The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) (7 page)

Then
, suddenly of course, there was the appearance of a shambler from out of the broken front of a jewelry store directly in front of him. The thing had been a big man in life and it was now quite the sight. He was a big ol’ boy
,
standing roughly six and a half feet tall in his bare, bloodied feet. What clothes
remaining
on him were in tarry tatters black with rotting gore from a hundred different feasts.
However,
none of that living flesh had satisfied it so far and as soon as it zeroed in on
Ron,
it gave out with a hoarse moan and set into a kind of stumbling trot.

The deads seemed relatively harmless when you looked at them from a distance, but the thing was that they could move at a decent pace when they wanted to get you, and they never got tired. He didn’t understand why dead flesh could even move, and he certainly would never understand why the normal rules of exertion failed to apply to them. What he did know was that they would come at you when they saw you and that nothing but bashing their brain in would stop them. And God help you if one got its mitts on you. The absence of pain meant that they knew no limitations when it came to combat. Their hands were like vises; Cutter could account for that from too many personal experiences to list.

“You sneaky fucker,” he whispered to it. Already it was halfway across the street. A half dozen other admirers of the jewelry store’s wares came staggering out of the shadows of the broken storefront. Off to his rear
,
the tens of others that
he had
initially spotted had finally turned to see what excitement was going down and as
one;
they gave out with that hideous wail a crowd would always give up.

The chase was on, and there was nothing
to do,
but to go with the flow.

Cutter ran. The sun
was
up, high in the sky. The weather was really bad for this kind of shit, but you couldn’t choose every situation.
Sometimes
you just had to bite the bullet and run. What he needed were a couple of those canisters of propane. Ron made his own rounds these days and he had to have a good fuel source to smelt his lead and brass. He was running low on the fuel and it was a must-have item. If not now, then later, and nobody knew what another day might bring.

If he could keep the dead at his
back,
he could make a good go of it. It was when they put you into a gauntlet situation where you found the odds stacked almost totally against you. If all you could do was run from one clot of deads to the next, fighting and shooting, creating more noise and attracting more of them, then the situation could deteriorate into an end game from which you most definitely could not emerge. Ron had seen better men than him fall when that happened. They would put up a good fight, but in the
end,
the numbers would win out. He had to keep that from happening.

The street in front of him was mainly clear, so he headed off at a good clip in that direction. He seemed to ring as he trotted. No matter how well you secured your gear, as long as some of it was metal and plastic it always sang when you had to move fast. He could only hope that the sound of his movement wasn’t going to attract any attention from quarters he had to pass. At least
,
he had a good start on the monsters behind him, and he had a several safe houses and panic rooms secured and stocked in the immediate vicinity. They weren’t long-term security, but they would serve as refuge in an emergency.
Of
course,
he
preferred avoiding
having to use them.

With a quickness that the dead sometimes showed, and which always bothered him
,
even if it no longer surprised him, Ron watched as the buildings along the route he wanted to take suddenly disgorged
of
what looked to be an entire company of the walking corpses. They were of every shape and size—enormous hulking women
who had
been hideously overweight in life, to raving males with pendulous beer guts moving side to side, to what looked to have been the remains of some kindergarten class demoted to undead status. Young kids, especially, seemed to be able to move quickly in the zombie state. In
seconds,
the street before him was a crawling wreck of a space, moving with the stinking animated meat.

“Goddamn it,” Ron hissed. He was almost surrounded. Cutter had, perhaps, a couple of minutes to make a decision, and then all choice would be out of his hands. It was obvious to him that the zombie population in this part of
Charlotte
had increased in the days since
he had
decided to hole up and rest in his favorite spot. If
he had
gone out on a few patrols
he would
have noticed the ballooning population and been better prepared for it. They were spilling out of the countryside now, headed toward the looming spires of what had once been a busy metropolis. Despite what everyone in the burbs claimed, they actually subconsciously enjoyed the city.
Old desires dictated the
movements of zombies, so if they were here, it was because they wanted to be
here
in life.

“Fucking wannabes,” Cutter grunted as he broke into a full run and headed for an alleyway that waited at his left less than half a block away. It had
once been used
for the movement of delivery vehicles and garbage trucks. Even now, it wouldn’t have been easy for gas vehicles to maneuver the narrow spaces, and Ron hoped that the way was at least partially clear of zombies so that he could make his way to a place that he knew would be relatively safe:

The Kid’s place!

Under normal
circumstances,
Cutter looked forward to see The Kid. He was a trip. He’d been on Ron’s visit list, so he’d just be making a stop earlier rather than later. His real name was Oliver, but Ron called him just
,
The Kid
.
He had
told Ron that he was fourteen, but Ron knew well the boy was no more than twelve years old
,
and
not even a mature twelve. He was exactly what he looked like—a lost kid all alone in this Hell. But the boy knew how to handle guns, and he was really careful when he moved around, and
Ron had to admit,
the place he’d chosen as a home was pretty cool. In fact, he was headed there—it was his best option to keep from having to
start
using up precious ammunition.

As he made his way into the
alley,
Ron could see that the route was clear. Nothing was standing to block him and none of the shamblers was moving to corner him from that direction. Behind him, though, was a different matter. He paused to look back again and saw that the street
now packed with moving corruption had
become the price you sometimes paid for going out to scavenge. The pocked, bloodless faces snarled and ground out their hoarse rage, wanting Ron to slow down so that they could catch and kill him. Their desires were as simple as that. Sometimes
,
he thought that he could detect something in a few of them that could be called guile, but by and
large,
the most complicated thing he ever saw them do was pick up a stick or a brick to use as a crude weapon, mainly to smash windows and doorways.

In a few
seconds,
he was moving again, driving himself forward. The Kid’s place was only two blocks away.
He had to admit, it
was a clever spot, and as far as he
knew,
no zombie had ever figured out how to get into it. Three days had passed since
he had
stopped to see about the boy, and he could only hope the youth’s
refuge
was still intact and that both the boy and his living space remained safe.

Cutter came out of the alleyway into the next street. As he’d hoped, there were only a few of the dead staggering around, and when they noticed him
,
they slowly turned in his direction and began that slow, plodding gait that preceded what passed as rage for them. When the great stream of the dead emerged from the alley, they would also begin that stumbling trot that marked their top speed. Before that
happened
, he wanted to be around the next corner, leaving them in his dust.

At the next corner, there
was a partially toppled garbage dumpster
,
and because of a jumble of stalled automobiles in the street, Ron would have to pass between the wrecked cars and the huge green dumpster. He never liked to put himself into such a confining space, but he really needed to get something more in the way of a head start on the creatures pursuing him. So he bit the bullet and dashed forward.

Just as he made his move, a pair of blood-black hands reached out
,
and fingers with no capacity for pain clamped onto his right shoulder and biceps. The sudden force of that grip
,
and the tug of what appeared to be at least 200 pounds of zombie
,
all but spun him around. Ron found himself suddenly looking into the lunging face of a dead man whose jaws were snapping open and shut, again and again, pulling itself close enough to try to bite him.

Cutter’s first reaction was to punch the thing in the face.
He had
tried to wean himself from doing that. It rarely did any good and if the fabric of his gloves ever
failed,
he could find himself with a fist stuck in the chewing mouth of one of those monsters.
Then
he was as good as dead. This time the blow landed on the dead man’s cheekbone and the punch resulted in absolutely no effect whatsoever. Their ability to feel anything akin to pain was gone with their lives. Instead of being pushed back, the thing only increased the power of its grip and that slashing mouth was even closer to Ron’s face than before.

In a
flash,
it had clamped its mouth shut on his left forearm, getting nothing but sturdy jacket material. Ron chose that instant to reach down to his thigh and pull the ball peen hammer free of its Velcro loop. There was the brief sound of the fabric tearing temporarily free and he had the hammer in his gloved hand. With anger and some
satisfaction,
he sent the metal head of that tool slamming into the dark, stinking, wet cranium. It only took that single blow, and the thing let go of him and crumpled to the pavement, dead for good and for real, this time.

The sounds of pursuit coming toward him meant that he didn’t even really have time to look back. They were so close now that Ron could hear the scuff of grit beneath their shoes and their bare feet. With an
oath,
he twisted free of the truly lifeless thing and sped on. Another corner turned and Ron could see what he was hoping was still there
.

The Kid’s tree house!

Indeed, someone had turned Oliver’s tree house into a place of refuge.
Of course, it
wasn’t just any tree house, but
it
had been constructed for some rich kid in the
backyard
of a brownstone that had been part of
Charlotte
’s downtown renewal some years before. In times
past,
the neighborhood had been public housing tracts, but in the years before the
outbreak,
it had given way to bulldozers and high-end real estate. Someone with a six-figure income had built their kid a 1,000 square-foot tree house on tubular metal stilts. Hell
, if
truth be told, it was better than the apartment Ron had been living in while he’d been paying his wife alimony and child support.

The
kid had spun razor wire
all around the thing
that
he had
found bound up in a nearby construction site. He had to give that boy credit for pure ingenuity and for
willpower
. Sometimes
,
he figured that the boy must have had some help—at least in stringing the razor wire
, but
Oliver would never cough that up. The two times that Ron had asked him, the boy acted as if
he had
heard nothing at all from Ron. So he’d stopped asking about that.

If he ran fast enough,
and
if he was lucky enough, then it was possible that the chasing dead wouldn’t even see where he’d gone.
If
they did, then
he would
just have to hole up there with The Kid until they got tired of waiting for them to come down. One thing that all of the living had noticed about the Dead was that they could wait for hours, but eventually they would lose interest if they saw no sure signs of life. After a while, they would seem to forget why they were standing in a place
.
They
forget that a victim waited just a short distance away.
After
that,
they would begin, one by one, to lose interest and to wander off in search of whatever it was that they desired from killing and consuming warm flesh.