Necrophobia - 01 Read online

  The door was ajar.

  We stopped and listened.

  I came forward and pushed the door open gently, deciding against a dramatic kick. Silence was important.

  The door opened and I went through it and a zombie was standing there like he’d been waiting for me and maybe he was. My stomach jumped.

  He was a big guy, utterly naked, gnawing on the gristle of a bone. He saw me and came at me, tossing the bone aside now that he had something better. He was barely four feet from me and there was no time to aim. I opened up and drove him back with a three-round burst to the belly that split him right open and made his intestines come snaking out. He stumbled back, groping at his own guts and wondering maybe if they were tasty.

  I shot him in the head.

  Anna made a whimpering sound.

  Sabelia told her to shut up.

  We moved into the entrance hall and I saw that the front door was half-open and then it opened all the way as a group of the dead came to investigate the sounds. We spread out and fired, putting them down, but six or seven more crowded in and I could see that there were dozens more coming up the steps.

  Dorian cried, “Look out!” as several more came down the opposite corridor. Sabelia fired, pushing them back, correcting her aim and dropping two of them. I got the third. Dorian shot another coming down the steps from the second floor and it was a perfect shot. The zombie rolled down the stairs.

  And then things got real hairy.

  We had them pouring in from the front door and coming down the other corridor. A pair of them came out of the offices. We started shooting. Some of the girls bunched in the middle were freaking out. Anna was screaming. The entire thing lasted about fifteen seconds, I’ll bet, but it was a very frightening and tense fifteen seconds and we spent a lot of ammo. When you’re in the middle of the shit, going at it hot and heavy in a firefight, there’s no time to account for everything that goes on around you. The lead is flying and you’re trying to cover your sector and hoping like hell everyone does the same. I drilled a woman who was carrying a butch knife right in the forehead, spraying her brains onto three more who were not bothered by it at all. I dropped a mammoth guy that looked like some kind of biker, two elderly women, and a teenage girl still wearing a hospital johnnie.

  And as I was shooting, I nearly got bitten by a little girl who came crawling on all fours through the legs of the adults. She was about two feet away when I punched her ticket.

  Like I said, a wild fifteen seconds.

  When it was over, there were corpses all around us.

  One of the younger girls let out a cry and ran for the door. She got past me before I could stop her.

  “TERESA!” Katherine called.

  Too late. In her hysteria she threw herself out the door right into a pack of ten hungry ghouls. And maybe that act saved us. I don’t know. But there were forty or fifty more coming and the feeding slowed them.

  “GET TO THE STAIRS!” I shouted.

  Katherine and Riley got them moving and Dorian dropped another zombie that came down the other corridor.

  They started up and two more came down for them.

  Mia and Susan drilled them. One of them rolled down the stairs dead, but the other came down with its throat split open, biting and snapping. Katherine shot it in the head.

  And I say it here because they were both so badly decayed it was really hard to tell whether they were animal or vegetable, let alone man or woman.

  Riley led the girls up the stairs past the corpses and at the top a little girl stood there with a hatchet in one hand. She was dressed in the shredded remains of a nightgown that was filthy with the stains of what she’d been feeding upon. She was deathly white, almost phosphorescent it seemed, something accentuated by the red gore staining the hatchet and splattered right up her arm to her elbow. Her lips were chewed away. She hissed through blood-caked teeth.

  Riley fired a single round at her.

  Her head exploded with gouts of fluids and tissues and she was tossed back by the impact.

  Riley was telling everyone to get up the stairs, “HURRY! HURRY! GET THE FUCK UP HERE!” Katherine was forcing them from the bottom, pushing and shouting at them until they were moving at a good pace. Sabelia and I, of course, had made the cardinal error of turning away from the door for a moment and that’s when Ginny came at us with the .45 raised.

  I thought she was going to shoot me.

  Then she fired and a zombie dropped dead behind me.

  They started pouring through the doorway.

  Sabelia and I raced up the stairs as the zombies flooded in. I don’t know how many of them there were, but it was enough to give me the cold sweats. Thirty? Forty? Fifty? They flooded the entrance hall and just kept coming and coming. I dropped five or six of them to tangle some bodies up at the bottom of the steps and it worked long enough for us to join the others in the corridor above.

  Which was full of more zombies.

  While Katherine and a couple others got most of the women into a classroom that was clean of the dead, the rest of us opened up with everything we had. We dropped a dozen and a dozen more surged at us. The bolt-action rifles were emptied and as a zombie came forward, Dorian split its head with the stock of her rile. Carrie covered her, dropping three more and then it was pretty much a rear guard action as we backed into the classroom, Sabelia and I providing cover for the others.

  That’s when Leslie (whose mind was pretty much gone) slipped past me, trying to break free. I watched a zombie grab her. He broke her over his knee and bit right into her throat. I hesitated, but Sabelia did not—she opened up and killed both of them.

  I fired to the left and to the right and when Sabelia tried to come out and fight with me, I shoved her back in. “GET INSIDE! GO!” I cried and dropped a few more until my mag was empty. Then I jumped through the door and it was slammed shut and locked. Thank God, it had a lock. To reinforce it, we pushed a few desks in front of it. There were half a dozen stored in there.

  At first, the dead amused themselves by fighting over the remains of their fallen comrades. While they were so entertained, I went over to the windows that looked out over the courtyard. Riley was already there. She looked positively gray.

  Jesus.

  I looked out and there were hundreds of zombies down there. It looked like the crowds at a rock concert. And all of them seemed to be pushing towards the doors below.

  We had to have a plan and we had to have one now.

  But I was fresh out of ideas.

  Then the dead began pounding on the door.

  HIGH-WIRE ACT

  I made myself calm down and think.

  The only edge we had on them was our brains and we had to use them. That was the important thing and sometimes the very hardest thing to do. In any contest of survival, it’s the guy or gal that uses their head that’s going to come out on top and prevail. I’d pretty much learned that in Iraq and I’d been learning it only too well since Necrophage. The problem was in a survival situation the tendency to freak out and panic becomes overwhelming at times.

  “They get through that door and we’re cooked,” Dorian said.

  “I’ll kill ‘em,” Susan said. “I’ll kill ‘em with my bare fucking hands if I have to.”

  I liked her gumption. Sometimes raw attitude will shift the insurmountable in your favor.

  “There’s got to be something we can do,” Katherine said.

  Tuck came over the walkie-talkie: “You still in one piece, bro?”

  “So far.”

  “You come up with anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  Sabelia then called me over to the window. “There’s a way out,” she said. “But it’s risky.”

  She slid the window open and I looked out of it with her, both sticking our heads out, trying not to look at the crowds of mulling zombies below. I knew what she was talking about right away. The ledge that ran beneath the window was a good one as far as ledges went. It was about tw
o-feet wide, plenty to stand up on and hold your balance. When I was a kid in Yonkers my buddies and I used to sleep out in tents in backyards and go over to our school and climb up to the second story ledge and walk around the building. It was stupid and suicidal, but that ledge had been maybe a foot and this thing was twice as wide.

  “We get out there,” Sabelia said. “We might make that roof over there.”

  I craned my head out as much as I dared and saw what she was talking about. The ledge fronted the building for about thirty feet and ended at the brick face of a flat-roofed addition that came pretty close to the roof of the chapel. I saw something down there. Something red spanning the addition roof and the chapel roof. I couldn’t see exactly what it was from that angle. A pipe? I couldn’t say. But if we could get down there and shimmy across…

  “I’m going down there,” I said.

  “I’ll come,” Sabelia said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  I explained things quickly to Katherine and the others and I could see they weren’t crazy about our plan. It was like walking the tight-rope over a crocodile pit. But it was our only chance and they knew it.

  I got on the box. “Hang tight,” I told Tuck. “We might have a plan.”

  “About fucking time,” he said.

  I handed Sabelia my CAR-15 and eased myself out on the ledge. For a second there I experienced terrible vertigo but I forced it from my head. If this was a two foot plank laying on somebody’s lawn I knew I’d have no problem walking it, so why should I have a problem with it out here? I tried to keep that in my mind. I knew from ledge-walking in my youth that there was only one “safe” way to do it: you put your back against the wall and arched it slightly so you were just leaning back a bit. That threw your center of gravity at the wall and not out into space.

  Okay.

  It was a typical inner city ledge: stained with pigeon shit and a few stray feathers. I saw cracks running through it and I prayed it would hold. I shimmied over away from the window and Sabelia handed me out my weapon and her AK-47. She climbed out and with such ease I figured she was part ape.

  “We used to do this kind of shit all the time when we were kids,” she told me and I laughed.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  The most important thing in ledge-walking besides shifting your gravity against the building is not looking down. Isn’t that a time-worn saying? How many old movies have you heard that on? Whatever you do, pal, don’t look down, the heroic cop always tells the kid or the jumper he rescues. Looking down under any circumstances inspires vertigo. And looking down into a nest of swarming, flesh-eating zombies will inspire sheer terror…the kind that will make you fall.

  “Well, let’s go already,” Sabelia said.

  I had been hesitating, talking myself through the whole thing.

  Okay.

  I sidled along the wall and at first I was moving at a snail’s pace until I got my rhythm, then I started to move faster. In about five minutes we were at the addition. The roofline was about four-feet above the level of the ledge so I had to turn and face it, toss my rifle over, and pull myself up and over to join it. Easy. Sabelia did the same and we found ourselves on an ordinary rooftop with heating vents and an air conditioner, lots of stained pigeon shit. We walked over to the far side that ran parallel to the chapel roof.

  A ladder.

  The red thing I’d seen was a ladder.

  One of those old wooden red firemen’s ladders. It was about twenty feet long. There was a span of about fifteen feet between the two rooftops and somebody had laid it across there no doubt to escape with.

  “The militia,” I said.

  Sabelia nodded.

  “Some of them might be in the chapel,” she said.

  “Could be.”

  “Or it could be the other way around—maybe they’d used it to cross from the chapel.”

  Regardless, this was our way out. It was risky but it could be done. I walked back to where we’d climbed onto the rooftop. From there I could easily see the front of the chapel. The front doors were closed. They were huge, about fifteen feet high with massive brass hinges. Sabelia and I threw together a quick plan of action then I got on the box and told Tuck what I had in mind. He liked it. It was daring and crazy so, of course, he was all for it. And it meant plenty of action on his end.

  “When I give you the call,” I told him, “cut a path to us.”

  “Roger that shit, Booky.”

  Sabelia told me to stay on the rooftop. She would begin bringing the ladies over. She clambered over the wall and went back down the ledge in half the time it had taken me. I could hear them discussing it over there and there was a certain amount of swearing and arguing. Then Dorian came out followed by Susan then Mia and Carrie. I could see they weren’t crazy about any of it. When Dorian got near to the wall, I took her rifle and pulled her over.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Hell of a time to mention it, but I’m terrified of heights.”

  “You did good.”

  “Something about zombies eating my ass inspired me,” she admitted.

  We helped the others onto the rooftop. Riley came next with Katherine. Anna was between them and they were each holding one of her hands which I didn’t like at all because if she went, they went. I sweated it out the whole time until I pulled Riley over and got my hands on Anna. But she made it and so did Katherine. Then came Kasey and Brittany who were friends of some sort and held hands. Neither of them had spoken since we showed up in the cellar. I got them up and over and then Sabelia scrambled onto the rooftop.

  There. We got that far.

  The women all stood there looking at the ladder.

  “I don’t know about this,” Dorian said. “I mean, shit, lookit ‘em down there.”

  Yes, the zombies were everywhere. If one of us fell during the crossing we wouldn’t even hit pavement there were so many of them. We’d be absorbed into their ranks. No, it was not a pleasant thought. But staying on that rooftop wasn’t an option.

  “Don’t look down and you won’t know they’re there,” Sabelia said.

  Words of wisdom. I was studying the bell tower on the chapel. What we didn’t need was for some crazy militia asshole to open up on us while we were crossing. I saw nothing up there and I hoped our luck would hold.

  I handed my CAR-15 to Sabelia. “Here goes nothing, as they say.”

  I got on the ladder while it was held by Sabelia and Dorian. I gripped both handrails and kneeled on it, then I just sort of scooted myself across without ever once looking down. I made the other roof and wiped sweat from my face. Dorian, afraid of heights or not, came next. She came slower than I but she made it. Next came Carrie and Susan followed by Mia and Katherine. Kasey and Brittany came together, of course. Then it was just Sabelia and Riley over there with Anna.

  “Come on, honey,” Katherine coaxed her. “It’ll be fine. I’ll meet you half way.”

  I didn’t care much for it but Katherine went back out there and even though Anna kept shaking her head, Riley managed to get her on the ladder. She crawled along right behind her. It was going to work. It was all going smoothly, I thought, and it was going to work.

  Those thoughts barely crossed my mind when Anna fell.

  She went over the side and hung by one hand, screaming and drawing the attention of those below. Riley got a hand on her, but she dropped away…right into that sea of zombies. We all saw them get her. Like meat in a piranha tank she was torn apart, split and ripped and dismembered until she was nothing but a huge clot of gore that disappeared in the zombie ranks.

  There was nothing anyone could do.

  We could say it was an accident in our minds, but was it? I was of the mind that she threw herself over and then, like many suicides, thought better of it at the last moment when it was just too damn late. Katherine and Riley got back over and Sabelia came across after tossing us our weapons.

  I think we all took a deep breath at
that moment and let it out slowly.

  The rooftop of the chapel was flat, too, which was very much in our favor. The problem was the bell tower rose up twenty- or twenty-five feet above it.

  Forming a chain, each holding onto the other’s waist to give us strength and balance, I reached out and grabbed the ladder. When I yanked it free of the other roof it swung down and probably would have taken me with it if not for the girls holding onto me. We all pulled together and got the ladder over.

  Then it was time to do some climbing.

  OUT THROUGH THE IN DOOR

  We brought the ladder up to the bell tower and stood it up at a slight cant against it. I went up first. I took my CAR-15 with me because honestly I didn’t know what we were getting into. I went up the ladder slowly, amazed at the view I had up there. The ladder did not reach all the way to the belfry so I knew I was going to have to stand on the top rung and pull myself up and in. But after the ledge and the crossing…hell, it sounded like a piece of cake.

  Riley and Sabelia stood below holding the ladder.

  Near the top, I looked down and waved to them.

  “Just get your ass up there, Sunshine,” Riley told me.

  Sabelia laughed as did some of the others.

  I slung my CAR-15 by the strap over my shoulder and climbed up to the uppermost rungs. It was doable. I would get up there and then help the girls in. Simple enough. I took the CAR-15 and tossed it up into the belfry. I heard it clatter. I reached up in a delicate act of balance and gripped the outer ledge of the belfry.

  And that’s when I heard a sound.

  The sound of the bolt being drawn back on my own rifle.

  I was pretty much fucked.

  One of the militia pukes looked over the edge and I was looking right down the barrel of my CAR-15. He was grinning. He was going to kill me. After all I’d been through, this weekend warrior goddamn amateur was going to kill me with my own weapon and the absolutely ironic thing was that I had given it to him.

  I heard a c-rack sort of sound and I thought he had just blown me away but then I saw his head explode in an eruption of gore and he fell back into the chapel.