Dead Air (Book One of The Dead Series) (44 page)

"Correction,"
she told the empty room. "No more cold showers in the mop sink of the janitor’s closet."

Exiting the bathroom
, she approached and opened the second door carefully as she stepped back and pointed her flashlight and pistol inside.

S
he was momentarily blinded by a light in her own eyes, and when they cleared, a shock went through her as she saw someone standing across the room pointing a handgun in her direction. She tightened the grip on her own weapon and sidestepped to the right. When she did this, she noticed the unknown person did the same only to their left.

Heather stopped and burst out in nervous laughter as she realized she was looking at her own reflection in a mirror. Panning her light back and forth, she saw that the whole rear wall was mirrored in what was a bedroom dominated by a king size, four
-post bed.

Exploring further, she discovered two walk-in closets that were empty except for
fabric-covered hangers scattered along the rods stretching to the rear wall. The more she saw, the more she realized that this suite seemed like a high-class hotel room. Nice, but completely unlived in.

Checking the final door,
she discovered a walk-in storage closet full of new linen, towels, toiletries, and a wide variety of unopened bottles of top shelf booze. Brand new hotel sized tubes of toothpaste and individually wrapped toothbrushes were piled on a shelf next to small bottles of shampoo, conditioner and bars of soap. The closet had a fresh smell that Heather breathed in before going back into the living room. Standing in front of the bar, she suddenly realized something. There were no windows in any of the rooms. All the other suites she had entered spanned all the way from the main hall that ran the length of the building down its center to the outside of it at its front and rear. They all had windows in them, but not this one. It also seemed smaller to her. Its depth should be the same as the radio station, but it didn't add up as she estimated it in her head.

Turning around in a
360-degree circle, she looked for another door she might have missed in the excitement of exploring the suite. Seeing none, she shrugged it off. Maybe a mechanical room or an air conditioning chase took up the missing area.

Standing at the door leading to the hall,
Heather wondered if Brain was back at the station yet. He had been so excited earlier when Tick-Tock invited him to check out the .50 caliber on the MRAP, that she was worried he'd pee down his own leg. She needed to talk to Brain about rerouting power to this suite.

Thumbing off her flashlight, Heather turned to go when a thin beam of illumination coming from the seam between two of the bookshelves on the back wall caught her eye. Leaving her flashlight off,
she walked over and studied where the glow came from. She pushed against the bookcase and felt it move beneath her hand. Drawing her pistol, she turned her Mag-light back on. After pushing did no good, she pulled on the bookcase. Excitement coursed through her as a four-foot wide section opened to reveal a hallway cutting between the bedroom and storage closet that ended in a room bathed in natural light.

Waiting a moment to see if anyone, or anything, showed itself
and to let her eyes adjust to the sunlight streaming in from the end of the hidden passageway, Heather smelled the familiar odor of chalk and felt. A smile broke over her face as she traversed the hall and stood looking into the room that lay beyond. It suddenly came to her that this suite must be some type of guest quarters that a corporation kept for their executive officers when they were in town. She had checked the registry in the foyer before coming up and it had simply labeled the space as belonging to Barclays. Now she realized it meant the bank.

The entire layout of the suite was nice
, but what Heather found in the back room made it perfect. She recalled Steve coming to the bowling alley on Thursdays to roll a few games and then hanging around afterward to play what he called his second favorite sport. He would always ask Heather to join him, but she was always busy with work. While she would have loved to, she always had to take a rain check.

Now it looked like they would have plenty of
time to compete against each other, and they had the perfect place to do it. The whole back room of the suite was a game room, and at its center stood a beautifully carved pool table.

Steve always teased Heather that she was too scared to play him
, but now she'd show him. You didn't work four nights a week in a bowling alley and not learn how to shoot pool.

"I'm gonna beat the brakes off you
, Steve Wendell," she vowed to the empty room.

A
fter throwing the last of her dirty clothes in a plastic bag and hoisting the leather carry-all that she had taken from the clothing store over her shoulder, Heather bent to pick up her CAR-15. She smiled at Steve and said, "I showed you the suite but not all of it."

"What did you leave out?"
He asked.

"It's a surprise
," she said with a mischievous grin. "I’ll show you after our radio show."

That night, Steve was surprised to find himself
beaten in four straight games of eight ball. The only feeling of redemption he had was when he trounced Heather in video golf.

Later on
, as she lay wrapped in Steve's arms, Heather felt content. They had secured the building and she had secured her man. She remembered the Sunday night when everything had gone to hell and how she had wondered if what she was feeling was freedom. Now, she was sure that's what it was. She was no longer bound by a job that she loved, but was emotionally and physically draining, and by struggling to pay off her student loans while trying to make ends meet on her salary and part-time work at the bowling alley. Although she would have never wished for the events that brought this freedom about, the fact was that they
had
happened. The benefits for her were no more bills, no more cleaning puke out of the back of her patrol car and no more blind dates with a long string of losers.

Considering her schedule for the following day,
she found few responsibilities that needed her attention. She had promised to teach Marcia how to use a rifle in the afternoon and had told Steve she would make a batch of Cinnabuns for him in the morning. Other than that, the rest of the day was hers.

As she drifted off to sleep, she thought about asking Susan if she wanted to get together for lunch and then browse the shoe store. A lazy afternoon of shopping seemed just the thing she needed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Clearwater, Florida:

The survivors barricaded inside the Garnett
Bank Building fell into a loose routine over the next few months. Jonny G taught Marcia and Heather how to use the equipment in the studio, and the two women started doing their own radio shows on alternate afternoons. Heather called hers 'Back in Black' and for six hours aired nothing but straight rock and roll. She kept away from the over played standards and only focused on songs that were good but hadn't gotten much air time in their day. The only two tired, old favorites she used on her show were the first and last song she played. She opened her set with ‘Freebird’ and ended with ‘Stairway to Heaven’. In between, she took requests on the CB and the shortwave but only played them if she could say to the caller, "That's a good song. I haven't heard that one in years."

She loved pulling up the computerized music catalog
and would browse through it for hours trying to find the best old hits for her listeners. At least three times per show she would receive a request that sent her running for the CD library to try and find a song that wasn't in the system. She would shout out to anyone in hearing range, "I just got the best request. Do you remember...?"

On the nights Heather did her show
(she could never refer to it as work) Steve would have dinner waiting for her when she was done. The deli was stocked with food, and Steve calculated it would take at least six months for the survivors to go through it. After that, they would have to go out and forage in what was left of the surrounding area, hoping that the looters hadn't trashed too much before they had been shot by the National Guard, driven into hiding, or eaten.

When dinner was over and its remnants cleaned up, Heather and Steve usually shot a game or two of pool.
Although Heather still won a lion's share of the games, Steve was steadily improving and vowed that by the New Year he would shut her out three straight games. Christmas and New Years came and went, but the best he could do was win two out of three. Their other evening activities, depending on their mood, would be to make love, watch a DVD, play cards, play any number of video games in the back room, or sometimes they would go up on the roof to take in the night sky and just talk. The one constant in their evening activities besides pool was sex, which caused Heather to talk to Marcia about a search of the empty offices in the building for birth control pills.

Although
the group had brought in their own toiletries and sundries, these were soon depleted. With no way to go to the local drugstore, the group turned to foraging in the offices for what they needed and were constantly amazed at the wide variety of items they found. Steve explained it best when he said, "You have to consider that the people who used to work here, spent a lot of time here. Some worked so much that they probably spent one third of their life in these offices."

As Heather and Marcia sat in the radio station's conference room discussing how they would go about their search, Susan came in and joined them. She caught the tail end of the conversation and sat quietly while the two women finished discussing how they would get together the following morning and begin their hunt. When they were done, in a quiet voice Susan said, "I need some birth control pills too."

Heather and Marcia were slightly taken back by this statement but recovered quickly.

"I thought that you were with Mary?" Marcia asked.

"I am," Susan replied shyly. "But, well, you know ..."

Marcia leaned forward
, and in a conspiratorial whisper asked the question that was burning Heather up but which she was too embarrassed to ask.

"Who?"

Susan blushed and refused to answer.

Heather and Marcia instantly ran through the short list of men and came up with the same name.

"Tick-Tock," they said in unison.

Susan's blush deepened and nodded her head.

"He's cute," Marcia said. "If I wasn't with Jonny, I'd be all over that."

In an almost pleading voice
, Susan said, "Please don't tell anyone, especially Mary. It's a very difficult situation. It happened the day we were searching the offices and a few times since then and ...” Her voice trailed off as Susan looked down at the top of the table.

Concerned by her reaction
, Heather asked, "He isn't forcing you to do it, is he?"

Startled, Susan looked up and her face went bright red. “Oh God no
, it’s nothing like that.”  After a second she laughed and said, “In fact, I damn near raped him the first time.”

This brought a burst of laughter from
Heather and Marcia that was so loud, Brain heard them in his office and poked his head in the door to see what was going on.

***

Tick-Tock, unaware that he was the topic of discussion upstairs, settled into the reclining chair he’d dragged into the bookstore weeks earlier and lit a cigarette.

He had fallen into the daily routine of going out first thing in the morning and running the MRAP's engine for thirty minutes to charge its battery. Then, depending on who stood guard atop the walkway, he would invite them to join him for breakfast or simply thank them and go on his way.

Jonny G he never asked to breakfast. It wasn't that he didn't like the younger man, it was more a case of the two of them having different interests. Jonny always wanted to talk about the radio station and working in the business, or what was left of it, but Tick-Tock was burned out on the subject. Shortly before the dead decided to walk the Earth and eat their fellow man, Tick-Tock had seriously considered putting in his two weeks notice at KLAM and looking for another line of work. Now that Clearwater had been turned into an open-air buffet, he considered himself semi-retired and didn't want to hear about broadcasting or radio at all.

Although
he still pulled a time slot every other day on the air, he enjoyed his time away and was happy to pursue other interests. The first days after locking down the building had been hectic, to say the least, but it had been something new and different for him. And while he wouldn't admit it to anyone, he did admit to himself that trying to survive the dead coming back to life was the most fun he'd had in years with his pants on.

And off
, thinking about that day with Susan.

All his life, Tick-Tock had yearned for adventure
, something to take him away from the day-to-day boredom of being an average guy, doing an average job. He’d joined the Marines years ago to break out of the humdrum nine to five life he found himself being pulled into and to see if he could find something new and stimulating in the physical and mental aspects of being a Marine. At first it had fulfilled him, with the travel and adventure, but even that turned boring as it evolved into a regular cycle of training.