Dead: Winter (15 page)

“We can’t join you,” the man whispered. He dropped his eyes and seemed to find something fa
s
cinating on the grip of his pistol.

“Why not?”

“We got three infected children.” Juan felt his guts twist just a bit at that revelation. “Their m
a
mas won’t leave till they pass. One of them says she will take care of her child even after it turns.”

“Take care of?” Juan didn’t like the sound of that at all. “She knows the kid will be a deader, right?”

“Everybody knows,” the man said with a grim-faced nod. “Folks are trying to talk sense into her, but it ain’t making a dent.”

“Looks like you have a pretty secure set up here,” Juan said, changing the subject.

“It does okay,” the man agreed. “Things get a little hairy when one of those mobs comes through, though. That’s why we filled all the vehicles with concrete. Had one a few months ago that moved cars out of the way. Damn things just squashed one a
n
other until some of ‘em popped like ticks, but the cars started scooting. We had to stay out of sight in our tree-huts for almost three weeks until it thinned out enough to go down and take out the ones that stayed.”

A cold breeze swept through, carrying with it the familiar stench of undeath. Juan looked around for where the source might be originating. The man must’ve smelled it too, because he swiveled his body around and raised his pistol.

“Maybe you should be heading back with your people,” the man suggested. “Oh…and one more thing,” he called as Juan turned to go. “I’m just gonna ask this once, have your pe
o
ple salvage some place else. We sorta figure this area to be ours.”

Juan nodded. He understood the man’s point. Besides, Juan could see movement in the shadows of the nearby streets as an undeterminable number of zombies were moving in the direction of this little cluster of survivors. These folks were in for rough times. Not only were deaders on the outside of their barricade, they were about to have them inside also. There was no way that could end well. He didn’t give them more than a couple of months.

Winding back to the water’s edge, he found Thad and Keith loading a pair of rickety shopping carts full of various odds and ends into the boat. A half dozen bodies lay sprawled around the landing.

“So what’s the story?” Thad asked as Juan stepped in to help load the newly acquired booty.

“Probably come back in a few months and have a shitload of supplies to pick through,” Juan a
n
swered.

Keith’s head came around sharply. “What do you mean?”

“They got infected kids inside their fence and nobody will put them down,” Juan said. “And as I was leaving, it looked like a couple hundred were coming. They’re screwed.”

The other two men looked back towards the direction of the encampment. Already the moans of the dead could be heard over the sound of the winter wind blowing through open windows and busted out doorways.

“People are stupid,” Keith muttered.

“No,” Thad disagreed. “They just can’t evolve quickly enough.”



The sounds of screaming were faint, but in a dead world, sound carried in a whole new way. Chad dropped the armload of wood he’d been carrying up to the hotel and took off in a sprint. He knew the sound of his daughter’s scream…and the one that had just pierced the air was definitely hers.

He drew the military-issue .45 from its holster and clicked the safety off. The rules were strict about using firearms: last resort only. If his daughter was in danger, that qualified in his mind. He ejected the magazine and ensured that it held nine rounds by seeing the brass casing in the third hole down. Sho
v
ing it back into place, he pulled the slide and let it push the first round into the chamber.

Ahead he saw a few more people on the run. One of them was Scott Colson. Scott had joined up with the group back in Modesto. He had also almost gotten everybody killed when they had sought refuge in a school when he’d gone searching for the cafeteria and some possible supplies. Ever since that incident, Scott hadn’t spoken much to anybody.

Chad watched as the man reached the top of the ridge ahead and came to an abrupt stop. Whate
v
er Scott saw, it had frozen him in his tracks. When the man began to backpedal, Chad just knew that he would never reach his daughter in time to save her. Something in his gut told him that she would suffer the same fate as her mother.

Forcing himself to move faster, he sent snow flying as he plowed ahead through the shin-deep powder. When he finally reached the top of the little hill he stopped beside Scott. Down below, the small creek where laundry was done ran by, heedless of the carnage happening on its banks.

Scanning the scene, his eyes fastened on his daughter. She was standing in the middle of the stream, pulling the arm of a young man who was caught in a terrible tug-of-war. The other arm was being pulled by a zombie that was still wearing most of its hiking gear.

As he ran down the hill, Chad noticed blood running down his daughter’s face. He was halfway when Ronni lost her grip on the young man and fell back into the icy water, vanishing from sight for a second. That second was all it took for the zombie clutching the young man to sink its teeth into his forearm as that pair tumbled back to the slushy banks of the stream.

Chad never even briefly considered helping the young man. He plunged into the freezing water and scooped his daughter i
n
to his arms. She was limp, but the water had done something wonderful; it had washed away the blood. The girl didn’t have a scratch on her! That meant all the blood had b
e
longed to som
e
body else. God have mercy on him, Chad didn’t care.

He slogged to the bank, but as he reached it, a pair of u
n
dead youngsters—recent additions to the ranks, one of them vaguely recognizable—met him with outstretched arms. Having no choice, he dropped his daughter at his feet and brought his knife up from its sheath in one fluid motion, driving the steel blade up under the chin and into the brain pan. Not bothering to try and keep his grip on the knife, he brought his pistol up and jammed it against the forehead of the second threat and squeezed the trigger. Even muffled by being pressed firmly against the creature’s head, the shot echoed through the mountain air.

Glancing around, he saw dozens more of the cursed things pouring from the trees. It must’ve been a herd; brought, most likely, by the noise made as Ronni and the others did clothes in the stream while laughing and just being teenaged kids.

More of the adults from the village were arriving now. It was like watching two armies of old clash on the field of battle. The living ran into the wall of dead with axes, mauls, and wic
k
ed blades of all sizes. There were shouts and screams from the living mixed with the moans and cries of the u
n
dead.

Chad noticed several heads turn in his direction—both li
v
ing and dead—in response to the report of his firearm. There would be some pissed off people when this was over. He didn’t care. His first and only priority was the protection and safety of his daughter. Besides, what were they gonna do? Kick him out? For just a moment his mind toyed with that possibility before discarding it as ridic
u
lous.

Picking up his daughter again, Chad saw the young man she had been tugging on moments ago rise from under a pair of blue-grey skinned zombies. The young man’s remaining insides spilled out of the gaping hole in his midsection, landing in the slush in a still-steaming pile. One arm was gone, and the throat was torn.

He shook his head as he marveled at the lack of blood visible from the neck wound. Movies had loved showing bright, spurting jets of red shooting from those types of wounds. Ho
w
ever, the reality was that, once a person was dead, the heart stopped pumping. There were surprisingly little incidents of spraying blood. Usually, as in the case of this poor lad, there was a residual trickle at best.

One of the residents of the village that Chad didn’t reco
g
nize—and there were more each day—came up and crushed the back of the young man’s head with a long-handled sledge. The zombie to
p
pled and the living assailant brought the heavy head of the hammer down twice more, shattering the skull and bringing to mind a comedian who once ended his shows with a watermelon smashing e
x
travaganza.

Chad started back towards the village as the residents finished off the last of the small zombie herd that had found them in this remote hideaway. On his way, he passed a man kneeling beside a woman who had an ugly bite on one arm.

“…might be immune,” he was pleading.

“I’m not,” the woman insisted. “I can already feel it, like rancid oil in my veins. I can taste the death.”

“But—” he began, and she cut him off.

“No!” The woman reached down and clasped the man’s hand that still held a dripping machete. “I won’t end up like them. Do it.”

“I can’t,” the man sobbed, pulling away. He rose to his feet and ran off; not towards the village, but instead down the trail that disappeared into the white-coated pines.

Chad paused as he and the woman made eye contact.

“Please,” the woman whispered.

Looking around to ensure that the coast was clear, he set his daughter down and approached the woman. All he still had b
e
sides the pistol was a hand axe. He fingered it dubiously, staring into the woman’s eyes.

“You sure?” he asked as he approached.

The woman nodded, tears streaming down her cheeks. She closed her eyes, but just as she did, Chad thought he caught a hint of black in the whites. Maybe he just wanted to see that. Maybe he wanted self-justification of what he was about to do as he raised the axe high in the air.

He brought it down hard in the center of the woman’s forehead. Unlike a zombie, the woman cried out briefly, and her body began to shake and twitch violently. Also unlike the u
n
dead, a living person whose heart still beat sent quite a bit of blood in the air. Chad looked at his hands and let go of the axe, leaving it jutting obscenely from the woman’s forehead.

Stepping over to an area of snow not soiled with blood, he plunged his hands in and scrubbed them furiously. He couldn’t touch his daughter until he was clean. Only, it seemed that ev
e
ry time he examined his hands…his fingers…under the nails… there was still the blood of that woman staining them like he was a modern day Lady Macbeth.

A hand touched his shoulder and Chad spun, prepared to strike. Scott Colson put his arms up to block any possible blow. Chad let out the breath he couldn’t remember holding and took a step back.

“We lost a few,” Scott said, hiking a thumb over his shoulder back to the scene of the battle. “Is your daughter okay…?” He seemed unsure of what to say, and his mouth hung open for a moment before he continued. “I saw the blood.”

“It wasn’t hers,” Chad said flatly.

Scott looked down at the girl sprawled in the snow with a peculiar scowl. Chad didn’t have time to waste trying to explain, he scooped his daughter back up and headed to the village. He needed to get her inside and warmed up. Looking down, he rea
l
ized why Scott had that dubious look on his face, her skin was turning blue and her lips were a horrid purple.

Twenty minutes later he had stripped her of her wet clothes and bundled her in several blankets and comforters. Her color was returning to normal, but there was a new problem…she wouldn’t stop shivering.



Darlene set the bone saw down and removed the two inch square of skull she had cut in the top of the cranium of her subject. She didn’t know what she expected to find, but she let out a gasp noneth
e
less. A blackish syrupy substance seeped out of the square and spread across the linen she had placed under the cre
a
ture’s head. She still considered them “creatures” and she refused to succumb to Lena’s insistence that these things were horror movie monsters.