Authors: Joe McKinney
Mutated - 04 (4 page)
He just didn’t know which.
He heard voices and the sound of boots crunching through rotten wood coming from the other side of the building to his right, and he knew he had to leave soon. If he stayed here, they’d be on him in minutes.
Slowly, praying his knees wouldn’t crack and give him away, he rolled over onto his butt and climbed to his feet. He slid his back up against the wall of the Pizza Hut and was making his way down the narrow gap between the buildings when a zombie stepped around the corner, blocking his path.
Richardson sucked in a breath.
Three more zombies rounded the corner behind the first, each of them missing an ear.
The lead zombie extended his hands out toward Richardson, opening and closing his fingers like he was begging Richardson for something. The man’s neck was bent to one side, the muscles in his face slack, the skin a jaundiced yellow. Flies swarmed around his head, and his clothes were so soiled Richardson couldn’t tell what color they had once been. For a moment, Richardson was lost in the pale white deadness of the man’s eyes. He was still thinking of the downward slide the man out in the street was just beginning, and he wondered what, if anything, was left of the person this zombie in front of him had once been. Was there a part of him that still thought and felt and watched through those dead eyes, horrified by the murder and death that surely lay in its path?
“I’m sorry for you,” Richardson said, and drew his machete as the man began to moan.
C
HAPTER
3
HAPTER
3
Without warning the zombie broke into a sprint, running straight at Richardson, arms outstretched. Richardson let out a startled gasp and slashed at the man with the machete. The blade glanced off the zombie’s left arm, cutting into the meat but doing nothing to slow him down. His momentum carried him headlong into Richardson’s chest, and when they hit, they both went tumbling over backward, landing in a pile of bricks and rotten plywood and tall weeds.
The attack caught Richardson completely off guard. Watching the zombie’s slow, staggering gait and jerky movements Richardson had thought he was dealing with one of the slow ones, the recently infected. But they were face-to-face now, rolling around in the weeds and the busted lumber, the man snarling and snapping his teeth just inches from Richardson’s nose, and he could see the threads of red veins in the eyes. He could see the intelligence, too. Anger and insanity and intelligence. This was a Stage III zombie, and he had tricked him by pretending to be one of the slow movers. He never would have let the man get this close if he’d known he was dealing with one of the smart ones; and as the zombie managed to roll over on top of him, the stench of his fetid breath in his nostrils, Richardson had the terrible realization that the zombie must have known that, too.
The man had tricked him.
He grabbed the zombie under the chin and pushed his snapping teeth away with the heel of his palm. The man snarled like a fighting dog, a wet, snapping sound. His fingernails dug into Richardson’s arms with unexpected strength.
“Get off, motherfucker,” Richardson hissed.
Come on, he told himself. You gotta fight. You’ve got to.
Grunting, bicycling his knees up into the man’s gut, Richardson broke the zombie’s hold on his biceps. He turned his head, looking for the rifle, and saw it partially buried in some tall weeds. It was just out of reach. He rolled over to his right, creating distance from the zombie, and scrambled to his feet.
The zombie rolled off in the opposite direction, landing with his back against the wall of the Pizza Hut. He climbed to his feet easily and lunged for the machete in Richardson’s hands. His fingers caught in the sleeves of Richardson’s Windbreaker and for a moment they spun around an invisible pivot point as Richardson struggled to break loose from the man’s grip.
The other zombies were halfway down the alley now. Too close. He had wasted too much time. Pushing the zombie’s hands up and out of the way, he kicked the heel of his right boot into the man’s gut, knocking him backward. When the zombie came at him again he swung the machete down on the man’s outstretched hand and felt the blade whisper through bone. Two fingers and part of the zombie’s hand hit the wall of the redbrick building with a dull thud and landed in the grass, the fingers curled toward the sky like the legs of an upturned crab. The zombie’s arm dropped to his side but otherwise the man showed no reaction to the damage. He continued forward. Richardson swung the machete twice more, hacking at the zombie’s outstretched arms. Then he stepped to his right and brought the machete down on the zombie’s head with a two-handed overhead chop. The blade connected right above the man’s missing ear and sank into the skull down to the top of the mouth.
The zombie fell to his knees, bringing the machete with him. Richardson yanked at the machete’s handle frantically, causing the dead body to jerk and twitch like a poorly handled marionette, but the blade wouldn’t come free.
The other zombies were too close. He felt one of them drop a hand on his shoulder and he twisted away, toward the front of the building. The zombies were grabbing on to his backpack, pulling him backward, but he was able to wrest free.
Barely.
He reached the rifle in the tall weeds and tried to swing it around like a club, but one of the zombies had closed the distance between them and was able to grab hold of the barrel and shake it back and forth so that Richardson couldn’t gain control of it. The zombie managed to shift its grip forward and grabbed hold of Richardson’s wrist. The gun and the zombie both fell to the ground as Richardson pulled himself loose, and he found himself standing over the zombie.
The zombie was on his knees, reaching for him, as Richardson backed away. The other zombies were still a few feet behind the one on its knees, but they were close enough to keep him from retrieving his gun and his machete. Still backing up, Richardson slipped on one of the bricks and nearly lost his footing. He reached down and scooped up a brick and smashed it down with both hands on the kneeling zombie’s face, the brick connecting with a muffled clank and then crumbling.
He let the ruined bits fall from his fingers.
He was out on the sidewalk in front of the Pizza Hut now, stunned by what had just happened to him. In eight years of fighting the infected, he had never seen one use such a complicated ruse as pretending to be a slow mover. The implications of that were staggering.
Richardson turned away from the two remaining zombies, looking for a place to run, and froze when he saw the Red Man watching him. The Red Man had been kneeling at the body of the dead man in the St. Louis Cardinals hat, but when he saw Richardson he stood up and took a few steps forward. There was no self-assured smile on his face now. Just a steady, unyielding stare. He stepped forward again, eyes narrowed on Richardson.
Behind him, Richardson heard footsteps in the grass. He glanced quickly over his shoulder and saw the two zombies coming out of the alley. When Richardson looked back to the street, the Red Man was pointing in his direction. Then the Red Man threw back his head and began to moan. The zombies in the street all turned their heads in Richardson’s direction. He made a quick scan of the street, all those dead eyes looking at him, and he swallowed.
One of the Red Man’s soldiers fired at Richardson, hitting the wall behind him, peppering the back of his neck and scalp with bits of brick and mortar.
He ducked his head and ran.
Behind him, he heard the hacking cough of automatic weapons. The air around his head filled with high-pitched whines, like a swarm of invisible hornets. Bullets tore into the façade of the Pizza Hut, blasting off bits of wood and brick that sizzled against the sleeves of his Windbreaker. He rounded the corner where he had first seen Sylvia Carnes and veered to his left as the wrecked car ahead of him exploded beneath a hail of bullets.
Four zombies were staggering toward him from the overgrown alley behind the Pizza Hut. Richardson veered to the right of a pickup to avoid a zombie and kept on running, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. There was a ruined wooden fence to his right that ran the length of the property back to the alley, bright green weeds growing along the base. Without breaking stride he pulled his pistol and fired at the zombie that stepped around the back corner of the fence. The zombie sank to its knees but didn’t fall.
A moment later he was in the alley, facing another crumbling wooden fence and a three-story apartment building beyond that. He looked to his left and saw two zombies coming at him through the grass. On the next street over he heard the sound of a truck engine revving loudly, coming closer. To his right the alley was thick with trash and weeds. A wooden light pole had fallen across the alley and it was covered with what looked like lilac. Beyond the pole was a zombie in the remnants of a red T-shirt and jeans staggering clumsily over a mounded pile of garbage.
Tires skidded on the pavement behind him. Men shouted. Again he heard the stuttering cough of automatic weapons, the bullets slapping into the brick wall to his right. He moved to the opposite side of the alley and ran toward the fallen light pole. His chest was heaving, his breath hitching in his throat, but he forced himself to stop, breathe, and focus on putting his pistol’s front sight on the zombie’s chest. Richardson fired twice, dropping the zombie, before ducking under the light pole and running through the trash-strewn alley.
He made it to the next corner and turned left. A long gray street stretched out ahead of him, the concrete cracked into oddly symmetrical squares and choked with weeds and rolls of carpet, insulation panels, soggy paper, plastic bags, and endless piles of concrete scree and lumber. To his left was a six-story brick building with nearly every window broken. To his right was the fossil of a parking garage, its gray concrete frame cracked and crumbling. Shrubs grew from the ledges. The bottom story had been walled up with a mismatched assortment of bricks, parts of the wall covered with the faded ghosts of graffiti from before the outbreak. One section of the wall had collapsed, creating a way in, and he ran for it.
“There he is!” came a man’s voice from behind him.
Richardson turned and saw one of the black trucks turning the corner behind him. A soldier standing up in the bed was banging on the roof of the cab and pointing right at Richardson.
“Damn it,” Richardson muttered.
He ran for the collapsed section of the wall and dove inside it as the truck roared to life and started down the alley.
Inside the parking garage he suddenly found himself in near total darkness. Here and there he could make out the silhouette of wrecked cars and he could smell the rancid odor of a dead body propped up against the wall to his right.
“He’s in there,” a man’s voice said.
Richardson spun around and faced the patch of sunlight that led back out to the street. Two man-sized shapes appeared in the opening.
He pulled his pistol and fired.
One of the men let out a grunt, like he’d been punched in the gut. The other ducked back behind the corner.
“Choke on it, asshole,” Richardson said.
He ran for the opposite side of the building, found a stairwell, and ran down it. He emerged onto another ruined street, a tall chain-link fence straight ahead of him. He ran for the fence and found a section that was peeled back from the post and he pushed his way through the hole into the overgrown alley beyond.
The alley was little more than an easement between two brick buildings. He had to turn his shoulders to fit through. On the far side of the easement he saw another building and he slipped inside one of its broken windows and stopped for a moment to listen to the silence and the shadows that had swallowed him.
Come on, he told himself. Breathe. Think. Come on, you have to think.
The room in which he found himself was large and empty, save for a few overturned chairs and ceiling tiles that had fallen to the floor and turned to powder. Electrical wires hung like vines from the exposed rafters in the ceiling. A gray haze hung in the air. The place smelled of rot and dust.
Richardson crossed to a window on the far side of the room and looked out. He could see a patchwork of vacant lots, the vegetation dead and brown. Gray streets led down blind alleys between endless red brick buildings. He couldn’t remember ever seeing so much red brick in his life.
But he could breathe again. At least he had that much. He looked down at the pistol in his hand and opened the cylinder and ejected the spent shell casings onto the floor. He took a speed loader from his belt and was about to drop it into the cylinder when he suddenly smelled the odor of rotting meat.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw a child, no more than ten years old, staggering toward him, dragging a useless leg behind him.
Richardson groaned.
The boy dragged himself forward, one arm coming up, the fingers too mangled to work. The other arm hung uselessly at his side. It too had been partially eaten. The boy’s face was crusted over with dark splashes of dried blood, his eyes milky white with cataracts. He was obscenely thin. He began a long, low growl that ended with a snarling, snapping cough. Then he fell forward.
Richardson stepped to one side, coming up behind the boy and pushing him face-first into the wall next to the window. Electrical wires hung down around them and Richardson balled up a section of them and looped the ends around the boy’s throat. The boy’s arm flailed against the wall, smearing blood on the bricks. Richardson kept pulling the wires down and down until he heard the long, low growl cut off abruptly. Then he stepped back from the wall and staggered back toward the center of the room.
The boy turned clumsily and came after him, his head snapping back as the wires went taut. He kept reaching for Richardson with his one working arm until there was no more air left in his lungs.
He jerked against the wire and a choking gurgling noise came from him. Then his legs bent and his body sagged, though his knees never quite reached the floor.
The head lolled to one side, the dead, white eyes still open, watching Richardson.
Richardson stood there, unable to look away from the dead boy. This was too much. This was just too much. There was no sound, save for the creaking of the wooden rafters as the boy’s body swayed back and forth, and all Richardson could do was stand there, shaking his head.
He could hear voices outside the window, but they were not close. A truck raced by, shifted gears, and the sound faded away into the distance until it was indistinct.
He’d lost them, at least for now.
He went to the window and put a hand on the brick frame and watched the vacant lots outside. A few zombies roamed between the apartment buildings; but for the time being, Richardson felt safe enough to relax a little. God knows he needed it.
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