9.0 - Sanctum (13 page)

He was right.  My ease at walking among the Whites was turning into a false generalization to all other people, normal people.

“What if we disguise them,” said Grace, “maybe put them in gloves and hoodies? Hide as much skin as possible.”

“The naked ones will see the clothes,” I said, “and come after them.”

“I have an idea,” said Dr. Oaks.  “It might solve both problems at once.”

“Both?” I asked.

He smiled.  “Dinner and disguise, of course.  If you find some food, maybe find some flour as well.”

I followed Grace across the street toward the four-story pharmacy building.  When we’d started down the stairs from the fourth floor of the veterinary sciences addition, I’d thought I was running the show, but she had a way of slowly taking charge that trumped my anti-authoritarian tendencies.  Or perhaps it was the sight of her naked body that kept me in line.  Sure, she was maybe twenty years older than me.  She had a few wrinkles, some gray hair, but those seemed unimportant with her clothes gone.

We ran through the grass and around to the side of the building, avoiding the dead Whites and live ones grazing on their fallen.  We stepped into a hedge of fat, round bushes standing taller than us despite the extreme weather and loss of irrigation.  Grace stopped, put a finger to her lips, and looked from side to side. 

I kept quiet and scanned.  No Whites were in the bushes that I could see.  The nearest live ones were thirty or forty yards away.

Grace leaned in close.  “You need to stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?” I didn’t think she’d noticed.

“There are naked infected everywhere,” she huffed.  “I’d have thought you’d be used to it by now.”

Busted.  Why not just go with it? “Sorry.”  I pointed at the Whites across the lawn, naked females were among them.  “Something in my brain clicks off when I see them.  To me, those ones are just monsters.”

“Really?”

Mostly.  I didn’t think it was good to mention the females I’d spooned with that night before I took that combine and ran down a few thousand of them in a cornfield.

“Listen, Zed, you’re cute, but you’re stupid.  I’m not going to make an emotional investment in somebody who’s intent on getting themselves killed.  Okay?”

Emotional?

Honestly, I was only thinking about sex, but the truth I didn’t tell myself was I knew sex would lead to something more, something that I was never good at dealing with even before the world fell apart—emotional attachments.  I was still a newbie in that department, fucking my relationships up at every turn.  I wasn’t an abusive monster like Dan, and I wasn’t a sharp-tongued, screeching cunt like the Harpy.  I had tried to navigate the hormone-charged high school and college years having not had the opportunity to see a healthy relationship at work, no template, so to speak.  That left me with trial and error, which so far hadn’t produced good results.

“Don’t pout.”  Grace smiled and looked me up and down.  “If you were the last guy on earth,” she shrugged and thought it through, “you’d do.  We could find a little house on the prairie and make little pale-skinned babies to repopulate the earth.  I’d stay home and make doilies and biscuits, and you could go out and hunt for buffalo.  It’d be fun.”

I rolled my eyes.  “Be careful what you joke about.  I am just about that last guy on earth.  You might end up with a half dozen toddlers that look just like me.”

Grace shook her head.  “You’ll be dead a long time before that.”

“That’s what everybody says,” I smiled.  “Yet here I am.”

“It defies all logic.”  Grace peeked through the foliage.  “Well, we can’t stand out here in the bushes all day.  We’re not middle-schoolers anymore.”  She pointed down the side of the building.  “There’s a way in over here.  They kept the food stored in one of the rooms on the second floor down at the far end of the building.  They figured if they ever got the service elevator running it would make sense.  You know, they wouldn’t have to carry it as far.”

“They have canned stuff in there?”

“That’s pretty much all there is left to scavenge.  Pretty much.  The infected get most everything else.”

That was true.  It didn’t take much brainpower to figure a box of cereal with a giant picture of Fruit Loops on the front might have something yummy inside.  Then there was the meager effort required to find out.

“They’ve got some of those canvas grocery bags in there,” she said.  “Grab one when we get there.  Don’t overfill it.  You want to be able to run.”

I knew how to handle the loads of things I needed to run with.  I didn’t need Grace telling me.  “Yes, mother.”

“That’s why you never get laid.”  Grace turned and punched me in the arm.  “You always say the wrong thing.”  She hurried through the bushes toward the door. 

A little too loudly, I called after her, “Or because most of the girls are dead?” I followed, muttering, “We do have this virus thing going on.” 

Inside, the dead lay on the floor as thick as they were in the veterinary science building.  Plenty of live ones worked on filling their bellies from the corpses.  We didn’t kill any of them.  We were on a different mission than that.  Instead, we went into the stairwell and climbed up to the second floor.  More dead.  Fewer Whites feeding.  A handful down the hall near the other end.

Grace and I headed down the hall to the room that had been dedicated for the pantry.  It was the first classroom on our right.  The feeding Whites barely gave us a glance.  That was hopeful until we neared the pantry door and I heard sounds from within.  Whites were in there, and they sounded pissed.

Nodding to the door, I pointed at the knob, then raised my machete and stood to the side so I could ambush and kill any beast that sprang out when Grace opened it up.

She positioned herself behind the door, gave me a confirming glance and pulled, stepping far out of the way.

The noise from inside didn’t stop, at least not immediately, but after a moment of waiting, I was rewarded.  A White ran out the door, right past me.  I swung my blade at the back of his neck.  He dropped as a second came out the door.  I wasn’t in position to get her with my machete, so I jabbed at her throat with the knife in my left hand and shoved the blade all the way through the back of her neck.  She crumbled, limp, gurgling blood through her breath.

I straightened up and stepped into the pantry.  The last of the Whites—a wiry guy with a full sleeve tattoo on his naked arm—glanced at me and then went back to smashing a gallon-sized can against the floor, holding it up to look at the picture of sliced peaches on the label after every couple of tries.

I motioned Grace to come in.  She followed, closing the door behind her.  I headed straight for the White, deciding to take care of him so he wouldn’t become a distraction while we sifted through the mess to find some groceries. 

The White, though, eyed me suspiciously and stopped pounding the can immediately after I started toward him.  By my second step, he was on his feet and moving to the other side of a shelf.

Damn, a skittish one.  Unusual.

I looked back to make sure the door was closed, set my feet, and raised my machete.  “Here, Whitey, Whitey…”

The White looked at me but didn’t move.

“Come here, buddy,” I said.  “I’m going to kill you.”

Still, he didn’t move.

To my left, Grace started to work her way around to the White’s other side.  He got nervous, glancing back and forth between us, and stepping toward the far corner of the room.

Then I stopped.  This was different.  “Can you understand me?”

It looked at me blankly, still glancing between us.

“Hey,” I said.  “Nod your head.  Blink.  Wave your hand.  Say something if you can.  Do you understand me?”

It stepped closer into the corner.

I sighed.  It wasn’t a Smart One.  It wasn’t a Slow Burn.  It wasn’t as smart as Russell had been but it seemed relatively harmless to me.  It didn’t wig out and attack me when I’d spoken.  Killing it didn’t feel right.  “Grace.”

“Yes?” she responded in a soft voice.

“Go open the door again, and stand out of the way.”

“Are you sure that’s how you want to handle this?”

“Yeah.”

“I think it’s a mistake.”

“Yeah.”  I looked at her.  “I don’t need any more guilt.  Let’s let it go.”

Grace shook her head and stepped quickly to the door. 

Once she had it open, I grunted a gorilla sound, raised my machete and charged the White in the corner, doing it slowly enough, and leaving him plenty of room to run along the windows, cross the room, and disappear out the door.  All I heard after that was the sound of his feet running down the hall.

Grace came back into the pantry and closed the door behind.

“Easy enough,” I told her softly.

“We’ll see.”  In the dim moonlight coming in through the windows, I scanned the room.  “You guys had a lot of food in here.”

“They were stocked enough to last for a while.”

“Besides the flour Dr. Oaks asked for? What should we bring back?”

“Anything they can eat right out of the can.”

I asked, “Can’t you eat
everything
right out of the can?”

Grace looked at me, puzzled.  “I suppose.”  She started searching through the remains of flour, sugar, beans, and rice that had been stacked on a couple of pallets and shredded by the Whites.  “Everything is mixed up.” 

“Maybe there’s a bag of flour down in the pile that isn’t open.”

Grace continued to dig.

I found where the canvas grocery bags had fallen to the floor, and I pulled several out and shook them off.  They all had big looped handles, and I slid one up my arm and wrapped the handle over my shoulder.  I moved around, trying the bag on for size.  If I didn’t put too much in the bag, I might be able to carry one over each shoulder and still keep my weapons in hand.  It would make for awkward movement, but I liked the idea better than going out with a bag in one hand rather than a knife.

Grace stopped digging through the mess on the pallets and started looking through the cans and boxes on the floor.

I put a grocery bag on my other shoulder and turned around to face Grace.  “What do you think? Stylish?”

She laughed and put a hand over her mouth to keep the sound in.  “You look like an idiot.”

I grinned.  “But it’s functional, right?” I waved my machete and knife to demonstrate. 

“Hey.”

“What?” I tensed.

Grace knelt on the floor, reached down, and lifted a clear plastic jug full of something white.  “Baking powder.  We don’t need the flour.  This will be perfect.”

I stepped closer.  “Is there another one?”

Grace found a second jug. 

I tossed her a grocery bag, and she loaded them in.  “You think two will be enough?”

“We can make another trip if we need more.”

It took a few more minutes to get our food loaded up along with our baking powder for dusting the academics in white before taking them out of the veterinary sciences building.  Just before we left, I asked, “Do they have an armory in here?”

Grace pointed down.  “On the first floor.”

“You think we should go down and pick up a couple of guns and some ammo, just in case?”

Grace shook her head, deciding instantly.

“I’m not saying it’ll do any good in the long run,” I explained.  “I was just thinking they might feel—I don’t know—hopeful, having a weapon in hand.”

“I think putting a loaded gun in their hands is a mistake,” she countered.  “They haven’t been out among the infected like you and I have.  We’ve seen enough people learn the hard way that noise draws the infected in.  With the naked horde everywhere, if one of the academics gets nervous and fires, then they’re all dead—all of them—whether they’re hidden in a stockroom, walking across the campus, or in their new hiding place.”

“You’re right,” I sighed.  “Let’s just take what we’ve got.”  I pushed the door open and peeked into the hall.  Nothing but the Whites far down, still eating.  I led the way out and crossed over to the stairwell, opened the door slightly to listen, peek inside, and proceeded.  It was clear as far as I could tell.  Grace followed me silently down the stairs, avoiding the slipperiest spots where the blood was thick and hadn’t yet dried.

At the bottom floor, we paused again at the door that led out of the building.  I pushed it open a little and listened.  No unexpected sounds.  I opened it wide enough to slip through and stepped out with Grace right behind. 

She gasped and froze. 

My machete was immediately up as my head snapped right, then left, looking for the danger.

She nudged me with her elbow and pointed across the grass.

A line of jogging Whites, twenty or thirty of them, was winding its way toward us.  The first White in the line had a full sleeve tattoo on his left arm, and was looking right at me. 

“Motherfucker!”  I pushed Grace back inside. 

Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

I should have killed that fucker in the pantry.  He was a Smart One.  He was smart enough to play docile and stupid when he saw my machete, and now he’d rounded up some of his motherfucking naked White buddies to come and get us.

Dammit.

“What do you think?” Grace asked, urgently.

I shrugged the grocery bags off my shoulders, and bounded over to tuck them beneath the staircase.  I planned to pick them up later, tattoo-sleeve asshole Smart One or not.  “Leave your stuff there with mine.”  I pointed up the stairs.  “Run.  Back to two.”

Grace shook her head.  “That’s stupid.  They’ll find us.”

“Go.”

I bounded up the stairs after Grace.  At the landing, she wanted to continue up, but I stretched an arm out to stop her.  I whispered, “Go up if you want to.  I’m going to make my stand on two.”

“Not even you can kill them all, Zed.  Not with a knife and a machete.”

“I don’t need to kill them all.  I just need to kill one.”

“What if they don’t come to two? What if they don’t fall into whatever stupid little trap you’re planning?”

“That’s why I want you with me,” I told her.  “I don’t want them to skip over two and find you first.  I know you can’t kill them all, either.”

Grace closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and huffed.  She looked at me with a steely glare.  “You better not fuck this up.”

We ran onto the second floor just as the Whites slammed into the outer door at the bottom of the stairs.