Dead, but Not for Long (43 page)

“Ain’t no time for dancing,” he deadpanned.

“Hey, now, I was just starting to enjoy that
little two-step,” the biker said, looking down at the body at his feet.

“Good timing,” another said to Snake.

“Speaking of timing,” Snake said, “it’s going to be getting
light soon. We’re almost out of time.”

The smoke was so thick that the building was
totally obscured. The smell of burning rubber nudged the men farther backward.

“Not quite that campfire smell,” Snake commented
as they turned to leave. Suddenly, a crash reverberated throughout the parking
lot.

“I’m guessing that was the roof,” Snake said,
pulling his shirt over his face to filter out the billowing cloud of smoke and
dust. They stopped to watch in silence for a few moments. Slowly, lumbering forms emerged from the murk.

When the figures appeared in the smoke, one of the
bikers swore under his breath, an old habit he’d never been able to break. The
image was the most terrifying one the biker had ever seen and his heart was
pounding as he waited to see just how many of them there were.

The first few were charred and smelled like cooked
meat. They moved even more stiffly than the rest of the undead, but they still
moved. Perhaps they’d been protected from the worst of the flames. The ones
that came next were still burning, the light flickering through the smoke as
they emerged. They didn’t even seem to notice they were on fire.

“We’ve got to put these guys down,” someone said. “They’ll
have the whole city in flames before we know it.”

“I don’t think that matters now,” Snake said. “They’re
bombing the city anyway.”

~*~

As Lindsey approached the hospital, she saw a
large crowd of the undead near the wall where the new gate was going to be
installed. A couple of people were up in the Crow’s Nest, playing sniper, but
they were barely making a dent in the numbers.

“What could have drawn so many of them here?”
Lindsey asked, mostly just thinking out loud. A light on the dashboard caught
her attention and she glanced down to see that the car was on empty. Her car
always warned her in advance when the gas was low, so she assumed that this car
was the same. Still, it was one more thing to worry about.

Wolf pulled up next to the car and Lindsey rolled
down her window when she saw him.

“I don’t know what happened,” Wolf said. “There
was hardly a zombie in sight a few minutes ago.”

One of the passengers in the car pointed. As some
of the crowd began to surge toward the vehicles, Lindsey caught a glimpse of
the wall. A couple of people were working on the pins for the gates with a
welding torch, while several others, including some of the newcomers, were
fighting to keep the growing horde back.

“Guess the work on the gate must have made some
noise,” Wolf said.

“I thought they were going to block off the area
with cars so they could work on the gate,” Lindsey said.

“They were,” Wolf told her, “but they decided to
leave it open so we could get through with the survivors. Snake was worried
that we might have some people with injuries or too weak to crawl over the
cars. Guess it wasn’t really necessary, but with everybody coming back soon,
there’s no point in trying to move the cars in place now.”

“Right,” Lindsey said, glancing at the gas gauge again.

“Let’s try to lead them away and come back,” Wolf
said. “It’ll help the guys at the gate out as well as giving us an opening to
get through.”

Lindsey followed Wolf and Smiley as they drove
around the block then began to make their way back to the hospital. She could
see that some of the dead were following, but it didn’t look like near as many
as had been at the gate. As they turned the last corner and approached the
hospital again, the car started to sputter as it drank up the last bit of gas.

“Come on,” Lindsey whispered. “Just a little bit farther.”

As she had suspected, a lot of the crowd had
remained near the gate. The noise must have kept many of them from following
the vehicles when they’d left, Lindsey thought. The two bikes dodged some of
the dead as they raced through the open gates and Wombat motioned for Lindsey to drive through.

Lindsey moved the car through the gate slowly, since
there were bodies everywhere, ranging from dead, to undead, to alive and fighting.

Once she had the car inside the wall, a couple of
the men struggled to get the gates closed. Others rushed over to help but they
were having a difficult time of it as the zombies outnumbered the humans.

“Back up!” Wombat yelled to Lindsey. “Use the car
to push the gate closed!”

She nodded, watching her rear view mirror as she
carefully backed to within inches of the men that were struggling with the
gate. Wombat hurried over to talk to them and two of them climbed onto the
trunk and kept pushing while the others moved out of the way of the car. Once
she was sure that nobody was in the way, Lindsey edged the car back farther,
finally stopping it when Wombat gave the word. The gate was quickly latched and
Lindsey pulled forward again once the two men jumped off the trunk.

The battle continued inside the walled parking lot
as the remaining ghouls were killed.

Lindsey decided to just stay put until it was
safe, since she was the only one in the car with a gun. She knew that she
didn’t dare use the weapon with so many living humans in the parking lot, so
she just waited and watched. The dead circled the car and pushed against it
from the front and the passenger side. They slapped their hands on the glass,
leaving blood and chunks of flesh as well as the green slime that many of them seemed to bear.

“Hey, I think we need to get out of here,” someone said from the back.

The sound of cracking glass emphasized their point
but Lindsey said, “We’re better off in here than we would be out there right
now. Let’s wait until we have a path to the door.”

The zombies around the car finally began to drop
then Lindsey’s door was suddenly yanked open. She shrank back, instinctively,
before her common sense reminded her that a zombie wouldn’t have the dexterity
to open the door. When she saw Wombat, she quickly unbuckled her seatbelt,
telling the Australian, “I am so glad to see you.”

“I get that a lot these days,” he said, turning to
use his machete again before looking at her. “You all ready? We’re going to run
for the door.”

“I’ll help,” Lindsey said stepping out.

“How did I know you were going to say that?” he
grinned. “I’ll get you a crowbar.”

The others unbuckled quickly and when Wombat saw
that they had a clear shot to the door, he told them to go. Jackson and the
others hurried to the entrance of the hospital, one carrying the extra laptop.
Once they were safely inside, the door closed. Lindsey turned her attention
toward helping to clear the parking lot, though it wasn’t easy with all the
smoke and dust.

“Where are the others?” Wombat asked.

“Snake had them lead the infected to a warehouse,”
she replied. “He went to check on them and he wants us to bring them some ammo.
They’re almost out.”

Wombat got on the radio and updated those in the Crow’s Nest.

“Go ahead, we’ll finish clearing the lot,” one of them replied.

“Let’s go,” Wolf said. “We need to hustle.”

“I need to get my bike out,” Wombat said. “Why don’t
you and Smiley go ahead and I’ll bring Lindsey with me. We’ll bring as much
ammo as we can carry.”

“How are we going to do this?” Smiley asked. “We’ve
got about a hundred infected at the gate.”

“Maybe the others can draw them away,” Lindsey said.

Wolf turned to one of the bikers and told him what
they needed. Soon, several of the residents who were unable to fight went to
the fire escape and began to yell, drawing the crowd toward them and away from the gate.

When the gate was clear, two men opened it
quickly, allowing the two bikes out before closing the gates again. Once they
were at the truck, Wolf jumped into the back and grabbed all the ammo he
thought they could carry, while Smiley used his .44 to pick off the dead that
were coming their way. Within a couple minutes, they were hurrying toward the
warehouse.

~*~

Snake watched as the burning creatures waddled
toward his men. Some had their faces completely charred off, leaving nothing but a smoldering grimace.

“If anything, it at least slowed them down,” Snake
told Fish, who was standing next to him. “Still, I hope these are just the
lucky few that survived.” He speared an approaching creature in the eye and
watched it fall to the ground. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to drop them all. We need to get back.”

“If we started out with about a thousand of them,”
the other biker started, “and half of them got run over, we’d still have to kill
fifty or sixty of ‘em, huh?”

Snake gave the man a sideways glance. “Math ain’t
your strongest subject, is it, Fish?”

One of the other bikers rolled his eyes. “Great.
He’s been doing my income taxes for the last five years.”

“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about an
audit,” Snake said, putting bullets into a couple of burning bodies.

A light breeze started to blow, fanning the flames
and sending the smoke away from the bikers long enough for them to see the pile
of rubble where the building once stood. Snake was relieved to see only a few
more figures staggering from the accumulation of smoldering debris.

“Dudes. Looks like this may have actually worked,”
he said with a grin. They quickly put down the smoking corpses. Soon, they
realized that there were more dead coming from behind them than crawling from the rubble.

“How many can there be left in this town?” one of
the bikers asked in obvious frustration.

Fish was counting on his fingers and spouting out numbers.

Snake shook his head. “There’s over a hundred
thousand people in Lansing alone. I’m guessing that most of them are zombified
by now. We got, oh maybe a thousand, as Einstein pointed out. That’s a drop in the bucket, boys.”

He glanced at the lightening sky. “I really don’t
want to head back while we’re low on ammo, but we can’t wait any longer. We’d
better go and hope for the best.”

He looked up to see two bikes approaching, to his relief.

“Good thing,” he said, when they arrived. “I only
had a couple rounds left.”

Several of the others nodded in agreement, as they
were all low on ammunition.

Smiley got off his bike and began to unload the
saddlebags. After handing out the ammo he’d brought, the big biker stepped away
and frowned, rubbing a spot on his chest.

Snake noticed right away that Smiley didn’t look
right. The man had a sheen of sweat on his face and he was out of breath.

“You all right?” Snake asked him. “You didn’t get
bit, did you?”

“Me?” Smiley asked. “Nah, I’m fine. Just a little
indigestion, but don’t tell Theresa or she won’t keep letting me have seconds.”
He took a step and staggered, grabbing the back of his bike.

Snake grabbed his arm to help steady him.

“You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m a little dizzy,” Smiley said. “Probably from all those stairs.”

“Why don’t you go sit down for a minute, while we finish
reloading the weapons,” Snake said.

The biker nodded and made his way toward one of
the five gallon buckets that had been used earlier. He flipped it upside down
and took a seat on it while the others replenished their ammunition.

“Boss, it’s quarter ‘til seven,” one of them said.

“I know,” Snake said. “Let’s get moving. We’re
barely going to make it.”

“Boss!” Fish yelled.

Snake hurried over to find Smiley lying flat on
the ground, not responding to the other biker’s attempts to get him to speak or
open his eyes.

“We need the truck!” Snake yelled, tossing the radio to Wolf while he began to administer CPR to the fallen biker.

~*~

Lindsey and Wombat had just made it to the truck
with a handful of others and were loading up on ammo when the call came in.

“Forget the ammo!” Wombat yelled to the others. “We’re
taking the truck.

Wombat and Lindsey jumped into the cab while the
others climbed on top of the truck, and then they were off. Wombat drove as
fast as he dared but by the time they arrived at the warehouse, the cloudy sky
was starting to show some color.

~*^*~

Smiley gasped for breath and his eyes flickered before closing again.

Placing two fingers on the man’s neck, just under his chin, Snake checked for a pulse.

“He’s alive, but his pulse is weak. We need to get
him to the hospital. He’s already had one heart attack and I’m guessing that’s
what this is.”

The truck arrived within five minutes but to Snake
it seemed like a lifetime. A couple of the men came over to help lift the big
biker into the back of the truck.

“Someone grab our bikes,” Snake said. He always
made sure that a few of the men rode double, so some would be available to
shoot while the others drove.

Two of the men that had ridden with others hurried
over to start the two bikes.

“I can stay in the back with Smiley,” Lindsey offered.

“No,” Wolf and Snake said at the same time.

Lindsey looked from one to the other but didn’t question them.

“I’ll do it,” Wolf said, checking his pistol. A
look passed between the two men and Snake nodded.

“Just in case,” Snake said.

He turned to the others, “Let’s roll, boys! And
let’s hope the jets don’t leave the base right at dawn.”

Once they were in the truck, Lindsey said, “You
don’t think he’s infected, do you?”

“I hope not, but if he is, I don’t want you to be
the one to have to deal with it if he changes,” Snake added.

Lindsey sat back in her seat taking in his words.
The thought of being trapped inside a dark truck with a zombie version of the
big biker made her shiver. Immediately, she felt guilty about her thoughts.