Necrophobia - 01 Read online

  I had trouble sleeping for many days following that night.

  After a time I honestly believed it had never happened. I never spoke of it. And only on two occasions did we who were there mention it. I never saw anything like that again.

  Not until it broke loose in Yonkers under a different name.

  THE NIGHTWALKERS

  We were running on straight genny after the power outage. The juice never came back on again. I told my story and got myself involved in a debate of sorts with the others as to what was going on, whether Necrophage was of natural origin or a biological weapon of foreign or (gulp) domestic design. I had no answers. And I didn’t see where it really mattered. It was here. It was now. I got a preview of its hell in Iraq. But that was a privilege I could have lived without.

  I haven’t said much about Dick lately because there really wasn’t much to tell. After his little episode out by the fence that night we really didn’t have much trouble with him. Which was a good thing because Tuck was really out of patience with him and I was afraid what he might do if Dick caused any further trouble. But, like I said, he was quiet. He was totally withdrawn and he gave just about everyone the creeps standing around staring or mumbling to himself. He particularly freaked out Maria and Davis though Paul had pretty much forgotten he even existed. He was a stick of furniture. He was a marble bust in the corner. Something inanimate.

  Ricki looked after him and Jimmy did some, too. I chipped in a bit when I could. Tuck just ignored him. Diane would talk to him but I don’t think she really expected an answer.

  Dick was just…Dick.

  About two nights after my storytelling, Diane had a sleepover with the kids on the floor of the panic room. It was just something fun to do for them. Something different. Tuck wasn’t sure about it at first but when Maria put the charm on him he melted like usual. Ricki and I took advantage of having the room to ourselves and made love for the first time in many weeks. It was nice, real nice. I think we connected in ways we hadn’t for the past couple years. I’ll never forget that night. We fell asleep in one another’s arms.

  Then, sometime in the dead of night, she woke me.

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s quiet…it’s so quiet.”

  At first I thought, c’mon, what a ridiculous reason to wake me…but then I knew what she meant. “The generator,” I said.

  We were both out of bed then, pulling our clothes on. Tuck had a few nightlights set out so you could navigate the stairs but they were out, of course. I rushed up the steps to the next level but the power was out so the keypad wasn’t working. Tuck had a key that unlocked the doors manually.

  I banged on the door and shouted his name until I heard him swearing.

  “Power’s out!” I called to him.

  By then, Jimmy was awake and out there with us. “Hell’s going on?” he asked.

  “Generator’s out.”

  Tuck unlocked the door and told Jimmy to go unlock the one leading up to the panic room. He gave him a spare key. Ricki was terrified and I could feel the dread running through her. I told her it would be okay and then I followed Tuck down to the crib. Using a flashlight, he opened the trapdoor to the cellar.

  “The back-up should’ve kicked in,” he said. “I don’t get it.”

  But when we put the lights on the generators we both saw exactly how it had happened: the emergency stop buttons had been pressed on both the primary and the secondary. But who would have hit the E-stops?

  “What the fuck is this shit?” Tuck said. “Who the hell would do this?”

  I held the light while he went through the start-up procedure which he informed me would take about five minutes since the gennies had both been shut off two hours before.

  That’s when Jimmy peered down the hatch at us. “Dick is gone,” he said.

  Tuck started swearing. I thought he would start shouting but he didn’t. He just looked over at me calmly and said. “You know he’s gone too far now. When I catch him, he’s going over the fence.”

  Off course, right away I wanted to tell him you couldn’t do that, but when I tried to think of a good reason why not I couldn’t come up with a thing. I mean, I like to think I’m as compassionate and tolerant as they come. I can handle a lot of shit before I crack or strike out. But in the final analysis, Tuck had saved all our asses. He mothered us all. He was our big brother who kept the bullies from us. He took us in when we had nowhere else to go. This was his place, his investment. Realistically, logically…could any of us stop him from throwing Dick to the wolves? Yes. No. Maybe. But did we have the right to?

  “Steve, you and Jimmy track that fuck down and don’t hurt him,” he told me as he went through the generator system start-up. “You can leave that to me.”

  Sighing, I went up to join Jimmy.

  When I got there, Jimmy had made a rather unpleasant discovery: the security door was open. Dick must have gone through it but left it ajar. Well, at least we knew where he was. We both had sidearms and flashlights so we repeated the procedure of the other night when Dick went roaming. Jimmy circled around the tower to see if he could find him and, flashlight in hand, I jogged down the road. Up on the walkway, I could see flashlight beams moving around. I didn’t like this. With our security screen down, just about anything could happen.

  I didn’t bother searching around out in the field for him. I guess in the back of my head I was figuring, well, if he walks out into the minefield there’s gonna be a big boom and we won’t have to be doing this shit anymore. That sounds cold and I know it. But I had reached the point where I was sick of Dick endangering the rest of us.

  I came around a clump of bushes and there was someone standing in the road.

  I thought it was Paul.

  But it wasn’t Paul. Just a boy who had been around his age when he died. He stood there, stiff like a statue in a blue burial suit. His complexion was mottled gray. Yellow-green mildew had grown up from beneath his collar-line and spread over his cheeks like fuzz. His eyes were milky-white, his lips gone, nothing but chattering teeth behind that ragged mouth-hole.

  He came at me.

  I backpedaled and fell on my ass. He reached down and grabbed my wrist, my flashlight hand. I saw those teeth coming down to bite and I tore my hand from his grip. The skin of his palm came with it. I rolled away into the grass, hearing his thudding footsteps closing in. When I came up on my knees, still holding the flashlight, he was less than five feet from me. I pulled the Sig-Sauer and I did not aim. I busted three caps in him out of sheer adrenaline.

  He stumbled back.

  The next round I put in his head.

  He took a step or two and fell into the grass, unmoving. In the back of my mind a few things occurred to me. Even if the voltage was off, that meant the boy zombie would have had to scale the fence to get in. I couldn’t conceive of one of them having the reasoning or initiative to do something like that. To them, a barrier is a barrier. You can’t get through it, you beat on it. So if he didn’t climb the fence, that meant that—

  Jesus.

  I was running again. Two zombies came up the road at me and I dropped both of them with head-shots. It was pure luck. That’s all it was. My hand was shaking like a leaf. In the distance I heard the roar of an engine and I knew it was the armored Jeep. I saw headlights come bouncing down the road. I kept pushing forward. Another zombie and another, both men, flanked by the third of a naked, obese woman with two bullet holes in her chest. I dropped one of the men, missed the second, corrected my aim and fired again. I caught him just above his right eye. The impact spun him around and dumped him into the woman. I thought she would follow the usual behavioral pattern and feed on him.

  She didn’t.

  She threw him aside and came at me. She was an immense, bloated, livid thing with straw-dry red hair hanging down over her face. Her mouth looked huge. Her teeth looked sharp. I thought she would probably take out my throat in a single bite and suck my guts out.

  I pu
t three rounds into her face and one of them must have drilled into her brain because she fell at my feet.

  Behind me.

  Hands grabbed my throat. I whirled around and cracked another zombie in the face with my flashlight. I shot him in the belly. Then in the head. I spun around and the road was clear ahead of me. I caught sight of movement in the fields but I didn’t have time for that. I came around the bend in the road, wondering how many rounds I had left.

  The gates were wide open.

  Dick was standing there. There were thirty or forty zombies facing him, seeming to listen to him as he babbled on in low tones. Why they didn’t just take him down, I did not know. Whatever power he had over them, I was grateful for it. Very grateful. Because if they charged through him then I was a dead man and, believe me, I knew it. Though he had the majority bottled up out there and transfixed, there were still seven or eight wandering just inside the gate looking for a snack and I was it. They saw me and came walking in my direction.

  Then the lights came back on.

  An absolute explosion of brilliance. I took a few faltering steps back and the deadheads did the same. Even Dick stopped talking. I needed to get those gates closed. But with the numbers of the living dead out there, that seemed like an impossibility.

  The zombies were coming again.

  They were all snapping their teeth in anticipation of the feast.

  That’s when I realized that there were maybe a dozen more in the field to either side of the road and they were now converging. I fired repeatedly into the pack that was closing in on me until the Sig was empty. I dropped four or five of them but my final shot went low into the neck of a soldier and he kept on coming and then the Jeep was seconds away. Whoever was behind the wheel—Tuck, I figured—was a madman. The Jeep didn’t even slow for me. I dove out of the way and it slammed right into the zombies coming at me and cast them aside. It plowed through and over them and Dick was so out of it he didn’t even turn. The bumper hit Dick and threw him through the open gates and bashed into about fifteen of the dead, sending them flying into the others.

  Then it backed-up and smashed three or four others down.

  That’s when I knew what the driver was doing.

  This was the chance I’d been waiting for.

  As the zombies outside the gates began to pull themselves up, I ran forward pushing the gate closed, glad the juice was turned off. But before I could get the chain and lock in place, they were pressing from the other side. Your average living, breathing human, I knew, was stronger than your average zombie, but there dozens and dozens of them out there and they were assaulting the gate, pushing it open and I couldn’t stop them. I gave it everything but my feet had no purchase on that dirt road and as the gate swung in I swung with it, my boots leaving furrows on the road.

  The Jeep revved again and the horn sounded.

  I dove out of the way.

  The Jeep hit the gate and swung it closed, throwing the zombies back with irresistible force. They stumbled and fell into each other and over each other as the Jeep held the gate closed. I took the chance and dove up on the hood as the zombies tried their might against that of the Jeep. But they weren’t budging it. I got the latch in place and pulled the chain through the loops.

  But where was the lock itself?

  Zombies were coming from inside now—the ones the Jeep had knocked aside and others pushing in from the field. I had no bullets left. That’s when the roof hatch of the Jeep opened and Diane emerged. She had a CAR-15 in her hands and as I watched, she dropped six or seven of them that were clustering together, spraying them in the heads on full auto. She dropped two more, turned, and three more zombies coming at me took head-shots and fell, gore spraying against the side of the Jeep. I had my cover. I jumped off the hood and looked around in the grass and found the lock where Dick must have dropped it.

  It was a big heavy-duty Masterlock and I snapped into place.

  Diane was putting down zombies left and right.

  “GET IN!” she told me.

  I heard her fire three or four more times. By then I was inside and so was she. She slid the hatch shut. I tried to slam my door, but three or four sets of hands took hold of it, pulling it from my grip. One of them pushed through the others to get at me. Without even a thought, I threw myself down, my head pretty much on Diane’s lap, and brought both my feet up and kicked the zombie square in the chest. He flew back into the others and I got the door shut.

  Then Diane threw the Jeep in reverse, knocking a few more to the earth. As she pulled away I saw all of them at the gate, pushing and beating on it. I saw something else, too. I saw Dick getting pulled apart in a red spray, a dozen mouths biting into him. They were pulling his limbs off like the wings of a fly, yanking things out of him and fighting over them. I looked no more as Diane brought the Jeep down the road to the tower, whipping around corners, flying over bumps, throwing me all over the damn place. She skidded to a halt at the tower.

  “I owe you,” I said.

  “Hell, it’s the most fun I’ve had in years, man,” she said.

  We climbed out and saw no zombies in the general area of the tower. Which was a good thing. What was bad is that we heard gunshots from inside. The outer security door was still wide open and I wondered why until we came through it and there were zombies standing there. Most of them were dead soldiers. A woman came at us and Diane dropped her with the CAR-15, firing on semi-auto now to save ammo. Three of the zombies were down on their hands and knees, prying the trapdoor open.

  When they swung it up, one of them took a round in the head that threw it back and down.

  Diane killed two more of them. “Tuck’s still down there,” she said. “We’ll take care of this! Get upstairs!”

  She tossed me her Sig-Sauer and off I went.

  I heard two more gunshots and these came from higher up. When I made the second level, there were two dead women waiting for me. They dragged themselves at me, baring their teeth and I shot them both in the head. I keyed myself up to the third level and killed another. I keyed myself up to the fourth level and this is what I saw:

  There were four dead zombies on the floor of the panic room, a fifth sprawled through the hatchway leading out to the walkway. Ricki was backed in a corner with a look of absolute shock on her face. She had Paul and Maria trapped behind her, the latter crying her eyes out. Jimmy was down on one knee. He had a crowbar in one hand, the claw end clotted with hair and gore. He had his Sig-Sauer in the other hand. His face was drawn and pale. He was having a hard time catching his breath. Davis was on the floor behind him, his arm was stained red.

  “Jimmy killed them all,” Ricki finally said.

  Jimmy just looked up at me, sighing. He had fought a valiant guard action against the dead. He had shot them, beat their brains out with the crowbar. “I did everything I could,” he said.

  The tone of his voice implied that it hadn’t been enough.

  I went over to Davis. His face was stained with tears. “That lady came after me,” he said. “She bit me.”

  CAR-15 Assault Rifle

  Type: 5.56mm Full-Auto

  Kill Range: 160 yards

  Magazine: 30 rounds

  THE INFECTED

  In retrospect, I still had no idea what control Dick had over them. It made no sense regardless of which way I approached it. He was dead now and I supposed it didn’t really matter. Still, it nagged at me. Dick had been out of it. Way out. Yet, he had not been as out of it as we had thought. He had enough going on to remember the key codes for the doors leading to the different levels. And he had enough going on to shut down the generators and get the key for the front gates. Maybe he had never been as incapacitated as we thought. Maybe he’d just been delusional. Maybe it really was all about Elena. Maybe he thought she was out there with the others.

  The maybes could go on forever.

  Tuck was a good medic and Diane was no slouch either. I’d had field training in first aid. Between the three
of us we got Davis’ arm cleaned up and we disinfected it and bandaged it. The bite bled a lot, but it wasn’t too bad. Just a little painful for the kid. Tuck gave him a shot of antibiotics. We all knew that it would do no good against a virus, but it would kill any infection.

  After that, we worked to clean the zombies out of the tower. The ones down in the crib would wait until full light, but the others from levels two, three, and four we threw off the walkway. Then we got hot water, scalding almost, and strong disinfectants (industrial strength) and cleaned up the gore sprayed about. We used plastic surgical gloves during all that just as we used them when we patched-up Davis. It took us about two hours to clean things back up to our own satisfaction. We talked very little during the process and that was because we were all worried sick.

  We did not mention Davis.

  Or what might be coming next.

  I kept telling myself that he stood a good chance of survival. That the odds dictated that not everyone bitten would get infected. But I was just trying to convince myself of the fact. By dawn I started to feel fairly confident because Davis was his same old self. It was like a weight had been lifted off us all.

  We relaxed an inch at a time.

  And when Davis announced that he was hungry, I started to feel optimistic about things. We had eggs and bacon and toast. Tuck made his own bread and it was damned good. The eggs were powdered, but already he was making plans to raid the neighboring farms and bring back a truckload of chickens to make us that much more self-sustaining.

  Just after nine, I sat down with Ricki out on the walkway now that Tuck had decided to take a nap after spending an hour or more out there with his .30-06 and scope, dropping upwards of two dozen of the dead. There were still more. But the bodies we’d thrown over the rail had drawn them in like bait piles and made the killing that much easier. There were still many crowded around the tower trying to find a way in, but that would wait for later since they were impossible to hit down there without hanging dangerously out over the railing.