All That I See - 02 (18 page)

I wrapped up the vodka, some crackers and croutons, and the rest of the cereal bars into another apron and tied the pouch from my belt. I had hoped I could find something I could use as a weapon—something quiet, portable, and club-like—but nothing jumped out at me. I did grab a large knife from the kitchen, but more for use as a tool and not for killing zombies.

When I came back out on the roof, Sara was eating peanut butter and drinking from one of the bottles.

“I’m going,” I said. “I’ll do my best to lure them away. Is there a fire escape on the back of your building?”

“There’s an old ladder, but it doesn’t go all the way to the ground.”

“Okay,” I nodded. “Just be ready to go and I’ll try to get something underneath it.”

“I’m ready to go now,” she said, giving me a small grin.

“It might be a couple of minutes or it might be a couple of days,” I said.

She nodded, “Be careful, and please hurry.”

I crossed over the rooftops to the fire escape and was about to climb down when she called out, “I love you!”

I hesitated and almost pretended like I didn’t hear, but I couldn’t be an asshole and leave her hanging like that…not again…not now.

“I love you, too,” I said. I waved to her, she waved back, and I climbed out onto the ladder.

Chapter 20

When I dropped down to the ground, a couple of them came at me, but they were slow. I easily outran them and headed through the parking lot on the far end. I didn’t stop, because I doubted any of the cars sitting in the lot were unlocked, and I didn’t want to put myself at risk trying to open their doors. Still, I didn’t want to be out on foot; I needed the relative safety of a car until I could figure out what to do about Sara. I ran down the block, away from the mob, until I got to the intersection with 9th Street and crossed over to the post office.

The Clayfield post office was constructed almost a hundred years ago, and other than the new, automated stamp dispensers, computer equipment, and wheelchair ramp, the structure really hadn’t changed much. I had a photograph in the museum from the 1920s depicting Clayfield’s Christmas parade, and the building is in the background, looking exactly as it does now. The original look had been m
aintained, both inside and out.

The smell of death was strong inside the building, but I saw no one on the customer side. I tried some of the doors to access the employee section, but they were all locked. I was hoping I could find a locker room or a break room—someplace where the employees might have stowed their purses and coats so I could get some car keys. The only way to get into the back, was to crawl over the counter. I was about to do that when the employees started shuffling out to greet their first customer in more than a month.

There were five of them back there that I could see—all animated corpses—and I didn’t think it was worth it; there were other cars. I went out the way I came and looked back east on Broadway to the Quality Glass building. Sara was standing at the corner of the roof still peering down into the alley. It almost looked as if she were a performer standing on an elevated stage while her adoring fans gathered below.

I continued farther west on Broadway, past the First Presbyterian Church, past an appliance repair shop, and then crossed the street to Carter’s Plumbing Supply. The storefront was all glass like most of the downtown businesses. I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked into the building before going inside. I didn’t see anything but toilets, shower stalls, and racks of PVC and perforated septic line.

A little bell above the door jangled when I went inside. I waited there to see if anyone would come to investigate. No one did. Immediately, I saw something I liked. There was a square wooden bin with several large pipe wrenches propped up inside. I pulled one
out. It was about three feet long
and heavy. I could swing it one-handed, but I had no control. I’d have to use it like a baseball bat. I considered taking a short length of PVC instead; there was a rack holding five-foot pieces PVC of different circumferences. I liked the longer reach, and they’d be easier to swing with one hand, but I didn’t know how well they would hold up. The pipes might stun the creatures, but the wrench would crush skulls. It would slow me down, but I went with the wrench.

Once I had secured my weapon I went into the back of the building. I found an office, and there was a set of keys on the desk. I took them and headed out again.

The keys went to a white Honda sedan parked next to the building. I needed to find something that would make a lot of noise, so I drove farther west to the outer edge of town to the firehouse next to the old Westside Elementary School.

The big fire trucks were gone—likely taken and used by Nathan Camp and his group that day Jen had been shot—but there was a red Chevy Tahoe parked off to the side. It had the red lights mounted on top, so I figured it would have a siren.

The truck’s door was unlocked, but the keys were not in the ignition. On a whim, I pulled down the sun visor and then looked under the seat. I found them hidden under the floor mat. There was a console mounted under the dashboard that had a bunch of buttons. I cranked the truck then started pushing buttons until the siren sang. I left it on so Sara would know I was coming, and drove back into town.

When I got to the intersection with 9th Street, I took a right, away from the post office and parked in front of the First Christian Church. I thought it was
a
fitting place to lure them, since that had been Sara’s hiding place when Canton B had first hit Clayfield. I left the engine running, got out, and continued on foot heading south on 9th.

I didn’t want to be out in the open like that, particularly when I was so close to the siren. There was a tiny drive-in restaurant, not much more than a kiosk, across the road and south of the church. I hoped there would still be keys in some of the vehicles there.

The eatery was one of those places where you pulled up out front and the waitress came out to your car. It had a similar operating premise as Sonic, but much less sophisticated. I remembered the food being pretty good, though. There were three cars parked in front of the building. In the warmer months, they would have had their windows down, and there would have been trays hanging off of them out of the car. However, when their drivers had pulled up there for lunch that fateful day more than a month ago, it had been the middle of February and below freezing. All of the windows were up.

One of them was still occupied. I moved past it to check the other two. The infected were moving in by this time. All of the ones that had not yet picked up on Sara were zeroing in on the red Tahoe. It was only ones and twos at first, but then groups of five and more began to appear.

The first car I checked was locked and next one was unlocked but without keys.
I took a quick look around. The
things were closing in. I didn’t think they’d noticed me yet; they seemed fixated on the noise.

I bent at the waist and looked into the occupied car. Keys dangled from the ignition. The thing inside was strapped in. A purse in the seat next to it told me it had been female, but that was the only clue. All of its hair had fallen out except for a few greasy strands. It looked a lot like one of those Egyptian mummies after they unwrap them. Then I got to think
ing
about how many of those things the old movies used to scare us—mummies, Frankenstein, zombies, vampires, and ghosts—were all things that had come back from the dead. I looked around me again at the crowd closing in on my location, and I had to agree—dead things coming back to life is scary as hell.

I didn’t want to take the chance of searching for another car. I knew it would smell bad, but I decided to carjack the mummy lady. I opened the door and put her down with the .45. That attracted some attention away from the siren, but it didn’t take much to unbuckle her seatbelt and roll her out onto the pavement. There was this ugly, oily-looking stain in the seat, but I tried not to think about it; I just climbed in and shut the door before any of the others could get to me. I can’t even describe the odor inside. The car started right up, and the stereo was playing an audio book. That was kind of nice, but I turned it off; I needed to focus on rescuing Sara.

I drove south a couple of blocks (with the windows down) away from the siren, and then circled around and parked on 8th Street in front of the museum, a block north of the Quality Glass building. Sara saw me and waved.

We waited for the crowd to move to the siren. Although a few broke away, they would only walk so far then return to Sara’s location. After several minutes, Sara looked out at me and raised her hands as if to say, “What now?”

I had no idea what now.

As I watched more of them shuffle in, I realized the siren was doing more harm than good. It was pulling in creatures from farther away who would then join the group around Sara’s building. I had made the situation worse.

I considered stretching a rope from rooftop to rooftop and getting her to come across like a zip line, but while escapes like that worked in James Bond movies, I thought it would be too risky to attempt. Besides, we would have to move quickly, because they were after Sara, and when she moved, they would move with her. I needed to get the zombies away from the building, which wasn’t happening, or I needed to get a vehicle in there.

I waved to Sara. There was no point in trying to talk to her; she’d never hear me. I pulled away and headed west on North Street. I stuck with the side roads and drove back to my house on 17th. I was going to have to get rid of that car (I just couldn’t take the smell), and I would need more supplies. Also, I really needed a few moments of quiet so I could think.

I parked the car on the street and went into the house. I hadn’t left much when Sara and I were here weeks before, but I had left some clothes behind—mostly things I thought I’d never wear. I stripped off what I was wearing, including my boots to get the stink off me, and tossed it all out the front door onto the lawn. Then I went to my bedroom to find something clean to put on. What I ended up with was a pair of khakis, an old tank-top I’d hadn’t worn in years with Joe Camel on the front, a black tuxedo jacket, and
a
pair of gray running shoes.

Then I took my hobo’s pack of food and vodka, the pipe wrench, and the .45 and
went out into the garage.
I opened my pack on the hood of the Jeep and tore open one of those cereal bars. I was so hungry. I ate three of them, and washed them down with a couple of swigs of vodka. I went around to the back of the Jeep to see what kind of supplies were there. I was really hoping I’d dig around and find a machine gun, but it was just food and water. The .22 was up front where I’d left it, but I wouldn’t be able to mount an assault on the zombie horde with two handguns and a pipe wrench.

I was going to have to bully my way in there with a vehicle—something big. I thought the best thing would be a bucket truck. I could push in there behind the building, park under that ladder, and Sara could just climb down to safety.

Chapter 21

Twenty minutes later, I was wearing a yellow hardhat and feeling pretty good about myself as I waded into the mob in a truck I’d commandeered from Clayfield Water and Electric. I came in from the south on 8th Street with the bucket partially raised. Most of them gazed and reached up to Sara, but there were several that tried to get at me.

I thought I was going to make it to the ladder, but when I got to within about
twenty
feet, there were so many bodies sandwiched between my truck and the building, there was no way. They closed in around me before I could back up, and I found myself stuck again.

“Nice,” I said. Still, I wasn’t willing to quit just yet. If I could get myself into the bucket, perhaps I could at least reach out with the thing and get Sara off the roof….or hang out up there with her.

There would be no way I could go out either door. So, using the pipe wrench, I busted out the back window then climbed outside. They did their best to climb up the side of the truck, and one of them almost made it, but his comrades pulled him down in their own attempts to come up. I climbed up the lift arm which was extended up at about a 45-degree angle forming a sideways V shape with the bucket toward the rear of the truck.

After I made it into the bucket, painfully scooting up it with the arm between my legs, I waved at Sara again.

“I thought you might have been someone else,” she yelled over.

“I changed my clothes,” I said.

“No, I thought
that
was you,” she said, pointing north up 8th Street.

There was a silver pickup sitting in the middle of the road that hadn’t been there before.

“Maybe it’s the Somervilles,” I said.

“If it is we should get them to help us,” she said. “Maybe they don’t know it’s us.”

The truck rolled forward a few feet and stopped. The engine revved. Then the driver did a U-turn and headed north. They went up a couple of blocks then took a right onto a side street.

I used the controls in the buckets to swing the arm around and lift me higher. I could get high enough, but I was still too far away. We had a gap between us of about four feet.

“I think I could make it across to you,” she said.