing emptiness in her soul. She opened her eyes, and found herself behind the nurse’s station in the ER. The florescent tubes were dimmer than she remembered, and buzzed like a fly caught in a bug zapper.
The room was a nightmare version of itself, walls twisting and distorting themselves before her eyes. Shadows moved out of the corner of her eye, but nothing was there when she turned to see what it was. Unearthly moans and shuffling feet came from all around her, as if the life that normally filled the halls were replaced with hellish abominations. Behind it, the distant slapping sound continued, growing louder with each passing second.
The coppery smell of fresh blood suddenly filled the ER, tinged with the distinct odors of death. Droplets of blood formed in the corners of the ceiling, dripping down in narrow streams and pooling on the cold tiled floor.
Lights flickered and dimmed even further. The slapping grew even louder, until it was like a hammer beating its way out from her skull. She tried to raise her hands to her ears to drown it out, but she had no control over them. Her arms came up of their own accord, and in her hands was a shredded human arm.
Rosa’s mind wanted to scream, but she had lost control of her own body. The blood soaked appendage lifted to her mouth, and her teeth tore into a strip of red muscle. She felt the skin flex, then pop as her teeth broke through. The spongy raw flesh resisted until she pulled her head back, tearing at the tough meat. It gave with a pop, her head snapping back as the tissue filled her mouth. She chewed, tasting the metallic blood squirt from the meat with every bite, until she swallowed it down.
Her brain wouldn’t stop screaming. Her stomach roiled, but she couldn’t stop herself from going in for another bite. “No! Stop!” she screamed in her mind. Her head suddenly felt like it had been ripped open when another slap hit like a stick of dynamite.
Rosa’s eyes snapped open. She was awake. She lay on the floor in almost total darkness, save for the slivers of light streaming in from around the door. Her eyes ached and her head felt like it wanted to burst open. She rubbed her temple with the hopes that the nauseating dizziness would subside as her terrifying dream faded into memory.
The door suddenly rattled on its hinges as something smacked it from the other side. Rosa bolted upright, nearly blacking out as she did so. Flashes of light danced before her eyes as the effects of her concussion refused to dissipate. The specter of unconsciousness hung dangerously close, and she felt as if she could slip away at any moment.
Movement in the scant light drew her attention to the door handle. It bobbed up and down, until the door came dangerously close to opening. She launched herself at it, her thumb hitting the lock seconds after the handle bounced back in place. She fell heavily on her side with a grunt before pulling herself up, sitting with her back to the door.
The thing on the other side snarled, and attacked the door with new found fervor. The door shook with every hit. It no longer sounded like an open handed slap, instead it was as if the creature was throwing its body against it.
“Please…go away, please go away, please go away…” she mouthed, pressing her knees tight to her chest. The noise was sure to bring more of them, and she didn’t think it would be long before her temporary sanctuary would be breached. She shook uncontrollably. For the first time since she was a teenager, she prayed.
She heard a sorrowful moan join the angry snarl, and a second creature joined in the attack. The door shuddered in its frame. Soon another joined, the hinges cracking under the relentless attack. There was no doubt, they knew she was in there. Or at the very least, they knew there was something in the room worth investigating.
Her eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. She realized she was in a medical supply closet that paramedics used to resupply their rigs. This particular one was relatively close to the sliding glass doors that would lead out to the ambulance bay. She needed to get there somehow.
Her eyes darted over the room, looking for some hope of escape while more of the monsters joined the fray. The top hinge cracked and fell away, the door buckling under the immense pressure of the monsters outside. She thought of climbing through the vents, but there was no way to gain entry that she could see. There were no windows to climb through or cabinets to hide inside. There were only wire racks marked with various labels to aid with locating the various medical supplies. Most of the racks were empty.
The door cracked, and she panicked. She got to her feet, fighting the ever present dizziness. She frantically grabbed at anything she could use as a weapon, finding only some crutches and a few collapsible walkers. The attack on the door intensified, and her knees weakened. She had no chance if she was forced to fight. One last look around the dark room, and an idea suddenly hit her.
Two large canvas laundry carts sat against the back wall, intended to carry soiled and contaminated linens to be properly cleaned and sterilized. On a busy day, paramedics could easily fill at least one of them. Usually they would be emptied first thing in the morning, but it seemed current events had delayed pick up. It was far from ideal, but it was literally her only hope.
She found them both full of linens that were covered with vileness that Rosa did not want to imagine. She pulled the first one out of the way to access the one behind it. She pushed and shoved the heavy sheets out of the way until there was enough of a gap for her to climb in. Once she stood inside, she reached over and pulled the first cart back to where it was, so she would have some protection between her and the things that soon would be inside.
No sooner had she ducked under the nastiest sheets and blankets she could imagine, the door cracked from its hinges and crashed to the floor. Rosa squirmed her way to the bottom of the cart until she couldn’t dig any deeper. She noticed a pinhole of light penetrating into her shelter. She cleared a crusted sheet away to reveal a small tear in the canvas wall. She could not see much beyond the other laundry cart, but what she saw filled her with icy dread.
The creatures were spilling into the room, banging into shelves and knocking bins full of equipment to the floor. She had finally accepted what the things were. She had no choice. She didn’t need her nursing degree to tell her the people milling around inside the room were dead, and yet they were walking. Against everything she knew to be scientifically possible, she was looking at zombies. A shit load of zombies, and they were looking for her.
She couldn’t see how many were in the room with her already, but she had a clear view to the now opened doorway. Creatures continued to flow in, with no end in sight. Her cart jostled with every impact of a creature against the cart in front of her. She watched through her peephole as the things packed in so tight they could only sway against each other.
She caught sight of a man in coveralls. His jaw and tongue were gone, leaving the top row of teeth exposed. Blackened clotted blood oozed down his exposed chest, running across a tattoo that looked like a tiger with a deep gash slicing through its midsection. His left arm was missing save for a small splintered bone protruding from his shoulder. His ghostly white eyes scanned the room, just like every other monster that had invaded her sanctuary.
“Oh Ted, no,” she mouthed when she saw the man who had dragged her into the supply room hours before. He had saved her and went back for others, and it cost him his life.
Her hiding place jarred suddenly as several of the things fell onto the cart in front of her. Rosa grunted as she was thrown backwards and away from her peephole. The room went silent. Rosa held her breath as she listened for the slightest noise and found none. She peered out into the herd once more. They stood eerily still, heads turned in her direction. Their eyes moved slowly left to right, as if searching for something. And they were. They heard her, and they were looking for the source of the sound.
For several terror filled moments the creatures didn’t move, and neither did she. She waited for one of them to rip the sheets away, and pull her into the waiting hungry mob. A growl floated from out of her view, followed by a moan, and a hiss. Slowly, one by one, they started to move again. Eventually, they returned to their uncoordinated shambling.
Rosa exhaled into a bundled sheet to eliminate any more noise. Her head still swam from her concussion. Spots danced in front of her eyes from holding her breath for so long. She pulled away from her peephole. She didn’t want to see any more. She didn’t know how, or even if she would be able to get away.
She curled herself into fetal position, buried under pounds of sheets and blankets contaminated with blood, shit, and vomit. Her tears flowed freely onto the canvas below as the dead pressed against her.
She didn’t know what else to do. She waited.
Chapter Twenty-One
“No more gas stations,” Abby said.
“Agreed.”
Route 12 was a bust. Not that there wasn’t a glut of places to stop for fuel. However, all but a few were crawling with corpses. I wasn’t sure if there were people trapped within, and I wasn’t willing to risk my growing family to find out. The buildings that were not surrounded by walking coffin stuffers were either destroyed completely or appeared too dangerous to approach.
We thought we had struck gold when we came upon a Shell station that appeared untouched. We soon found that the owners were willing to kill to keep what they had. A point they made with two new bullet holes in Abby’s bumper and a shattered taillight.
“Everyone okay?” I asked after we gained some distance from the trigger happy station residents.
“We’re okay,” Lexi replied. “Right girls?”
“Uh-huh,” they said in unison.
“We’re stopping soon, one way or another,” I said, turning my attention back to Abby. The bright red low fuel warning light blared in my face like a beacon.
“I know,” Abby stared off at nothing. Her face was awash with exhaustion, both physical and emotional. She was drained. We needed to get off the road, and more importantly, we needed to rest. Spending the day fleeing from people, living and dead, takes a toll on the human psyche that can never really be fully described.
Ken’s Body Shop came into view as we came around a bend in the road. It was a small, single story green building with two large white garage doors facing the roadway. The path leading to the overhead doors was a mix of gravel and weeds. Old rusted out cars littered the area, slowly succumbing to time’s decay. Through the shaded front window, we could tell the interior was dark. A small “Sorry, We’re Closed” sign hung in the lower left part of the window.
“Think Ken will mind if we stay the night?” I asked to no one in particular.
“You think I care?” Abby answered.
I made quick work of the padlock on the garage door using the bolt cutters from the squad car. We backed Abby’s Honda in as it sputtered and died with just enough clearance to close the door behind us. I didn’t like the idea of leaving the overhead door unlocked, but we were short of options. I wedged a screwdriver I had found in the garage into the door track. If someone was determined enough they could lift the door, but not without making a lot of noise.
The place was like any other body shop you would expect to see. There was a small office area, complete with faded red vinyl covered chairs, torn down the middle with a strip of duct tape holding the cushion together. The garage itself was empty, except for our CRV that took up half of the space. The floor was dusty and dirty, old grease and oil caking the floor wherever we looked. Tools were laid haphazardly throughout the work area. Overall, it was a disorganized mess. Ken needed a housekeeper.
Before long we were huddling around a small fire we had built inside an old metal trash can. Black smoke billowed from the oily rags and old magazines we used to fuel the flames. We listened to the outside for the mournful groan of the living dead. The body shop glowed with the orange flames, our shadows dancing on the walls behind us. The acrid smell of oil and grease hung heavy in the frigid air.
The flames of our makeshift campfire had barely started to dance along the rim of the can when the sun finally made its decent below the horizon. Night came quickly, stifling the little light we gained through the dusty oval windows in the bay doors. No one spoke, either from the stresses of the most recent life threatening events, or from sheer exhaustion, I couldn’t be sure which. Even the road outside was eerily still.
I stared into the fire, taking in the calming stillness of the room. Looking up, I saw Abby and Lexi sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding the kids in their arms and rocking them gently. Katie and Jane were as quiet as the rest of us, snuggling in as close to the women as they could. Neither cried, both wore the same blank stares on their faces as the women who held them.
I was worried. Our group had been running on fear alone for too long, and the toll it was taking was written on all our faces. If I had to choose a word to describe our state at that moment, it would be defeated. We had a car full of supplies, but unless the vehicle could run on fresh air it would not be leaving that garage. We had all lost our homes, and for all we knew our families. We had been forced to fight for our lives at almost every turn. We were dangerously close to our breaking point. I sat trying to find a way to bring some semblance of hope to our little group.
It was then we heard the first moan. It was deep and almost sorrowful, as if the thing was mourning the life it had lost, and what it had become. It was quickly followed by another distinctly feminine groan in the distance. A chorus of the dead soon followed, and we soon realized why the road was so quiet. I put my fingers to my lips to shush the group. Abby nodded and held the two youngest girls tight. Lexi drew her knees up and shivered, laying her head on Abby’s shoulder.
I kept my head down and crept to one of the small windows. I am not ashamed to say if my bowels were full, they wouldn’t have been for long. From my vantage point, I could already see dozens of corpses making their way past our building. From around a bend in the road, an endless stream of the dead flowed. Men, women, and children of all ages shambled by in an undead parade. There were creatures that had been torn in half, pulling their bodies along, dragging their entrails behind them.
They moved slowly, bumping into each other occasionally as they moved in the same direction. They seemed to have no purpose other than to keep moving, following the road beneath their feet. Somewhere in the woods across the road from where we hid, something crashed through the trees. My blood turned to ice water when all at once, every one of the creatures stood completely still, facing the direction of the sound. They were silent, not a single groan or hiss amongst them as they scanned the tree line.
They were hunting.
This was a new development to me. I had always figured zombies, if they were real, were mindless in their search for a meal. They stumbled around until they happened upon a warm fleshy thing that screamed. They would eat until the screaming stopped, and would move on looking for something else warm and fleshy.
This was different. As it turns out, zombies are real. The real ones were using the most basic of hunting skills. Don’t scare away your prey with noise. There was either some tiny bit of logic floating around in those rotting brain cells, or they were using simple hunting instinct. Either way, it scared the shit out of me.
I stood there for what seemed an eternity before the first of the creatures began to move again. Somewhere ahead of the group, another soulful moan broke the silence, and the macabre parade began anew. They shambled along the road as their moaning and hissing rose anew. I ducked down, realizing how shallow I had been breathing. My head spun slightly as I made my way back over to the group, taking a seat as close to Abby as I could without being on her lap. I would have preferred her lap.
“How many?” Abby whispered.
“Can’t count that high. Chicago Public School system and all,” I said with a forced smile. Abby glared at me.
“Do you have to make a joke about everything?”
“It’s either that or shit myself. I just got these pants, so bad humor it is,” I replied.
“Daddy, you said a bad word again,” Katie whispered to me. I looked at her face, and I saw the one thing in my life I know beyond a doubt I did right. She was the vision of innocence, a kid who always smiled and laughed. She was smarter than I could have ever dreamed to be at her age. She was already reading and doing math at an age that I was still eating crayons and trying to figure out how to glue my brother to his bed sheets. She was polite; ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ were as natural to her as farting and burping were to boys. I would sacrifice everything to ensure she would never be hurt.
“You’re right, daddy said another bad word,” I whispered in her ear. “Are you scared?”
She gave me the slightest of nods as she pressed her head into her mother’s chest.
“Daddy’s scared too. But you know what? Even if daddy is scared he has to be brave so people around him feel brave too. I bet Jane is really scared. You think so?”
Katie looked at Jane, and they both looked at me nodding.
“Well, I bet if you stay brave, Jane will feel brave too. I bet even Mommy and Daddy will feel more brave. Can you do that for us?” I asked in a hushed voice. She sniffled, rubbing a tear away from her eye, and nodded yes.
“That’s my girl, I knew you could do it. Jane, can you help Katie be brave too? I bet if you do, your big sister will feel better. Are you a big enough girl to be brave for everyone?” I asked with a smile.
“Yes!” Jane blurted. Lexi’s eyes grew big as saucers as she covered Jane’s mouth. We all held our collective breaths as we listened, hoping the marching corpses outside were louder than the outburst of a little girl. The shuffling continued outside, allowing us to slightly relax.
“Can you be brave AND quiet?” I asked just slightly above a whisper.
“Yes,” they said much quieter this time.
“Good,” I said as we settled down to wait out the deadly parade.
We huddled together, trying to keep each other warm in the falling temperatures. I had long since covered the fire, afraid the light would attract unwanted attention. The darkness consumed the shop. I held my pistol tight, waiting out the longest hour of my life as death marched on into the night.