Necrophobia #3 Page 16

  Shit.

  I jiggled the knob frantically, hoping I was wrong.

  “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THAT DOOR OR I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!” a voice from inside shrieked.

  “Listen,” I said. “We’re not crazy, we’re not infected, and we’re not with any militia. We’re normal. We just need help.”

  “PISS OFF!”

  “Listen, we’re no threat to you! My friend has been shot!” I shouted. We could have gone into one of the other offices, but I liked that sturdy door. “Please! We need help!”

  There was some grumbling inside. I heard several voices. The door was unlocked. It opened a few inches, and I saw the harried face of a teenage boy. “All right, but if you try anything…”

  “We won’t. I swear.”

  The door opened completely. The kid was maybe seventeen, athletic-looking. There were two teenage girls with him. They were a desperate crew, but I could see looking at them that they weren’t bad people; just scared.

  I got Robin in the room and set her on a leather sofa. The boy closed the door and locked it. He had a pump shotgun and I had no doubt that he wasn’t afraid to use it.

  “It was that nut on the roof, wasn’t it?” one of the girls said.

  “Yeah, fucking freak,” Robin told her.

  The trio seemed to relax a bit now that they saw Robin was a teenager, one of their own. They introduced themselves. The boy was Chris. The redhead was his girlfriend, Charlene. The blonde was her sister, Sandy. As I pulled off Robin’s motorcycle boot and rolled up her pants leg to get at the wound on her calf, they laid out their story to me. There weren’t from Perryville. When the shit hit the fan and everyone started dying and rising back up, the three of them remained uninfected, so they got out of their hometown, Woodstock, and made their way to Perryville where Chris’s aunt lived. She was a nurse. She had a cabin outside of town, so it seemed like a reasonable place to go, remote and defensible. Unfortunately, when they got there, after many weeks of hiding, the cabin was burned to the ground. They had no idea where Chris’s aunt was. They’d been on the dodge since, hiding out, moving around, trying to keep safe.

  As I thought, Robin’s wound was just a good graze. It bled quite a bit, but it was worse to look at than it really was. I got the first aid supplies out of the ammo bag. I took out the hydrogen peroxide.

  “This is going to sting a little,” I said.

  Robin lit a cigarette.

  “You know, the air’s bad enough in here as it is,” Sandy said.

  “Shut up,” Charlene told her.

  Using cotton pads soaked with peroxide, I cleaned up the wound the best that I could. Robin winced a few times, but she was okay with it. Thoroughly disinfected, I bandaged it and wrapped sterile tape around it. I did a pretty nice job. I pulled her pants leg down and slid her boot back on.

  “You gotta change your socks more often,” I said.

  “Fuck you, Steve.”

  Charlene and Chris laughed. It eased the tension in the air somewhat. We were all safe for the time being. Safe, but also trapped. The kids were all hungry, so I shared our food with them. It was a sign of good faith. They went after our collection of junk food with gusto, guzzling off warm water bottles.

  “What up with all those skeletons out there?” Robin asked.

  Chris shrugged. “Who knows? Zombies, I guess. They were there when we came into town a couple days ago. There’s so many dead, I guess it’s not that surprising. They probably pick everything to the bones.”

  That seemed pretty reasonable, but I got the feeling he wasn’t anymore convinced than I was. If there had just been a few teeth marks on the bones, I guess I would have felt better.

  I had a cigarette and wondered what the hell to do next. I was still no closer to Catskills State Park and my son, my friends. Shit. It had been like this for so damn long. The closer I got, the farther away I was. I heard that rumbling from below again. In fact, it seemed not to be coming just from below, but from the pipes in the walls.

  “Hell is that?” Robin asked.

  “We hear it from time to time,” Charlene said. “It’s weird.”

  “What’s our plan of attack, Big Steve?” Robin asked.

  Then all eyes were on me. Sure, I was the adult. As tough and seasoned in horror as they all were, they were still essentially kids. They would never admit the same, but it was true. I was the adult. They were looking to me to come up with something, to do something.

  “We’re safe for the time being,” I said.

  “Sure, let’s just spend our lives in this room,” Sandy said.

  “Just shut up,” Charlene told her.

  “No, that’s a good point,” I said. “We’re safe for now, but we can’t hope that will continue. Robin and I are looking for some friends of mine that have set-up out in the country on a farm, I think.”

  “Can we come?” Charlene asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “But first things first. We can’t hole up here forever.”

  “What choice is there?” Chris asked. “The zombies are everywhere.”

  “And even if we get by them, there’s that nut on the roof.”

  “He’s gotta go,” I said.

  Chris shook his head. “No way. There’s two or three others up there and they’ve all got machine guns.”

  I picked up my MP-5. “So do I.”

  THE HUNTED

  Climbing the stairs to the second floor was easy enough. It was dim and shadowy, but I encountered no resistance. According to Chris, the hot zone was the third floor, and that’s where I was going. I had no choice. I had a plan for us that didn’t involve dancing with the dead in the streets, but it couldn’t happen unless the crazies were taken care of. That was priority number one.

  I could almost feel them up there.

  Waiting for me.

  The thing to do in a situation like this, I knew, was not to panic. Imagination would kill you as fast as a bullet. It was important to remember that your adversary was human, too. You were coming. He knew it. He was just as scared as you were. It was also important, of course, not to underestimate your opponent or, for that matter, to overestimate him and turn him into some kill-happy boogeyman coming out of the shadows at you. You had to be calm, aware of your surroundings, and absolutely lethal when the time came. No hesitation or it would cost you your life.

  That’s a good pep talk. Most of it I heard at Fort Benning. It went through my head as I moved down the second floor hallway…and it did me no good whatsoever. I was scared to death. I was determined, oh yes, but I was still scared and my guts were knotted in white loops.

  According to Chris, at the end of the hallway there were two branching corridors. The one on the left would lead to the third floor stairs. That’s where I had to go, but getting there was going to take time and a great deal of patience. I wanted nothing more than to jog down there and get this thing going, but I also didn’t want to die. The hallway was murky, very little sunlight getting in. That was okay. It would work to my adversary’s advantage and it would work to mine. About halfway down, there was an open door. It was a square of blackness. Either I moved past it or I jumped in there. The fatal funnel, it was called. Doorways were always the most dangerous place in room-to-room fighting.

  I edged along the wall, clinging to the darkness and moving without so much as a sound. The shooter on the roof had an AK and, according to Chris, there were other crazies up here. Who knew what they were carrying?

  The silence was unbearable.

  I moved closer to the doorway, wishing to God that I had a grenade to toss in there. Wishful thinking. I was fighting a war I wasn’t really equipped to handle. I got up to the doorway, rapping lightly on the doorframe with the barrel of my machine pistol. Nothing. If there were someone in there, it would have drawn fire. I was sure of it. Unless, of course, they had a night-vision device and could see exactly what I was up to. At the very least, the rapping sound should have made somebody move in there. Breathe. Rustle
. Something.

  Here goes nothing.

  Sucking wind into my chest, I darted past the doorway, my entire body tensing for the slugs that would rip through it, but there was nothing. The only sounds were those of my breathing, the thud of my heart in my ears. I had to relax a bit and I knew it. When you got that keyed up, you made mistakes. At the end of the hallway, I realized that Chris was wrong. There were no branching corridors. There was what looked to be a big room like a lobby…but, no, that’s not what I was seeing. It had been gutted. The corridor and the rooms to either side had been opened up, the walls torn out. Apparently, at the time of The Awakening, there had been some remodeling going on. There was a window off to the right, but very little light was coming in because sheets of what I thought were plasterboard were stacked up against it. I could see lots of murky shapes. Sawhorses, lumber, what looked like clusters of wires hanging down from the ceiling. Pipe work and conduits were exposed, the walls just frameworks of studs.

  At the far end, I could see what might have been another corridor. That’s where I would need to go.

  I stepped out into the construction maze, nearly tripping over stacked bags of drywall. I heard a sound. A sliding sort of sound. I crouched in the shadows. Another sound. Someone was coming. I had a feeling by the noise they were making that they weren’t aware of my presence. A form came stalking out of the corridor on the other side, weaving his way through the mess. He was carrying a rifle. I saw his silhouette fairly clearly. I had him. I knew that much. He was going to pass within feet of me.

  I peered over a stack of lumber as he got close.

  And at that very moment, I kicked over a can of nails. He jumped back, bringing his rifle around, stumbling and tripping, firing as he went down. Slugs tore into the ceiling above, shattering a few tiles and raining down debris on me.

  I put a few rounds in his direction.

  He tried to get to his feet and stumbled again, this time on boxes of drywall screws, I was guessing, from all the racket. More bullets peppered the exposed studs behind me, ripping them apart, shards of wood flying about.

  I had precious little ammo.

  I couldn’t afford to shoot until I had a solid target. He was using an AK-47 like the guy on the roof. There was no doubt about it. I had heard insurgents firing them almost daily in Iraq. My heart was pounding. He was moving around a rubbish heap of discarded boards, old lathing, tangles of wires, and plaster debris. He was trying to inch his way around it until he could get a good killshot in my direction.

  Wait. Take it easy. Play it out.

  These were the kinds of things I used to say to myself during the war when I got too keyed-up. There was an opening in the debris. To get around it, he’d have to pass by it. I waited. He tried to move past it quickly. I squeezed the trigger of the MP-5. I put a round dead into him on semi-auto. It caught him in the side. He let out a cry and hit the floor, crawling away and out of sight.

  Score one for me.

  Now what?

  That was the question in situations like this. Either you hunted down your adversary or you let the situation play out. He was hit. He was bleeding. He would need to get somewhere to get patched-up, so time was on my side. I could hear him belly crawling, trying to keep out of my sights. I didn’t move. I waited for him to make a break because he would. He had to. He was doing something over there, but I couldn’t tell what. He was fumbling around, making noise. I could hear his breathing. It was harsh and ragged. Sweat ran down my face, salting my lips.

  Motion.

  Something came through the air. He had thrown something at me. I hit the floor thinking it was a grenade. It wasn’t. It was a small box of metal parts, maybe wiring brackets. It hit the studs behind me, crashing and tossing metal pieces everywhere.

  He made a break for it.

  He rose up from behind the rubbish and tried to get away. I brought up the MP-5 and fired again. I missed. He fired in my direction on full-auto, slugs whining over my head. I fired again. He shrieked and fell down, crawling away. I thought I hit him in the leg. At that moment, I became aware of a burning pain at my arm. I was hit, too. A ricochet grazed me. I felt along my elbow, finding it wet with blood. This wasn’t going the way I’d hoped.

  Silence. Now we were both waiting.

  It sounds crazy, but I was thinking of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Poe. The part where the narrator listens to the deathwatch beetles in the walls. When I was a kid, we had them in our house in Yonkers. The house was old and they’d bore into the wood, make this weird tapping sound late at night. I thought I was hearing something like that. My imagination told me it was the beat of my adversary’s heart.

  “You’re going to die,” a voice said.

  VERMIN

  I thought for a second I had imagined it, but I hadn’t. It was the voice of my adversary…except he wasn’t a he, but a she. Her voice was female, all right, but hoarse and angry, full of venom. Whoever she was, she hated me.

  “After I kill you, I’m going to cut off your balls. I might cut them off first.”

  The voice was amazingly self-assured for someone who had just taken several slugs, 9mm Parabellum. What bothered me was not its confidence, but its calmness. How could anybody be that fucking calm after getting shot? She was insane. She had to be insane. There was no other explanation for it, which only made my problem worse: a crazy person would not react the way a sane person would. Expect the unexpected.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” I called out to her. “I’m only after the asshole on the roof. He shot my friend.”

  “They’ll find your corpse. That’s all they’ll find when they come for you. I’ll kill them one by one.”

  God, that voice. It was deranged, almost mechanical in its rhythms. It was a mind-fuck. I knew that much. Insurgents used to do it in the war. They’d call out to you about what they were going to do to your body when they got you. Yet…in the shadowy confines of that building, it worked. I was scared. I felt sick to my stomach. My limbs were trembling.

  I waited for her to make the next move.

  She started calling out insults to me, shit about my wife, my mother, my sisters. Typical stuff. I mellowed out, refusing to get rattled. She was the one that was in danger, not me. She could keep this shit up as long as she wanted, but she would be bleeding the entire time. I reached around on the floor. The can of nails. I set my weapon down. The can was still half-full. I let it fly in her direction, right over the rubbish heap. She fired off a few more rounds. I think I hit her with it.

  She moved.

  I saw her outline trying to make a break for it. Dumb bitch.

  I was charged with adrenaline.

  She fired in my direction. I saw a clear silhouette in the light from the window. I fired on semi-auto and hit her in the arm. She cried out, stumbling to the side and I put another one in her. I was aiming for her chest, but I caught her in the guts. She was done for now. Without surgery, she was going to die a horrible, lingering death. There’s nothing worse than being gutshot.

  She hit the floor, then got to her feet…but just barely.

  She was hunched-over, dragging herself away like a monster in a B-movie. It was time to finish her. She had dropped her rifle and was making no attempt to go back for it. I came around the rubbish pile and she swore at me. Her voice had a gurgling quality to it. Her throat was filled with her own blood. There was blood on the floor. A smear of it. A bloody handprint. Splotches of it led away to where she was trying to escape.

  “YOU FUCK!” she cried out when she saw me coming for her. “YOU STINKING ROTTEN MURDERING FUCK!”

  I got within ten feet of her.

  I expected her to drop to her knees and give up the ghost. I had her either way. She knew it. I knew it. She was still hunched-over, trying to move away, leaving a lot of blood behind. She cried out, went to one knee, and then got up again. I came right up behind her and brought up the MP-5. I sighted in on her scowling face.

  Click.

&nbs
p; Click. Click. Click.

  My magazine was empty. A sort of triumphant look passed over her face. She should have been done in, but she came right at me. She had a knife and she was going to use it. She shambled in my direction, surprisingly quick for someone who had lost that much blood and who must have been in considerable pain. She slashed at me, almost taking the tip of my nose off. She advanced, I retreated. I was so surprised at the viciousness of her attack, I didn’t even think of pulling my own knife. She kept slashing, driving me back.

  I moved forward.

  Her knife missed again and I brought the MP-5 down on her wrist with everything I had. There was a clear sort of cracking sound. The knife was dropped.

  She came at me barehanded.

  I cracked her in the head with the MP-5, but she hit me with a body tackle. We crashed into some lumber. She was on top of me, trying to gouge out my eyes. Her nails scratched my face. I punched her hard in the nose. Her head snapped back. I seized her broken wrist and twisted it. She fell away. She got to her feet and swung wildly at me. I hit her again and again. I grabbed hold of her and shoved her as hard as I could. She tripped over a mangled conduit and smashed right into an old, rusted wastewater pipe. The back of her slammed right into it and with such force, the ancient pipe split open.

  That’s when the most horrible thing happened.

  I was steeled to most things by that point. Even the walking dead didn’t horrify me the way they once had. Now they were just enemies, like soldiers in a war. But what I saw come out of that pipe was something that put me right on my ass.

  Worms.

  That’s what I saw. Maggots. Graveworms. But each swollen to about the size of my thumb, if not maybe a bit larger. They poured out of the pipe in a white flood, engulfing the downed woman. They were heaped on her like writhing white rice. They were down her shirt and in her hair and…God…in her mouth. She screamed as more poured out of the pipe, squirming all over her.