Loose Ends: A Zombie Novel (21 page)

The tall zombie got down on his knees quietly between the feet of the stretching, pulling zombies. He stared at Doc’s calf. His white tongue slid over his teeth and out of his cracked lips. The blood was gone from the tongue’s rough surface. He leaned his face into the chain link about a foot off the ground. He stuck his tongue through the link as far as it would go. He waved it up and down in the air. I could see a long, dark slash in the skin under his tongue. It spread apart as the tongue strained up toward his own nose. The gash closed again as the tongue dropped back toward the silk shirt pasted to his skin.

The fingers on the zombie’s split hand still worked. They crept up the fence like alien worms. Each finger seemed to operate independently of the others. They laced through the links of the fence and pulled the spilt flesh upward. Then, they wriggled up and into the next link crawling up higher.

The zombie with the flappy, claw hand ignored this alien motion as he continued to try to lick at the blood spreading on Doc’s calf. I wiggled my thumb over my hurt wrist without realizing I was doing it until the pain stopped me.

The backpack ripped and then ripped some more. The goose’s limp neck and one, dead wing slid out on the zombies’ side. The corpses on the sides and in the back of the press pitched themselves forward and in to grab at the bird. Their weight bulged the fence out on to our side briefly. The ones in the front were pinned immobile for a moment.  Doc was able to pull the torn backpack on to our side.

The bird’s wing was ripped off by one pale hand. The bird’s belly sliced on top of the fence. Blood and bile dripped into their faces. The zombies lunged again. The bird was pulled over on their side and ripped apart in an instant. Feathers and flesh flew in every direction as the zombies bit each other trying to get a piece of the shredded carcass.

Doc stepped back and dropped the bag. Slappy was still on the ground with his wriggling claw ignoring the splatter from the bird as he stared at Doc’s feet.

Doc said, “I’m starting to think shooting that bird wasn’t worth the trouble, Mutt. What do you think?”

I didn’t say anything. He reached down into the torn canvas and pulled out a rolled up magazine. It was speckled with blood. He slid it into the back of his pants smearing the tail of his shirt with the bird’s splatter.

The fence tilted over us a few inches as the zombies turned their attention away from the bird pieces and back to us. I thought it was just my imagination. The hook loops that connected the sheet of links to the posts of the fence began to strain and pop audibly.  The chain link became loose suddenly. It bowed out and the post in front of us tilted toward us several more inches.

We both stepped back.

Doc said, “Time to go, Mutt.”

We angled up through the pines up the slope and away from the tracks and weakening fence. I glanced back once. Slappy was licking his split hand again and was watching us go. He was still kneeling on the ground calmly as the others struggled to get through the fence.

***

We could still hear the fence behind us as we went deeper into the woods. There was a noise in front of us. Someone was walking through our path. Doc patted my shoulder as he kneeled down. I did the same. I was afraid our earlier gunfire was going to bring more of them through the woods to drive us back into the canyon.

A deer stepped out and looked over at us. It sniffed the air and then ducked its head to bite up a tuft of green poking through the mat of pine straw.

Doc’s hand rested on the butt of the gun stuck in the front of his waistband and belt. I was thankful it was empty. He had a bad habit of wanting to kill things at the worst times. I’m not sure he was holding the gun consciously because he didn’t pull it.

The fence rattled more loudly behind us. The deer raised its head and looked past us.  It sniffed the air again. This time it turned and bounded up the slope through the trees away from us.

We decided to follow as we fled more slowly after it.

The ground leveled out and we kept moving through the woods. I listened, but didn’t hear them behind us or any new ones around us. They had to be coming. We had fired off dozens of rounds in our escape which wasn’t quite resolved.

We found a trail and began following it. I was nervous. It seemed like a bad choice to me for some reason. I had no reason to think zombies paid any attention to trails, but it still made me uneasy. I felt exposed.

I kept looking back behind us.

Doc glanced back at me and whispered, “Do you hear something?”

I shook my head and looked back again.

He said, “I’m worried about them too. We’ll go back and look for them when it’s safe. If I don’t make it, you can do whatever you want, I guess.”

I looked back at him suddenly. He was facing forward again. I had no idea why we would want to go back. It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Chef and Short Order. I had not given any thought to them as we trudged through the woods away from our struggle on the tracks. I was still in flight mode.

I looked down at his calf. There was a long tear along his pants leg over the wound. The ripped material puckered open as he walked. One side of his sock was red.  As our feet swished and crunched more loudly on the straw than I liked, his bloody foot came down inside the boot and squished. I started looking around in the straw to be sure he wasn’t leaving a trail of blood. I stared back at the knob of bone on the back of his skull as we kept walking.

We walked up behind a wood pile with a rotten canvas over it peppered in pine straw. Doc crouched down and looked over the top. There were the backs of two story houses beyond much smaller, chain link fences. Most of the windows were intact. The vinyl siding was falling away from the houses in places. Rotten wood slats were exposed underneath. A gutter was hanging loose from one roof. The fine, green lawns had been overtaken by tall, yellow grasses. The three houses we could see from the woodpile looked the same except for the shade of the fading siding.

After a moment of watching, Doc waved me forward and put his finger over his mouth to signal silence. He was the one that was always talking, but I followed him anyway.

We walked around the woodpile and up to the fence to the white house between the blue and tan ones. Doc lifted the rusted latch at the gate slowly. He pushed it open a foot with a loud screech of metal on metal. He froze and waited. We could hear birds again.

Doc nodded and slid through into the tall grass of the backyard. I followed him through without touching the gate. He walked slowly being careful to spread the grass with the toes of his boots to be sure he wasn’t stepping on anything or anyone.

He paused over a skeleton. The bones were separate, so it was difficult to identify it. It wasn’t human. It also wasn’t going to attack us, so we kept walking.

The back deck was collapsed on one side. The furniture and large umbrella were cast aside in the broken lumber on the ground. Doc walked up the steps and on to the splintering wood on the other side. The top layer of wood crumbled dry and peeled away with each step. It wasn’t much louder than walking in the pine straw, but I was worried about the strength of the boards. I followed Doc across.

He reached the door and cupped his hands over his eyes to look through the streaked glass. After a moment, he reached down and pulled the door knob. The entire house popped, but the door stayed sealed. He tapped the glass pane above the knob either testing it, trying to get something to reveal itself, or thinking about what to do next.

I tapped his shoulder and he jumped. He sighed and looked back at me. I pointed down next to the door. Doc looked down and saw a green, ceramic frog. He reached down and picked it up. He smiled back at me as he pulled the key out and held it up for me to see. He started to say something, but I held my finger over my mouth. He nodded and turned to the door.

I had snuck into a few houses during the confusing days that I was alone and looking for food before the Complex. Sometimes there had been food for me and sometimes there were monsters trying to use me for food. The people sometimes hid keys outside before they became monsters.

The key was stubborn, but Doc finally fiddled the lock into submission. He turned the knob and pulled the door open with a long, ripping crack.

***

The plastic weather stripping tore away from the door and stuck to the frame in several places. Doc waved me in and then pulled the door closed behind him. He reached down and turned the tiny lock switch back. If the zombies came to this door, the lock wouldn’t be much protection.

The kitchen still had dishes in the sink. Pots of dirt were set around with the plants long decayed. The refrigerator was spotted black all around its surface. Doc placed the frog and key on the faded section of the table cloth near the back window and open curtains.

There was a door in the kitchen that we would discover led to a basement with one of the family members under the stairs. We decided to bypass that for the moment.

In the living room, there were dead cats around the floor. Their bodies were curled and dried black. Their smell was still deep set in the carpet. There were small, bloody, paw prints along the carpet and the separating boards along the walkway to the front door and stairs.

As we went forward, we found the lady of the house still waiting for us on her sofa. Her mouth was open and turned up at us revealing a dark, decayed crater. Her tongue had rotted away to a stump or had been bitten off. She still held a .45 revolver in her hand. There were bite marks in her exposed skin around her loose dress. Some were from the cats. Others were not. Her leathery skin was grey and as dry as the cats around her feet. There was a black spray that was caked and dried on the wall behind her open head.

Doc went over and took hold of the gun. He pulled at it to get it loose. The woman’s arm crackled as it lifted off the fabric of the couch cushion. Swatches of the material came up with her skin that matched the thread pattern underneath. The elbow popped out of joint under the mummified flesh. The hand held her weapon in a literal death grip. It broke loose from her hand finally. Some of her fingers snapped off and bounced on the carpet.

He opened the chamber and spun it before snapping it back into place. He looked up at me and back at the gun.

Doc said, “It might work. It has been sitting a long time. There has to be a kit or something to clean it, I would think. I’m afraid it might explode in my face. Depending on how this scratch works out, that may not be a problem.”

His voice echoed off the walls around us and rang off the light fixtures above us. Houses that had been left for dead reacted oddly to sound. I looked around at the ceiling and over the banister that disappeared up into the second floor.

Doc said, “There are two empty chambers.”

I looked at him and then back up the stairs. We walked up together. The cat prints coated the stairs in several trails moving in both directions. We could already see the hand dangling over the top step. Blood was pooled and solidified underneath it.

The body was across the floor coming out of the bathroom. The shower curtain with an intricate, flowered pattern had been pulled down and laid over its legs and back. The hand not hanging over the stairs was sunk deep in the carcass of one of the cats. The cat’s body was missing its head as the man’s hand disappeared into its decayed side between the exposed rib bones.

The back of the man’s head was caved in around a perfectly round hole. He was face down in a wash of blood that had coated the carpet under him in a smooth, thick film.

I thought about the woman with the duct tape bonds back in the bathroom at Doc’s secret house surrounded by dead police. I started wishing I had been teamed up with Chef or Short Order instead of being alone with Doc in this house. I would find out they did not make it out of the Super Max that day, so this was sadly the better option.

“That would be shot number two,” Doc said. “Or I guess that’s actually shot one and the wifey-poo on the couch did herself with shot two.”

We searched the upstairs and found Doc’s gun kit in the master bedroom. Doc also pulled out some clothes and a pair of sneakers. We found a first aid kit in the bathroom. We moved everything we found into the guestroom. It was less worn and there were two windows looking out on two sides of the neighborhood. We went through the kitchen and found a few cans.

Then, we opened the door in the kitchen and discovered the basement.

The stairs creaked as we went down. Doc whistled twice to awaken anything that might want to grab us in the dark. I didn’t like how unfinished basement stairs opened in the back to let something reach through to grab ankles. Light was coming in from small windows high on the concrete walls, but it was still dark.  There were rows of boxes. We found a shelf of preserves. I started to pick up a few when I saw the body.

Doc saw it too. He kicked the shoe sticking out from under the stairs. Doc reached down and grabbed an ax handle. He pulled it dragging the body out from under the stairs by the ax where it was jammed into the forehead of the skull. He pressed his foot with the bloody sock against the side of the head. The skull crumbled under Doc’s boot. He lifted the blade out without having to pull it.

Doc hoisted the ax on to his shoulder. He looked over at me by the shelf of jars.

“Grab a couple,” he said. “I need to get back up and treat this cut just in case I am going to live through the night.”

Once we were back up in the guestroom, I set done the jars I had carried and Doc leaned the ax against the door with the head on the floor. He opened the alcohol and peroxide bottles first. He waved them under his nose.

“They’re denatured. I might as well spit on my cut,” Doc mumbled.

He found a small bottle of iodine and swished it around. He shrugged and started untying his boots.

I looked out the window to the blue house across the side yard. In the backyard of the blue house, there were at least a dozen skeletons. With them lying in the tall grass and not being able to see the back of the house where they seemed to be heading, it was hard to get an accurate count. I couldn’t see their skulls clearly, but I had a suspicion of what they all had in common.