One Blink From Oblivion (10 page)

The overwhelming smell of burnt rubber lingers in the air. The only things audible are a light whimper from Vinny and heavy breathing all around. If Brooke had not insisted that everyone wear his or her seatbelt then it would be a far grizzlier scene.

“You two ok?” Max is the first able to speak.

“My shoulder is killing me!” Vinny responds through clenched teeth and evident distress.

Max unbuckles both he and Vinny’s seat belts and reaches to the front to touch Brooke’s arm. Though she was moving, she hadn’t responded.

              “I’m fine, check out Vinny,” her voice has a trimmer but Max hopes it is more due to shock than injury and turns his attention back to Vinny.

              He pulls the collar of Vinny’s shirt toward his injured shoulder and sees that the bruising has intensified.

              “Do you think you can walk? Your car is screwed.”

              Vinny never answers that question but asks one of his own instead, “Do you smell that?”

              “What, rubber?”

              “No, it smells like gas.”

              Max is suddenly aware that the Audi is still running. The automatic fuel shutoff apparently has malfunctioned and they are not only leaking high-octane fuel, the car is also quite hot. If a spark from the engine ignites the gas or it reaches any number of red-hot pipes beneath the car, then they will certainly be burned alive. The need for escape is urgent.

              “We’ve got to get out of the car! It could catch fire!”

              Max turns to the door and finds himself face to face with the yellow eyes of the brunette’s husband. Now that he stands outside of the convertible, his figure seems even more imposing. He’s at least six-three and his thigh muscles can be seen straining against the fabric of his gray Dockers. Sooner than Max is able to react, the enraged fiend reaches through the open window with one large and powerful right hand and grabs him by the neck. He pulls Max from the car like a rag-doll in the hands of a hate-filled child and tosses him to the pavement yards away from the Audi. Given Max’s own size and weight, this should have been an impossible task. Max tries to soften the blow with the pavement by rolling out of his landing but is only halfway successful. The wind is knocked out of him and his vision darkens a bit.

              Back at the car, the biter turns his sights on Brooke. Vinny, who has pushed his back up against the crumpled interior door of the Audi, is attempting to gain distance from the open window while fumbling for his magnum with his one good arm.

              The infected reaches for the front passenger door handle. The door is locked and the handle breaks loose under the strain of his superhuman grasp. Rather than shattering the window in further pursuit of Brooke, the infected turns on Vinny who offers an easier meal in the open back seat. In an unexpected move, he reaches through the window and opens the door from the inside, which completely exposes Vinny leaving him naked to the biter’s powerful clutch. The raging beast reaches out with a left hand that’s just as impressive as his right and anchored to a sturdy arm with so many bulging veins that it resembles a road map. With it, he grabs hold of Vinny’s left leg and pulls him violently to the open door. Vinny –now stretched out- finds it easier to free the freshly loaded magnum from his waistband and begins firing at will. In the confined space of the car, the crack of the gun is almost deafening. The first two shots strike the biter in his lower abdomen and hip. The brute doesn’t cry-out in pain or even change his Nicholson-like expression (eyebrows raised at the outer corners and a sadistic half grin chiseled across his face). He does however withdraw back through the door, without relinquishing his hold on Vinny’s leg. Consequently, Vinny is jerked along the seat, which causes his third shot to go awry.

              Max struggles to regain his breath as well as his footing as the attack on his friends unfurls before his eyes. As soon as Vinny begins to shoot, Max becomes conscious of the fact that he is directly behind the monster. He dives out of the line of fire and covers up. Vinny’s last shot hits the pavement and sparks fly. The pool of gas beneath the car is instantly ignited in a yellow blue blaze, thus beginning a deadly countdown.

              Vinny lands hard on his back with his captive leg still up in the air. The pain of his shoulder hitting the pavement is mind numbing and he looses his hold on the handgun. He doesn’t try to retrieve it because from his peripheral he glimpses something better. Just at the edge of the Audi and under the open doorway from whence he came lays Max’s shotgun. It had apparently fallen from Max’s lap when he was tossed from the vehicle. Vinny reaches for it just in time as the biter gives his leg one last tug to pull him away from the Audi. Vinny whips the shotgun around and hammers the infected center mass with a round of double ought buckshot. A plume of smoke and blood sprays forth from its chest and it falls squarely on its rear.

              Vinny breathes a momentary sigh of relief as he again has control of his extremities and sees that Max too is rising to his feet. However, the relief is short lived when Vinny realizes hat the Audi has caught fire, and worse than that, his attacker -against all reason- is also rising to his feet. With one arm still in a sling, he has no chance of cocking the gun for another shot before the biter is on him. He tries to scramble to his feet and prepares to use the shotgun as a club.

              Max bares witnesses in horror. The car is aflame with Brooke trapped inside, desperately trying to kick out the shattered glass of the driver’s window with little success. Vinny is still on the ground making a feeble attempt to get up without use of either his injured arm or the one busy holding the shotgun. Max has no time to consider options. It’s time to act. He burst into his best forty-yard dash, trying to pick up as much momentum as possible in the few yards between him and the car. The biter is still focused on Vinny and doesn’t hear Max swooping up from behind until Max hits him at full boar. Driving his shoulder into his back, he scoops at the back of the infected’s knees, lifting him up in the air without ever slowing down. Caught by surprise, the infected thrashes about, not quite knowing what has happened or what to do about it. He has suddenly and inexplicably found himself horizontal and staring confusedly at a starry sky. Max puts his head down and charges directly for the rail. All he can think is ‘this thing is going down, even if I have to go with it’. Max reaches the rail and slams on the brakes, but not before he bends his knees and heaves the beast over, plummeting through the freeway overpass-divide to the ground below. The monster hits the ground with so much force that the sound of breaking bones is audible even several stories up.

              With no time to waste, Max returns to the vehicle, relieves Vinny of the shotgun and using the butt of it shatters the front passenger-side window. Brooke shrinks away from the glass fragments as Max clears a big enough hole in the safety glass through which to pull her. Max sets Brooke on her feet and yells at her to run while he pulls Vinny who was busy retrieving his magnum from the ground.

              Max, Vinny and Brooke run and limp from the wreckage of the Audi as the fire swallows it whole and burps up several small explosions. Once they’re a safe distance away they all turn and watch the blaze. Each of them are wearing varying degrees of remorse on their faces; Vinny’s due to his sadness over the loss of his most prized possession, Brooke’s because of her gratitude for the car’s assistance in her earlier escape, and Max who couldn’t care less about the car but the backpack full of weapons and ammunition in the back seat will surely be missed.

              “This fire is going to draw a lot of attention. We need to get off the freeway,” Max says hurriedly while giving Vinny and Brooke a quick once-over, looking more for signs of bleeding than anything else.

              “Can you walk?” he asks of Vinny.

              “My legs are fine.”

              “Then let’s do it.”

              After taking stock in what little ammunition they were able to salvage from their pockets, they head down the nearest off-ramp and point themselves in the direction they believe will be most fruitful. The plan is still to find a phonebook and get Vinny looked at. Hopefully there will be something in walking distance or perhaps they can find a suitable vehicle along the way. As they begin their walk, none of them take notice of a fourth companion that’s joined their journey but is keeping quietly to the shadows. 

The streets surrounding the off-ramp are ghostly vacant. Max, Vinny and Brooke are beginning to feel like the last people on Earth. Though there are no houses in the immediate vicinity, it is still surprising that no other living thing stirs in the night -surprising and a bit of a relief. Just over twenty-four hours ago, this area was probably bustling with happy and oblivious people just going about their day, clueless to the horrors that awaited them. Soon their worlds would be forever changed. Some would succumb to the infection and be compelled to slaughter their loved ones, while others would be forced to defend themselves resulting in the same unfortunate end. Was this ancient and wicked disease called up from the bowels of the earth as punishment from the heavens? No doubt humanity has gone astray from what God had intended, but was this virus to serve as the tool of the apocalypse laying waste to all of humanity like a flood of destruction? Was this the endgame for the human race? Soon would the world be wiped clean of our kind to make space for God’s next, less flawed, creation? Perhaps our existence here –in the end- would merely have been a failed beta test from which the creator would gleam the necessary data prior to moving onto the next phase in development.

Could the adverse also be possible? Could this virus merely be an isolated incident that has reared its ugly head around the globe from time to time over the centuries, bringing with it a tirade of death and destruction only to vanish just as suddenly leaving behind speculation and conjecture? It was an obvious fit for the lore of the vampire and its virility would explain the lack of first hand accounts that sounded like anything more than the ravings of a lunatic. But surely, if a catastrophe of this magnitude had previously transpired there would be a written record documenting the event. Had the virus mutated over the years to become the harbinger of death that laid waste to the masses here and now? Would anyone be left alive to document this event for posterity?

Time would tell.

***

              Max, Vinny and Brooke, after walking for what felt like an eternity but in reality was closer to thirty minutes, have had little luck finding what they’ve searched for. Their first priority –a medical facility- was nowhere in sight. As for a phonebook, they hadn’t fared any better. They searched every gas station phone booth and grocery store public phone that they saw but were batting zero. Either this town’s phone company did not provide phonebooks for payphones or other people had come up with the same idea as Brooke.

              “This is a waste of time,” Max speaks impatiently, his concern for Vinny building as the walk has grown increasingly difficult for him, “There has to be another way to find a phonebook.”

              Vinny shakes his head, “Let’s just break-in someplace and take one.”

              “In case you forgot, breaking and entering is a crime punishable by imprisonment in most places on Earth.” Brooke says with a pseudo-sarcastic tone in her voice.

              Max interjects, “No, Vinny is right. The time to pussy foot has long past. Besides, we threw the law out the window when we stole a bag full of guns from the sheriff station. Anyway, the law does allow for desperate measures during desperate times.”

              Vinny smiles and slaps Max on the back with his good arm, “A hustler turned would-be cop, we’ve got the best of both worlds right here in you.”

              “There’s a strip mall ahead. Most of those businesses will have a phonebook and the shops are notoriously easy to break into.”

***

Across the street and trailing a block behind, their unseen attendant slinks about the shadows being very careful not to be noticed and biding its time.

***

              Now, in the parking lot of the strip mall they begin assessing the easiest targets; a coffee house, a bagel joint, a used sporting equipment store, and a delivery-only pizza parlor.

              Brooke takes a break from nibbling her thumbnail to say, “My vote is the pizza place,” she whispers so low that she can hardly be heard, even though the parking lot is bare without another sole in sight, “They use the white pages to look up people’s addresses sometimes…. don’t they?”

                “Good call,” answers Max, “and since cash on site is small, security measures should be low.”

              Vinny is sitting on the curb and trying to find a comfortable position for his shoulder in the sling.

He looks perplexed, “Who gives a flying fart about security measures. Smash the fucking window and get the book. While you’re in there grab me some pizza. I’m so hungry I could eat an inside-out asshole.”

              Vinny’s volume had escalated, causing Max to put a finger to his lips and make a shushing sound.

              “Hey, right now we’re alone here but if we start making too much racket those things might be all over us, not to mention the police, if there are any left. Now maybe you two have nothing to fear from the police, but I’m a young black male with a shotgun that’s about to commit breaking and entering. For a cop in the area where I grew up that’s the trifecta. I’ve seen this episode and the black man dies first. So if you don’t mind I’d prefer to do this quietly.”

              In truth, Max is less concerned about what the police might do to him and more concerned with how they would react to Vinny. It was Max’s experience that most police were fairly cool under pressure, but it only takes one that’s a little too twitchy to see Vinny -covered in blood and looking like stomped shit- to start a shooting frenzy that could get all three of them killed.

              Max approaches the glass front of the pizza shop and gives the doors a rattle. This is his high-tech way of testing the fortitude of the dead bolt and to determine if any other locks are in place. He peers through the window and takes inventory. The shop is small. Not much bigger than a dorm room in the front with a kitchen maybe three times that size in back. The lobby is tight and populated by three armless chairs for waiting customers. On the counter he can see a cash register, a stack of coupon fliers and a sign that reads, ‘
BUY ONE LARGE ONE-TOPPING PIZZA GET HALF OFF THE NEXT!’.
There’s an upright glass-front refrigerator to the right facing the door and he is disappointed to find it empty. Satisfied that the place is vacant he traces the inner doorframe looking for magnetic alarm contact points and spots one at the upper left corner on the hinged side of the door.

              Max could use one of his few remaining shredders to do the job but that would be a waist of a good shell plus it would be the antithesis of stealth. This was going to require a bit of grace and skill. Since he has no tools suitable for lock picking he searches the archives of his mind for an alternate means of circumventing the deadbolt.

              “Vinny, do you think you could spare a round from your magnum?”

              “Look man if you can’t get in, then no need to do anything drastic,” Vinny says with his usual level of sarcasm.

              “I need the gun powder and primer to blow the lock.”

              Vinny reaches into his pocket, extracts a cartridge and hands it over to Max. Max goes to work removing the slug from the cartridge casing with his teeth and once done discards the hollow pointed lead. He pours the powder from the cartridge into the deadbolt lock through the keyhole. Max then –using a discarded stir stick he finds littering the parking lot in front of the coffee house- removes the primer from the cartridge and pushes that into the keyhole so that some is still exposed. He looks around for something to use as a hammer and decides that the folding stock of his riot shotgun will do.

              Max cautions Brooke and Vinny, “I’ve never tried this before so you better stand back.”

              He takes the butt of the gun and with a short precise stroke hammers it against the keyhole. The impact ignites the primer with a quick spark that causes the gunpowder inside the lock to explode. The sound it creates is similar to that of a small firecracker but everyone holds his or her breath in anticipation of the biter’s screams just in case. After waiting a few moments, quiet still prevails, so Max proceeds to check the lock. He puts the tip of the empty cartridge casing between his teeth and bites down until it’s flat. He inserts the flat end into the deadbolts keyhole and turns it. The deadbolt retracts leaving the door unlocked.

              Brooke rewards Max with a soft clap and says, “Let’s get in there, maybe we can find something to eat.”

              “Just a minute,” replies Max as he points to the alarm, “Does anyone have some gum?”

              Brooke reaches through her collar, into her shirt and down into her bra. She pulls out a single stick of cinnamon flavored gum and hands it to Max with a sheepish smile.

Max accepts it with a smile of his own, “I never thought I could be jealous of a stick of gum.”

The comment widens Brooke’s smile and she demurely lowers her gaze to the pavement. Vinny cuts his eyes at Max –who doesn’t notice- and subconsciously adjusts the revolver in his waistband.

Max unwraps the gum and pops it into his mouth. A chill runs down his back and he tries to suppress an emotional response to the scent of Brooke’s perfume on the gum wrapper. He isn’t sure if he pulls it off. After a few chews he removes it from his mouth and sticks it to one end of the foil wrapper. He then slides the other end in-between the door and jam until it’s touching the magnetic alarm contact. He uses the gum to hold it in place.

“Let’s do it,” he proclaims as he pushes the door inward to the sound of silence.

Vinny –now on his feet- is shaking his head, “I’m not even going to ask where you picked up that little trick,”

Taking charge, Max decides to delegate tasks, “I’ll find the white pages, and you two look for food and check the phone.”

Slowly the sweet aroma of tomato sauce, bell peppers, mozzarella and pizza dough supplant the smell of gunpowder. The scent causes Vinny’s nostrils to flare and his stomach to growl. He continues to search the small dimly lit space for a phone. He finds a black -and somewhat bulky- three-line office phone sitting behind the counter. Nearby, Max has also located his target and is thumbing through the directory. Brooke isn’t as lucky.

“Everything in the fridge is raw, so unless we’re going to fire up the oven we’re S.O.L.”

“Some pepperoni and jalapeno pizza sounds real good right now, but of course that’s not happening.” Max hears his stomach grumble at the thought of food.

“I think I’ve found what we need. What’s up with the phone?”

“Dead, just like the sheriff station. I wish just one of us would have had the forethought to keep our phone in our pocket back at the cabin.”

Vinny looks Brooke head to toe admiring the fit of her jeans. Even in her disheveled state, she was still a sight to behold. He continues, “Except for you. No way you’re fitting a phone in any of those pockets, and I’m not even sure how you wedged a stick of gum into that bra.”

Brooke crumples a flier from the counter top and deftly tosses it at Vinny’s head, hitting him squarely between the eyes.

Max picks up where he left off, pretending not to hear or care about Vinny’s comments, “Then it looks like we continue to hoof it. Are you up to it? We have a couple of miles to go according to this little map.”

Vinny shrugs his shoulders and immediately winces, “What’s the alternative?”

“Well, we have no car, we have no food, we’re short on bullets and I can’t reach Big Mama. If this clinic is functioning then it’s probably protected. At the very least we should be able to find you some pain killer and a shoulder splint.” Max says trying to end on a positive note.

After a brief pause, Vinny says, “Then what the hell are we waiting for?”

***

After about ten minutes of uneventful walking, Vinny stops dead in his tracks and puts up one hand signaling to the others to do the same.

He whispers low, “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” asks Brooke.

“I thought I heard a fourth set of foot steps. Softer than ours and further away”

Max and Brooke look at each other and share the same expression of confusion.

Max responds, “I didn’t hear anything, and we haven’t seen another living sole since the freeway. How’re you feeling?”

“It’s not the pain; my shoulder actually doesn’t feel so bad at the moment. I think maybe that the pain got so bad that it kind of went numb. I’m telling you that I heard something.”

Max spins in a slow turn, checking 360-degrees of darkness, lit sporadically with the occasional street lamp.

“Do you think we have a tail?”

“I don’t know, but whatever it is walks when we walk and stops when we stop. I’ve been hearing it for a while and thought it was my imagination but now I think it’s starting to close the distance between us.”

Max nods his head, deciding it’s better to err on the side of caution, “Then let’s pick up our pace. We only have about a mile to go and maybe there will be help there.”

They quicken their stride in hopes of putting some distance between themselves and whomever or whatever is following them -be it real or imagined.

Before long, they come to an intersection and Max pauses to consult the map in the back of the thin phonebook he carries.