Eric S. Brown (5 page)

“
It was. . .unpleasant,” Elijah answered then changed the subject. “Your husband will die from his wound. Do you want to be the one?”

“
But he didn’t get bit,” Lori argued.

“
It doesn't matter. The virus has become airborne.”

“
How could you possibly know that?”

“
I can do it if you want,” Elijah offered. “You know I'm telling the truth.”

Lori forced down her anger. “No, I

“
Anger is good,” Elijah told her. “It gives you strength. Control it and it may keep you alive but it won’t change what will happen to Michael. It’s only a matter of time.”

Jacob and the others were waiting on the roof when they arrived. Jacob lobbed a belt of grenades over the edge of the roof into the rotters below as the morgue came into view. Elijah reduced the Outback’s speed as the explosion shook the parking lot, then he punched it, driving through the flames and rain of splattered body parts as Lori held herself in place in the passenger seat with white knuckled hands. The Outback’s brakes squealed, straining to stop the vehicle as Elijah brought it around to the side of the morgue.

Lori and Elijah leapt from the Outback, providing cover fire against the few rotters left standing, as the others made their way down from the roof. Michael looked worse than ever as Jacob helped him into the Outback’s hatch. The pieces of lab coat tied as bandages over his stomach were a wet shade of red. His skin was pale and sweaty. Lori was the last person to get in. her final shot making a mess of an elderly lady’s gray hair as Lori’s bullet cracked her skull. Jacob was smiling at her as Lori turned to look into the backseat. Helena sat next to him, clearly terrified but holding it together.

“
Where to now?” Jacob asked.

“
Out of the city,” Elijah said.

“
Good,” Lori laughed bitterly. “It’s about time we got the Hell out of Dodge.”

***

Michael lay propped against the side of the Outback in the hatch area behind the backseat. His pain was so intense, his knuckles were white where he clutched the floor as he tried to keep from being sent flying about by Elijah’s wild driving. Lori was so far away in the passenger seat, she might as well have been on the moon. There was so much he wanted to say to her but he couldn’t, not in front of the others. He grunted through gritted teeth as the Outback hit a pothole and jostled him, causing his muscles to tense up. Michael could feel parts of him hanging out of the open mess of his wound underneath his makeshift bandages. He never imagined he’d go like this or that death would hurt so much. Memories of better days played through his mind like short movies. He remembered when he met Lori. The way she looked all sweaty and out of place on the gym’s treadmill that day. The smell of her hair as her head rested on his chest in their bed. How she hated mushrooms and complained every time he cooked them. He thought about the child they had been planning and the future that would never be. Michael promised her he would never hurt her or let her down. He was breaking that promise now and that fact hurt him as much as the shotgun had. A moan escaped his lips.

“
You okay back there?” Jacob asked, twisting his head around over the top of the backseat.

“
What do you think?” Michael snapped. He hated the nerdy writer mainly because he figured Lori would one day end up in Jacob’s arms after he was gone.

“
You were kind of scaring me there for a moment,” Jacob droned on.

Michael ignored him until Jacob left him alone. Closing his eyes, he rested his head on his chest. Maybe he would get lucky and bite the prick’s nose off when he turned, before one of the others put a bullet in his brain. As he fell asleep, Michael dreamed of chewing on Jacob’s flesh and tearing it apart with his teeth.

Neither Jacob nor Helena saw it coming when Michael’s corpse rose up in the hatch several minutes later and grabbed Jacob’s head by handful of his hair, jerking it backwards. Helena screamed louder than Jacob as the writer twisted about, trying to get free of Michael’s hold. Helena knew she had to do something, anything. Her hands latched onto the sides of the thing that was once Michael’s head. His flesh was feverishly hot against her skin but there was no doubt in her mind that he was dead. She strained, tugging him away from Jacob.

“
Michael!” Lori shouted from the front of the vehicle.

“
Kill it!” Elijah barked, unable to offer any help.

Helena released Michael as Jacob turned in his seat, wrestling him. Michael tried to force his way over the top of the backseat to flop onto them. Helena reached for Jacob’s pistol where he had dropped it into the floorboard. Her fingers closed around it. She’d never held a gun before much less used one. The feel of the weapon in her hand sent a rush of excitement coursing through her. Helena sat up.

“
Shoot it! Shoot it!” Jacob was yelling at her. Michael gave a low, guttural moan as his soulless, hungry eyes cut towards her, as if a shred of understanding of what a gun was remained within him.

Helena pressed the pistol’s barrel to the side of his head and squeezed the trigger. A spray of bone fragments and brain matter flew over Jacob and the Outback’s hatch window as the bullet exited Michael’s skull. Michael’s body slouched over and slid into the floor of the hatch to lay still. Helena giggled like a little girl at the mess she had made. Jacob stared at her. She realized what she was doing and stopped suddenly. “I. . .I am sorry,” she said, handing the gun to Jacob. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“
Don’t worry about it. You just saved my life,” Jacob said, but Helena barely heard him over the sound of Lori’s wailing. Helena reached to put a hand on Lori’s shoulder to comfort her but Lori slapped it away.

“
Don’t you touch me!” Lori’s eyes were full of hatred and torment.

“
She only did what had to be done,” Elijah commented. “You knew this was coming.”

Helena, tortured by her own guilt at enjoying what she had done, tried to block out Lori’s sobs. Her gaze drifted to the rotters outside the window who were trying to chase them as the Outback sped along the freeway. These people had saved her from Mark but she didn’t know who they were. Not really. The four of them needed to get along and she hoped her action to save Jacob hadn’t destroyed the chance of a real friendship with Lori in the days that lay ahead. They might be the only two women left alive on the whole planet. Helena shivered. She could still hear Mark’s voice in her ears whispering, “Call me Daddy,” as he pumped away between her thighs. The sicko took her virginity. She was glad he was dead. Michael appeared to be a decent and good man though. She could understand Lori’s pain but as Elijah said, she’d done the right thing, the thing that had to be done. Was it her fault that she had been the only one who could do it?

Jacob was having about as much success comforting Lori as she had. Finally, he gave up and turned to her, shaking his head. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“
I know,” Helena admitted, touching his cheek softy with her fingertips. “It’s not yours either.”

They drove on in silence, leaving the city behind them.

PART II

Road Trip

As the sun rose above the fields of green, Thomas walked the perimeter of the farm. The grass was wet with dew, sparkling in the early light. Another time, he might have found it all to be beautiful, but not today. A rotter was caught on the electric fence that ran the length of his property. Smoke rose from its twitching form as its burning flesh popped and crackled.. The air stank of decay and cooking meat. Taking care to make sure he was grounded, Thomas used a long stick to peel the dead man’s fingers from the fence. The corpse’s brain was fried. Once free, the rotter collapsed on the other side of the fence and lay still. The TV said the cities were gone and the president dead before its screen became a forever dance of black and white snow, the voices of the news reporters replaced with static. Other than their stink, Thomas didn’t mind the rotters so much. Here in the middle of nowhere, their numbers were too few to be a real threat unless you got stupid and careless. Thomas almost pitied the creatures. He had known cows smarter than most of these things were. He finished his walk, heading up the hill to his house. The screen door on the front porch was flopping in the gentle morning breeze as he walked up the steps. Thomas stomped the mud from his boots and let himself in. Duke and Hunter met him. He squatted, scratching each of their heads in turn.

“
Bet you buys are hungry, huh? Tell you what. I’ll fry us up some eggs here in a second, okay?”

Thomas stood, propping his rifle against the kitchen table. The farms always yielded more than he needed to make it. Even before the rotters came, Thomas seldom headed into town. The only two things he was really going to miss when his supplies ran out were cigarettes and coffee. He supposed he could live without the cigarettes if he changed over to smoking a pipe and started growing more tobacco as part of his crop. He always kept a small patch in the garden. It was something his father always did and he carried on the tradition without ever honestly knowing why he did it. It wouldn’t be hard to expand. The coffee though . . . that was irreplaceable. Tea just didn’t cut it as a substitute. Maybe he was a Yankee, he could deal with tea, but he was a good old southern boy and proud of it. Yep, aside from the coffee issue, he pretty well had it made. So far, the power was even still on. He didn’t expect that to last though, but it was nice for the moment. He took a half dozen eggs, a bottle of ketchup, and a jug of milk from the fridge and went to work on making breakfast. The dogs watched him as he cooked. He placed one heaping plate of steaming eggs on the floor for them and took a seat at the table with his own.

As he shoveled a forkful into his mouth, he thought again about trying to hike over to old man Hall’s farm to check on him. That codger was too stubborn to die from such a minor problem as hungry, dead people roaming around. If he worked up the courage to go, Thomas was fairly sure he would find the old man working his still like he did everyday.. It wasn’t that he was afraid of the rotters. It was how the animals in the woods were acting all spooked that bothered him. Who knew what the rotters were driving out of hiding and down from the mountains? Thomas had no desire to come across a displaced and angry Grizzly. There was a half a tank of gas in his Ford but using the truck brought on a whole other set of problems. For one, he’d be exposed on the road. Every dang rotter in earshot would come running as soon as they heard the engine. Worst of all though, even if he made it to old man Hall’s and back, was the certainty that the things would follow him home. Odds were there would be too many for him to handle alone, even with the fence, the traps he had set and his guns. The truck was a risk he couldn’t take unless he was prepared to possibly abandon his home. Even if he ditched it and walked, there would be no guarantee of not being followed on foot after having drawn as much attention as the truck’s engine would. Thomas promised himself he’d figure a way to see the old man yet but he didn’t have time to dwell on it any longer this morning. There were chores to be done and they weren’t going to tend to themselves.

One of Thomas’s current projects was cutting firewood for the coming winter. August wasn’t that far from the colder nights of November as he saw it. If he was still breathing then, he would need something to burn. Wood would be his only source for heat and means to cook with because one day soon the power was going to go out and it would never be coming back on. It was work that Thomas hated but his pa didn’t raise no slacker.

Carrying his ax and his rifle, Thomas marched through the backdoor and into the yard with Duke and Hunter nipping playfully at his heels. Better to get it done before the day got too hot and the sun was high in the sky. Thomas led the dogs through the gate onto the road. He had been clearing the woods around the property as he gathered his firewood. Two birds, one stone and all that. The dogs followed him as he cut back up the hill, walking beside the fence, to the area he’d been working on.

Bringing the dogs along was sort of a safety net. They hated the dead. If any of the rotters came stumbling through the trees, there was no chance of them sneaking up on him. Duke and Hunter would tip him off to their presence long before they got close enough to be a threat. He worried about the dogs but whatever it was that caused the dead to rise up after the flesh of the living had only affected humans so far. That brought him some comfort and quite frankly he needed them. He wouldn’t be able to do this without them.

Thomas picked a tree and went to work. The blade of his ax thudded into it a thick trunk. Wasn’t but three swings later that Duke and Hunter suddenly went nuts. Their barking was frantic and loud, unlike anything Thomas expected. He flung his ax to the ground and grabbed his rifle from where it lay in the grass nearby. Sweat trickled down his back as he chambered a round in the .30-.06’s chamber. From how the dogs were acting, either a whole horde of rotters was coming or the devil himself was headed down the mountain towards them. A roar so loud it seemed to shake the trees answered the dogs. Hunter and Duke went silent, except for a quiet whimpering, tucking their tales between their legs. Thomas felt like he was being watched. He wanted to run but something inside of him made him stand his ground. Whatever was in the woods sure wasn’t a rotter and his life might depend on knowing what it was. Thomas heard the sound of breaking limbs as something larger than a bear and as fast as a car tore through the trees heading to the North, away from his position. He raised his rifle, bracing its butt against his shoulder as he took aim at the area where the movement was. His finger twitched on the trigger but he didn’t pull it. Instead, he whirled about and ran for home, calling for the dogs to follow him.