100 Days of Death (8 page)

I got Albert a sweatshirt, socks, and bottoms with an elastic waist. There was no way he’d fit into anything else I owned. I heated up the left over soup for Albert and watched him over the table as he wolfed down his meal, slurping loudly. We stayed up until 7:30am talking. Finally, I noticed his eyes getting droopy.

“Is it OK if I crash in your spare room?” Albert asked.

Without waiting for an answer, he got up and shuffled toward the hallway. I followed after him, debating how to broach the subject of sleeping arrangements. I wasn’t sure I was ready to let anyone stay in my aunt’s room yet, and I was damn sure I wasn’t ready to invade her sanctuary. Besides, the bed in her room was a hospital bed.

I guess Albert assumed I had taken my aunt’s room because he walked up to my room and stopped at my door. Albert looked back at me.

“Thanks for taking me in, man. I’ll never forget it.” he said.

His gratitude left me speechless. He opened the door to my room and looked around. “Actually, that’s my roo….” I started to say.

Albert interrupted me, saying, “Cool Christmas lights. Bed’s kind of a mess though.” He walked in and shut the door.

I stood in the hall for a minute, finally saying to myself, “Actually, that’s my room…”

After Albert retired to my room I hung his wet towel and washed the dishes. I noticed that the water pressure had increased. I have no idea what to make of that. It was still rainy and overcast, but nothing like the night before. I was too wired to sleep so I decided to update my inventory list. Watching Albert eat made me realize that my three-month food supply probably wouldn’t last a month with him around (he finished off his soup then went through a can of chili, a sandwich, and a box of Oreos).

I would have to have a talk with him about rationing, but after hearing what he had been through in the last sixteen days I didn’t have the heart to say anything to him yet.

Frankly, I was pretty impressed that Albert had managed to survive until now. He had never struck me as particularly resourceful. The last time I had seen him was when I told him to take a patrol car to go find his sister.

When he left the security office that day (it feels like a lifetime ago), Albert had driven out to Canoga Park. When he got there, apparently there was a riot in full progress. When the looters saw Albert’s patrol car they threw rocks at it and surrounded him, forcing him to either stop the vehicle or run them down. Of course Albert made the mistake of stopping.

They pulled him out of his car and proceeded to rough him up until Albert drew his sidearm and, according to him, attempted to “fire a shot in the air to disperse them.” What wound up happening was that someone tried to grab the gun from him and Albert accidently shot two of his assailant’s fingers off. That evidently worked just as well.

The crowd dispersed long enough for Albert to get away, unfortunately, not with his vehicle. Someone had driven off with it while Albert was showing off his marksmanship skills. Albert wound up walking over two miles to his mother’s house.

He told me that when he got there no one was home. His little sister’s cell phone went straight to voice mail. Albert stayed at his mother’s house for six days waiting, but his family never returned.

By then, the Infected were everywhere. Over a hundred of Them surrounded his mother’s house, trapping him inside. I think Albert figured out that he was probably never going to see his sister again. He couldn’t stay where he was for much longer because it was only a matter of time before they would break in by sheer weight of numbers.

Albert’s escape plan was actually pretty creative. I guess the distance between Albert’s mother’s house and the next-door neighbor’s house was pretty narrow. He went up to his mother’s attic and pulled out several-eight foot long attic floorboards. He staggered them to form two sixteen-foot beams and nailed them together with shorter cross pieces to form a crude ladder like bridge. He then spanned the makeshift bridge from the ledge of the attic window to the neighboring roof.

He went downstairs and made as much noise as he could to rile them up. When they started tearing through the front door, Albert went upstairs, shutting every door he could between him and his pursuers. He went out the attic window and across the bridge to the neighbor’s roof.

A pack of Them, still outside, saw him and tried to get to him but were stopped by the fence separating the two houses.

Albert went across the neighboring roof and down the other side to get away. He spent the next six days in an apartment building he came across. The building was full of infected people, but according to Albert, they didn’t know how to use the elevator, which gave Albert an advantage in getting around them.

He somehow managed to corral all the infected tenants on the top floor into the stairwells and down into the parking garage, where he trapped them. He said there were two remaining tenants on that floor who were not infected, but one of them never came out of his apartment the entire time he was there.

The other tenant, a “saucy little Latino number” (Albert’s words, not mine), named Cindy, let Albert stay with her. Although Albert wouldn’t admit it, I’m pretty sure he was shacking up with her. For six days they went from apartment to apartment on that floor living off of whatever food they found.

Twice during his stay there he had encounters with plague victims and both times he was able to get away and lock them into holding areas. He knew his stay was over when the power to the entire complex finally went out.

He escaped that night and spent the next four days walking across the San Fernando Valley, avoiding hordes of Infected to get to my house in North Hollywood. I don’t know the details of his four day journey yet, but I’m curious as hell how he survived. When I asked him about Cindy, he avoided answering me. I didn’t pursue it.

I asked him why he didn’t try to find a car and drive instead of walking the whole way. He told me he couldn’t bring himself to steal a car from someone who might need it. When I asked him why he decided to come find me, he hesitated, but then told me it was because I was the only friend he had. Albert had finished his story by saying that if he hadn’t found me he didn’t know what he would have done.

Even though I’m now sleeping on my couch, I’m really glad he’s here.

At 12 noon I turned on the TV to watch Gerald Ritchie’s broadcast. I had asked Albert if he had watched Ritchie’s broadcast and he mentioned that Cindy had watched it every day. He wasn’t interested though, because the news just depressed him.

After the usual updates on the most dangerous areas of the city, Gerald attempted to approach a military unit guarding the Pasadena Evacuation Center for an interview. When he identified himself the soldiers opened fire on him and his camera crew. Even while he was retreating with bullets kicking up all around him, Gerald continued to give a blow by blow report, not even concerned that people were trying to kill him.

The broadcast suddenly pixilated, and bright moving dots of color obscured the images. The only audio was a high-pitched whine. After watching this (with the volume down) for ten minutes I gave up and shut off the television.

Albert was still asleep at 1 p.m. so I went up on to the roof to look around. It was still overcast and drizzling. I saw movement up near the end of the block several times and could hear an eerie moaning wail off in the distance somewhere, but other than that it was quiet.

I saw Albert’s discarded clothes in the front yard and the pile of carcasses across the street. I had ignored Dale’s bloated corpse on the driveway but knew I would have to deal with it all at some point.

It was when I glanced at the bodies across the street that I saw it. At first my mind didn’t register it, but then it hit me. Dawn’s front driveway gate was wide open. I had definitely secured everything there when I left the other day. A wave of guilt washed over me.

I must have procrastinated at my front gate for twenty minutes before I finally unlocked it and ventured over to Dawn’s house. I had thought about waking Albert to bring him with me, but decided to leave him a note instead. I mentioned in my note to hold off eating until I got back (my passive aggressive way of saying “don’t eat all my f---ing food while I’m gone”).

I delicately stepped over all the bodies in the yard and stopped near the open gate. I peered down the driveway and listened for a few minutes, trying not to gag at the horrid smell of the dead. At least there was no music playing, but the silence was even more unsettling.

I walked up Dawn’s driveway alongside her house. I scanned her back yard and then went up onto her back porch. The French doors leading to her master bedroom were askew. The interior was dark. Several of the window panes were broken. A sinking feeling latched on to me as I contemplated what to do.

My mind screamed at me to just leave. After all, Dawn was obviously toast…she had probably tried to hug the damned things while they ate her. I knew I was going in anyway. I’m an idiot. I let out a sigh and switched on the Surefire light mounted on my carbine.

As I entered the bedroom, glass crunched under my feet. The room was cold and musty, in sharp contrast to my last visit here. The Surefire pierced the darkness, revealing a massive amount of blood on the sheets of the bed. A bloody trail led out of the bedroom and into the hall. I stopped halfway down the hallway when I heard movement around the corner. My internal voice reminded me that coming in the house was a terrible idea.

A person came around the corner toward me, less than twenty feet away. It was an undead male, blood caked from its mouth to its stomach. The smell of it pushed at me like a shockwave. I felt trapped in the tight confines of the dark, cold hallway.

I wanted to turn and run but couldn’t. I don’t know why, but I was suddenly more terrified than I have ever been. It was like every childhood nightmare I ever had come to life. I choked down my panic, took aim, and fired into the thing’s head. A flap of skin on the side of its skull flipped up like a toupee caught in the wind.

The creature snarled and bared its teeth. I fired two more times in quick succession, both rounds hitting the thing between the eyes. It fell into the wall, bounced and collapsed to the floor with a splat. Its leg kicked out, twitching spasmodically and hitting a stand holding a ceramic bowl of potpourri. The bowl shattered when it hit the floor, echoing through the house.

Bloody hell! Could I have made any more damn noise? I backed up against the wall and waited. My heartbeat pounded in my head. The silence was deafening. Finally, I moved forward, stepped over the now dead thing, and cleared the rest of the house. There was no sign of Dawn or anything else anywhere. I went out the front door, too chicken to go through the back of the house again.

When I walked through my front door, Chloe greeted me with enthusiasm. Albert was up and sitting at the kitchen table finishing off the rest of my cereal. I guess he didn’t get the note.

When he asked where I had been I told him I was out visiting the neighbors. “You still have neighbors?” he asked.

After stripping my gear and cleaning my carbine, I sat down with Albert to discuss our future plans (or lack thereof). We both danced around the subject of Albert staying around permanently until I finally told him that we should stick together because there was safety in numbers.

The look of relief on his face was almost comical. He asked me what would happen next. Up until now my game plan consisted of A) Don’t go crazy again, and B) Don’t get eaten by those things. I know, not the most brilliant strategy ever devised, but thinking about long term goals was pretty depressing.

We discussed the evacuation shelters, but after watching the reception Gerald Ritchie received at the Pasadena Center, I wasn’t about to take any chances. When I told Albert my thoughts he just nodded.

As he poured the last of my cereal into his bowl he looked at me and said, “I’m sorry about eating so much. It’s just that I haven’t had any food in three days.”

While I was a little ashamed that I had been critical of his eating, it was a perfect time to bring up the food storage issue. I told him we could probably hit the local grocery stores but I wasn’t very confident there would be anything left there.

Albert owl blinked a few times at me and then said, “Why don’t we just try the Bishop’s storehouse up in Sylmar (an area just north of us)?”

“The Bishop’s what?” I asked.

Albert began to explain that when he was attending the Studio City ward he volunteered to work in the Bishop’s storehouse two days a week. When he saw me staring blankly at him, Albert added that he was a member of the Mormon Church.

“You’re a Mormon?” I asked incredulously.

Albert actually looked a little insulted by this but went on to tell me that the Bishop’s storehouse was basically a grocery store for Mormons.

I told him that I was pretty sure the Mormons would have cleaned the place out by now, but Albert was adamant that there would be supplies there. We discussed it for a few more minutes and decided that we should plan a trip up there soon.

At one point, our discussion turned to my trip to the Do It Center and I mentioned the bikers I had seen. He nodded and said he knew about a group of guys that fit their description and that they lived in a junkyard not far from the storehouse we are planning to visit.

I suddenly got concerned, but Albert assured me they had no idea about the storage building. I got out a map and had him point out both the junkyard and the Mormon food supply. We will have to take a longer route to avoid the biker’s area and just hope they aren’t out and about when we get there.

Later in the day, I opened my safe and showed Albert my firearms. I had planned to give Albert my Ruger .22 caliber rifle to use (since I had already built a silencer for it), but when he saw my vintage WW2 M-1 carbine, he about crapped himself. He went on and on about how his Grandfather had one and it was the first gun he ever learned to shoot.

After listening to him rave about what a great gun it was, I didn’t have the heart to not let him use it. I grumbled to myself that I’d have to build a sound suppressor for it, but what the hell, I don’t really have anything better to do.