Dead Series (Book 3): A Little More Alive (12 page)

Paul got up, head
dizzy from the quick movement in the thin mountain air. He paced in front of
the fireplace, looking for a sign of Sophia on the floor and wondering why he
should believe this guy. Because Wendy did? He stopped marching and planted his
hands on his hips. “Bullshit.”

Brian traded a solemn
look with Wendy and slowly dug into his back pocket like he was afraid to make
any sudden movements around Paul because he might shoot him dead if he did. “My
clearance is in here.”

Paul swapped
glances with Wendy before taking the wallet, assessing she’d already seen what
was folded within. The leather was soft against his skin and probably an
anniversary gift from Dot in the not-too-distant past. The cards inside were
even more imposing, and not just the platinum ones either. Everything related
to the CDC – three cards in all – had a magnetic stripe on the back and Brian’s
picture on the front. They looked legit and there was no way anyone could’ve
forged them after the outbreak, not with this world’s limited resources. Regardless,
Paul tossed the wallet back and played along. “So how did this happen? Who’s
responsible for this…
blight
that
killed everyone I know and love?”

Brian slipped the
wallet in his back pocket like he might need it later on at the grocery store
or gas station. “Like I said, we didn’t have a lot of time to figure that out
but I can tell you that the one hundred and seventy-five million vaccines I
mentioned, are produced by private manufactures. Now, these vaccines are never
in the same place at the same time, which means this had to be done by someone
with an international reach because this was no coincidence.”

Paul shrugged,
searching to fill in the blanks. “So who would have that kind of power?”

Brian shrugged
right back. “You tell me. Isis? Taliban? North Korea? Maybe a network of
activists like Anonymous – but instead of cyberattacks, they attacked our
health security. The only thing I know for sure is that this was an inside job.
People infiltrated manufacturing plants across the globe through
lawful
employment and means. A lot of
people
.”

“Like who?
Scientists and security guards?”

“That, or delivery
drivers, janitors, health inspectors. The number of people with even minimal
access to plant floors is alarmingly high.”

“So what can we do
to stop it?”

“The virus?” Brian
looked at him like Sophia had just done and it grated on his nerves. “In a
sense, we have to set a brush fire.”

“Brush fire?”
Wendy gasped, nervously noting the heavy woodwork running throughout the home.

“Down on the
flatlands, burning pastures is how ranchers rid their fields of unwanted brush,
weeds, ticks, and parasites.” He tipped his head down. “It’s the only way to be
sure.”

Paul pulled up his
jeans and studied Brian for any
tics
of his own. The kind that would tell him if this guy was full of shit or not.
Not that it seemed to matter. Brian was right about one thing: it was
definitely too late to stop it. “What about a cure?”

Blowing out a long
breath, he ran a palm back and forth across his thigh. “For who? Us or them?”

“Both.”

“It’s too late for
them. Their bodies have suffered severe internal damage.” His gaze slipped out
and over the second floor balcony, getting lost in the darkness swallowing the
mountainside. “I’m afraid nothing can ever bring them back.”

“No, but we can
help ease their pain.”

Wendy’s eyes
jerked to Paul and narrowed. “What do you mean?”

Paul ignored her
and continued on. “So what are you suggesting? We burn the whole town down?”

“Yes, but not with
fire.” He smiled thinly. “With ammunition.”

“Oh great idea, Brian.”
Grinning, he threw his hands out. “Shit! Why didn’t I think of that?”

“We start with one
town at a time and go from there, kill the corpses and save the people.” Brian
winked at Wendy. “It’s the only way to be sure.”

Crossing the room
to the large windows overlooking the front yard, Paul rested his hands on his
hips and stared into the night. “We’ll need to get to the Suburban for the food
and ammo before we can do anything.”

“And we will in
the morning,” Brian replied, coming over and slapping a hand on his shoulder.
He smiled warmly at Paul’s reflection in the glass. “First, let’s get a good
night’s sleep. You look like you could use one.”

Paul watched him
slip into the kitchen, Sophia’s words coming back to him on the smell of burnt
wood. If he wasn’t hallucinating, they may have a bit more of an edge than they
thought. A hand slipped through his arm and he turned to find Wendy tucking up
next to him, her body warm against his.

She searched his
face, bloodshot gaze caressing his eyes. “What did you mean when you said,
we can help ease their pain
?”

He stared down at
her, remembering that first night they met inside a frigid strip club, a purple
butterfly peeking from her back while she huddled with Dan for warmth. So much
had happened in such a short span of time it felt like he’d known her for
years. For decades. Wendy had stood by his side through thick and thin and he’d
known her longer than anyone on the entire planet. Anyone left alive. This was
his circle of friends now and it didn’t seem real. Didn’t seem right. A trade
had been made on his behalf and he was powerless to stop it, so maybe it was
time to relax into the pull and build upon his strengths…instead of continually
tripping over his faults.

“Paul.”

Prying her from
his arm, he backed away. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

That first day at
the Gulf of Mexico came back to him in her eyes. They thought they had made it back
then. Made it to safety. Just the two of them. Now he knew there was no
making it
. They would never
make it
. They could only make it better
than the day before and if that’s all they had then so-fucking-be-it. “Why do
you think that out of all the people out there, we survived?”

Her steady gaze
held onto his and when she spoke her voice was low and unwavering. “Fate.”

His mouth opened as
he silently cursed fate for taking his wife from him. For taking everything.
“We should get some sleep,” he said, turning for the hallway leading to three
of the house’s five bedrooms.

She grabbed him by
the wrist and pulled him against her, staring up into his eyes. “Did you see
her again?” She swallowed hard. “Sophia?”

Just the mention
of her name quickened his breath and broke his heart. The room spun around him.
The flickering flames painted the walls with things that weren’t there. Despite
Sophia’s growing decay, he couldn’t wait to see her again. Couldn’t wait to
feel her scaly skin against his. Taking a calming breath, he looked Wendy in
the eye and reminded himself to breathe. “Yes.”

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT

T
he morning sun was bright against the melting snow,
and descending the driveway was much easier than going up it. Paul looked from
Curtis, Stephanie and Billy flanking his left to Wendy, Calvin, and Brian standing
to his right. Together, they formed a wall of resistance no corpse wanted to
cross. Nonetheless, Paul could feel them out there.

Watching.

Itching.

Drooling.

“It’s like they
know we have ammunition again,” Brian whispered, throwing his pinched gaze
around the quiet trees encroaching upon both sides of the driveway. “When we
ran out, they somehow knew it and tried getting inside the house.”

“How’s that even possible?”
Billy asked, clutching an M4 and searching the trees. “How the hell could they
know something like that?”

Brian grunted.
“Probably because we stopped shooting at them.”

“Well, they know
different now.” Curtis spit onto the sun-splashed asphalt. “Come on out,
ladies! Breakfast is served!”

“Curtis,” Paul
hissed, setting his jaw.

He shrugged. “I
thought they already knew we were here.”

“They do, but you just
scared the crap out of us.” Stephanie sighed, forcing her muscles to relax.

Calvin adjusted
the M4 hanging from his neck. “Probably not the best idea to be scaring people
who’re holding fully automatic weapons, Curtis.”

“That’s his thing,
man,” Billy told him.

“It’s not my
thing
.”

“Yes, it is,”
Stephanie murmured, moving with the group’s slow and steady advancement.

“Boo!” Curtis
grabbed Calvin’s arm, causing him to errantly fire a short burst into the treetops.

“Goddamnit, Curtis,”
he growled. “Don’t be doing that shit, man. I could’ve shot your sister.”

“Hey, you shoot my
big sister and I’m going to start getting pissed.”

“Aww, that’s so
sweet,” Stephanie replied, rolling her eyes.

Paul turned and
looked behind him, heart jumping. The look on Wendy’s face curdled his blood
and the fact that she’d stopped walking without warning sent a nest of restless
nerves slithering down his spine. “Stop,” he said to the others. Wendy stared
past him like he wasn’t there. Like he didn’t exist, pink gun hanging limply in
her hand. “What is it?” he whispered, throat tightening with his grip on the
M4.

Jaw slowly lowering,
she pointed past him.

Turning, he
followed her index finger to a thick skeletal tree on the right side of the
driveway just before the asphalt disappeared around a pine-tree laden bend to
the left. His heartrate jumped, sending a burst of vertigo rushing through him.
Cora’s bloody robe flapped in the breeze, her face gaunt and blank. Paul’s
heart cracked down the middle. His watery eyes followed her crooked finger
across the driveway to where Brock stood with a toothpick wiggling in the
corner of his shit-eating grin.

The cowboy pulled
his bloodstained boxers up and pointed a meaty finger at the sky. “Look up,
boss.”

Adrenaline dumped
into Paul’s already racing bloodstream, accelerating his breath and leaving him
lightheaded. Slowly looking up, terror widened his eyes when he saw all of the
dead people in the trees. They were everywhere and he barely had time to wonder
how they managed to climb so high when something hit the ground behind him and
Wendy screamed. Gunfire shredded the quiet mountainside and before he could draw
a bead on a target, corpses began raining down from the branches like dead autumn
leaves. Something hit his left shoulder, driving him to the ground and jerking
the M4 from his grasp. A dead sheriff’s deputy sneered and hobbled closer, his
uniform pants torn off at the knees. Paul grabbed the M4 but it twisted in the
neck strap. His peripheral vision was a downpour of corpses falling to the
ground like toxic rain. The deputy reached for him with both hands, cheekbone
poking through his face and hunger haunting his eyes. Scooting backwards on his
butt, Paul pulled the PX4 Storm from its leg holster and shot him in the face
before pushing to his Adidas. He swung the gun from body to body, not sure who was
dead and who was alive. Gun blasts rang in his ears. The smell of decay filled
the air. Paul took aim at a young man hopping a piggyback ride from Wendy as
she spun in circles and fired into the air. Unable to line up a clear shot, he
put a slug through a woman sneaking up on Stephanie from behind. Turning back
to Wendy, he saw Curtis grab the thing from her back and yank it to the ground.
Paul shot the man once in the head and took Wendy’s arm, steadying her on her
feet. “Are you okay?”

Pulling a hand
from the back of her neck, she stared hard at her open palm. The fact that it
was free of blood did little to deter the shock welling in her eyes. “I think
so,” she panted, looking up to meet her reflection in his sunglasses. “Look out!”

Paul dropped to
one knee and Wendy sent a two-round burst over his head, ripping open the two
things about to tear into him from behind. One after the next, they dispatched
the dead while wasting as little ammo as possible. The last of the stiffs fell from
the trees and, even with a fight still on their hands, Paul had time to notice
how well his crew worked together as a team. Like fingers of the same hand.
Even Brian picked up the slack in all the right places, as if they’d done this
a thousand times before. When it got quiet again, the place was a bloody mess
that smelled like pennies and death. Ragged bodies littered the hillside and driveway,
and stepping over and around them was no easy task.

The woman who
played possum yesterday skittered through Paul’s mind. He kept his weapon
pointed at the head of every crumpled corpse he passed, holding his breath and
gritting his teeth. It was hard to believe they were once human. He could
almost see them laughing in the sun. Spending Christmas at mom and dad’s.
Snatching his ankle and biting into his calf. Clearing the images with a quick
shake of the head, he pressed on. This was almost worse than seeing them fall from
the trees. Almost. Everything was too quiet, too still. Even the breeze held
its breath. His pulse echoed in his head, growing louder with each body he put
behind him. Stepping over a fat man missing his Adam’s apple, Paul stared into
the man’s gaping eyes, wondering if he was here to help him or kill him. With
the dead these days, Paul was never sure.

“I can’t believe
that! Those bees were actually hiding in the trees,” Calvin said, sweating in
the cold and searching the treetops. “We’re totally fucked, man. Totally
fucked.”

“No we’re not,”
Paul replied, searching the treetops with an intensity that contradicted every
word he said.

Billy vehemently
shook his head, white knuckling the M4. “I didn’t sign up for this shit, man!”

“How long can we
keep this up?”

Paul turned to
Calvin and tried to control the panic in his voice. Calvin hadn’t been outside
the base since day two and this had to be intimidating as all hell for him. “As
long as it takes.”

“That’s right,”
Curtis whispered, jerking his M4 around. “And quit calling them
bees
. We call them stragglers around
here.”

“You gotta admit
bees
is kind of cooler,” Billy replied. “Ya
know, like zom-
bees
.”

“I get it already
and it’s still stupid.”

“Who were those
people back there?”

Paul turned to
Brian but didn’t follow his jerk of the chin to where Cora and Brock were no
longer standing. He knew who he was referring to and giving an answer at this
point in time wasn’t high on his list of priorities. Right now they needed the
food and ammo in the Suburban. That’s it. “Friends.”

Brian’s face
soured. “
Friends
?” He took a hand
from the bolt-action rifle to wipe sweat from his brow, searching Wendy’s face
for an explanation he would never understand. “But they were…dead,” he said in
a trembling voice. “Like the others.”

“No,” she breathed,
pink gun clutched in both hands. “They’re
nothing
like the others.”

Coming around the pine-tree
laden bend in the driveway, Paul shot a hand out, stopping the entire unit on a
dime. The sun was warm on their faces, lighting up the ghostly plumes rushing
from their lips. They stared down the rest of the driveway, eyebrows bending in
the golden light. There had to be at least twenty-five stragglers standing
between them and the Suburban and this wasn’t looking good. Paul could feel
more of them hiding in the trees around them and didn’t need a decomposing ghost
to tell him the dead people guarding the truck weren’t here to stop them from
getting to the food and ammo. No, they were here to sacrifice themselves. To
waste the group’s ammunition so the other things hiding in the woods could get
their fill.

“Jesus,” Calvin
whispered, pushing his glasses up the greasy bridge of his nose. “Why aren’t
they attacking?”

“They’re bait,”
Paul replied, swinging the end of his weapon to the trees.

Wendy and
Stephanie picked up on what he was saying and turned their guns to the sides as
well, readying themselves for the ambush they knew was coming. The foul horde
watched them through vacant eyes from the bottom of the drive, curling their
hands into mangled fists, itching to move. But something was holding them back.
They wanted to attack. To feed. Paul could see it in their eyes and hear it in
their grunts but something was stopping them from fulfilling their animalistic
impulses. Something he couldn’t see.

Intellect?

Orders?

Rules?

Whatever it was it
scared the living shit out of him because, one way or another, this meant there
was something still rattling around in their little brains. Something still
firing synapses that triggered a choreographed reaction that could spell the
end for mankind.

“So what now?” Billy
whispered.

Examining the
corpses standing next to the vehicle, Paul’s heart banged in his chest. “They
want us to waste our ammo on them and accidentally shoot the truck in the
process so the ones hiding in the woods can make easy work of us.”

Billy and Curtis
jerked their guns around the trees, muscles tensing in their necks.

“Damn,” Curtis
groaned. “Won’t be long before these things start outsmarting Billy.”

“Look who’s
talking,
Slingblade
.”

“Oh, I’m looking,
Scott Peterson.”

“That’s enough,”
Paul hissed, adjusting the neck strap and trying to think.

“So what do we
do?” Wendy’s chest rose and fell beneath her blue jacket, a loose stand of
bangs hanging in her face.

“We need that food
and ammo, so we go closer.”

A white plume shot
from Billy’s nose. “Okay, that’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I was
thinking.”

“If we don’t get
the food we’ll starve to death.” Stephanie shifted her combat boots on the
driveway, examining the dead with gravity pulling on her pretty face. “We have
no choice.”

Billy turned to
her. “Steph, there’s way too many of them.”

“We can take em,”
Curtis replied. “And don’t call her
Steph
.”

Lines carved
through Billy’s forehead. “What about the ones hiding in the trees?”

“We get the truck
and run them over with it if we have to,” Paul answered, pausing to meet their
eyes. “So whatever you do, don’t shoot the truck.”

“Oh, that’s
perfect.” Calvin flipped his bangs out of his eyes with a quick head jerk. “And
how’re we supposed to do that? They’re standing right next to it.”

“We lure them
away.”

“With what?”
Curtis watched the corpses watching them back, shaking his head. “We’re all out
of Beggin’ Strips, your eminence.”

Billy slowly
turned to Paul with his mouth agape. “Oh, hell no! Don’t even look at me, man.”