Run: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (15 page)

17

The best word to describe their pursuers was relentless.

After deciding to hole up in the apartment, Ali and Billy had been able to rest for about an hour before banging started in the hallway outside. When Billy looked through the peephole in the front door, he only saw one creature; nevertheless the thing had somehow discovered them and was doing its best to break through the door.

The duo had already shed their hospital attire, and donned some of the elderly couple’s clothes. After grabbing two matching yellow backpacks (multiple photographs throughout the apartment led them to believe that the owners, although septuagenarians, had been avid backpackers), they filled them with as much food and drink as they could carry. They decided that discretion was the better part of valor and used the fire escape to get to the top of the building. They roof-hopped a few times until they landed on the gravel rooftop of yet another apartment building, this one with a huge, intricate garden.

“Wow, this is really gorgeous!” Ali kept her admiration to a whisper.

“Yeah, it’s pretty, but how do they keep finding us? We haven’t made a peep!” Billy whispered back.

“I don’t know, maybe they can smell us? See our auras or read our minds?”

“Great. EZP, Extra Zombie Perception. If they start to fly, I’m gonna get angry.”

“Yeah, and you’ll get eaten too. Anyway, look at the flowers, and over there: Yellow bell peppers!” She walked down a flower aisle and over to the peppers, picked one, and bit into it. “Oh! Oh my God, you gotta try this!”

As she stepped past a line of knee-high blue and pink hydrangea bushes, a bloody, bandaged hand shot out from the leaves and grabbed her jeans. She yelped and fell on her backside, kicking at the hand. A second hand came out and went palm down on the flagstone walk, the rest of the creature following. Billy rushed to her aid, whacking the zombie on the side of its filthy cranium with his table leg as Ali attempted to kick it away. Billy smacked it again and the creature fell off to Ali’s right side, but it didn’t let go of her pants. Ali kicked more frantically, and the thing finally lost its grip. She scurried backwards like a crab, and Billy swung again and again until the creature stopped moving.

Visibly shaken, Ali stood up and started sobbing. “They’re everywhere. We’re never going to make it. We can’t even get down from here.”

“We’ll be OK if we keep our heads. They’re stupid and we aren’t. Besides, I’ve got a plan.”

“A plan?”

“A plan.”

“Care to share?”

“Yup. I gots me a boat! Let’s drag ourselves to Alcatraz!”

Ali smiled. “Good plan. How do we get there?”

“I didn’t say it was all figured out yet. There’re some details to iron out, but we’ll make it.”

Billy poked his head over the edge of the building, checking the avenue below. It was thick with the living dead. He walked around the edge of the roof, realizing that there was no place else to jump to. They would have to use the street, carpet of dead or no.

Looking through a skylight for a solid five minutes, neither of them saw any movement in the apartment below. Billy rapped his knuckles on the dirty glass, but no dead faces peered back at him. He searched for locks on the skylight to open it, but there were none. He was about to break the glass with his table leg when Ali stopped him.

“Let’s try the door,” she said pointing.

Billy dubiously approached the roof access door. “It’ll never be op—” the door opened on the first try. Billy shrugged and, not waiting for his eyes to adjust from the sunlight, descended into the darkness to a wooden door. He put his head to the door for a minute and then opened it wide. Ali followed him into the third floor apartment, and they started checking rooms.

The front door, which Hercules would have had trouble battering down, was locked with eight locks and a metal locking bar attached to a plate in the floor.

“This place is a fortress. Dead dude on the roof must have locked himself in. That crappy bandage on his hand must mean he was bitten first, and died locked in here, or even on the roof.”

“Yeah,” Ali agreed. “What do we do now? Each time we kick back for a minute, they’re on us. I don’t want to be lunch.”

“Well, we’re going to need to go back outside, and that isn’t going to be fun.”

“Then let’s do it now, before I get too damn scared.”

They continued searching the apartment again, this time for anything useful they could scavenge. The man who had lived here had been a sports enthusiast, evidenced by the many photos, trophies, and sports equipment. Many of the photos were of a man rock climbing, but two were of the same man holding a huge, freshly killed twelve point buck. There was no weapon in the picture, but Billy deduced that there must be a shotgun or rifle someplace in the apartment.

Ali stepped into one room and gasped. Billy, behind her, tightened his grip on his table leg and, calmly considering the circumstances, asked what was wrong.

“There’s a racing bicycle hung upside down in this bedroom and it scared the crap out of me. I thought it was one of them.”

“A zombie hanging from the ceiling? Zombie monkeys?”

“Whatever. It was the unexpected big-ness that scared me.”

The bedroom containing the bicycle had been converted into a storage room for the apartment owner’s gear. In one closet, Billy found a bag containing climbing equipment, including two ice axes and an entrenching tool. There was also a serious backpack made to carry climbing and camping gear.

“Oh, I like this room,” Billy said to himself.

“You gotta give me one of those axes!”

“Finders keepers! Would you check the fridge and see if there’s anything we can use?”

Ali huffed, but she left the room. Billy was able to come up with a baseball bat and some golf clubs in addition to his ice axes.
All good weapons
, he thought.

Billy was still rummaging around in the closet when he heard footsteps behind him. He spun quickly, raising one of the axes, but it was Ali.

She was smiling, and holding a camouflage compound bow. “Finders keepers.”

“Where was that?”

“Next to the fridge, which is pretty well stocked, but there’s blood all over everything. This poor guy must have gotten thirsty after he was bitten, and he bled on all the food and drinks. I don’t think we should touch any of it. There were only eight arrows in this little quiver, plus these four attached to the bow.” She held up the bow for Billy’s inspection, waving her hand as would a hand model, to indicate four vertical arrows held to the bow with a mini-quiver.

Billy nodded his appreciation and continued searching the closet, finding two unopened packages of broad-head hunting arrows on a shelf.

Ali took the arrows reluctantly. “I just don’t know how could you do it…”

Billy was confused. “Do what? I didn’t do anything, did I?”

“No, not you, the guy who lived here. How could he shoot Bambi?”

“Mmmm Bambi… Tastes almost like chicken except for all the deer. Don’t knock it, now we have a distance weapon.”

They searched a little more and found a flashlight, some canned goods and a jar of what looked like beef jerky. Ali had been right, there was no way to salvage anything from the blood covered food and drink in the refrigerator. Consuming something from there would undoubtedly infect whoever tried. A few minutes later, it was time to go.

The trip from the third floor apartment to the tiny lobby was uneventful. They tried the other three apartment doors on the way down, but all were locked. As the two exited the door into the lobby, which was really a small hall with some mailboxes, the stairwell door closed behind them with a
snick!
Ali tried it, but it was locked.

“Shit,” she whispered.

Their only remaining options were the front door, and a steel door that clearly led to the basement. The glass panels in the front door were concealed by curtains and reinforced with an ornate iron mesh for security. Billy gently parted the curtains to peek outside, and peered directly into the blood red eyes of an undead telephone repairman. Billy shut the curtains, but the damage was done. The thing on the other side of the door began to wail, and started banging on the glass, which broke on the third hit. It grabbed the mesh and started to pull for all it was worth. The curtains fell away, and the two survivors looked out upon a sea of dead faces all coming for the door.

“No. No, no, no!”

Ali started pulling on the door they had come through, but it wouldn’t budge. Panic was setting in.

“No time, we have to go down!” he told her.

“And get trapped in the friggin basement? Are you nuts?”

“Well, yes actually, but we still need to go! Now!”

Billy’s exclamation was punctuated by the snapping of the flimsy iron grate covering the window. The sheer weight of the undead trying to get in was compromising the door frame quickly. He ran for the basement door, pulling Ali behind him. The door opened onto wooden stairs disappearing down into complete darkness. He flipped the light switch and was rewarded with nothing. As he was rummaging around in his pack for the flashlight, the front door came crashing in, and the tide of zombies surged forward. The ones in the front fell with the door, and the ones behind crushed their hapless brethren as they shambled toward their prey.

Ali closed the door hard, almost knocking both of them down the stairs.

“Now I can’t see!” Billy complained as he fished through the pack by feel. Seconds later a slap sounded on the other side of the door, then thumping, then the howling started. There was an army of undead less than three inches away.

Standing on the stairs, in the dark, with legions of cannibals at her back, Ali began to cry. She screamed when a beam of light slashed the darkness and hit her in the face.

“Let’s go!” Billy grabbed her hand and they hurried down the stairs. There were boxes and assorted stuff in piles everywhere. Storage for the renters upstairs. Small casement windows were painted over, allowing no light to speak of into the subterranean room.

“Now what?” she demanded.

“I’m out of options, kid, it’s your turn.”

“What? You trapped us in here?”

“Yeah, as if there was a flying unicorn up there to whisk us away! What was your plan, huh? Fight them in the lobby with a bow?”

She started crying again. “I don’t want to die like this! They’ll tear us to pieces. Pieces!”

Billy shifted the light back and forth looking for anything to help them. As he was frantically searching, Ali tripped on something and fell sideways. He turned the light on her and she was sitting on the floor, knees to her chin crying hard. She had given up. He hurried over to try to console her when he saw what she tripped on. It was a tripod with a small powered winch attached. Billy’s eyes went wide, and he panned the flashlight around the floor with sudden hope.

Ali covered her ears to shut out the pounding and muffled noises from the opposite side of the door. She looked up and saw Billy searching.

“What are you doing?”

He ignored her, in favor of moving a few boxes to clear a space on the floor. His rearranging revealed a raised, round metal disc in the floor, with hinges and a recessed handle. He grabbed the handle and groaned as he heaved upward. It was heavy, but it came up, the hinge protesting with a shrill scream. Rusty rungs, embedded into the wall of the cylindrical opening, descended into darkness.

“Come on!”

She joined him among the boxes, wiping her eyes on her sleeve, and cautiously approached the edge of the hole in the floor, looking down. “I’m not going down there.”

“So you’re gonna what? Stay here? Now who’s crazy? Pieces remember? Not only are you going down there, you have to go first!”

She took a quick step back, her voice took on a panicked edge. “What? Why?”

“Because I need to shut the cover, now go!”

Ali studied the opening, then glanced back through the gloom to the door at the top of the stairs. Already there were thin slivers of light streaming through the top and side of the door. It was starting to give way. In moments, dozens of ravenous undead would flood down the stairs and rip into her.

She passed Billy the bow, and resolutely began inching down the slippery rungs. He passed the weapon back to her when most of her was below the basement level.

Following quickly, he shined the light below, but couldn’t see past Ali’s slowly descending outline. He reached up and grabbed a second handle on the bottom of the round cover. It wouldn’t budge.

“It’s wet down here!” Ali called to him.

Billy put the light in his front pants pocket, and hung all his weight from the handle of the iron cover, his legs dangling into space below. He started wiggling, banging his knee on one of the ladder rungs before the heavy metal lid started inching forward. Suddenly the cover completed its fall all at once, slamming closed and breaking Billy’s grip on the slimy handle. He fell, landing with a splash in shallow water at the bottom of the shaft. Hot shivers of agony splintered up his leg, but the pain was brief as his backpack hit another obstacle and propelled him forward. His head connected with something solid and he was out cold.