The Ugly Beginning - 01 (4 page)

“Get down, Thalia.”

She obeyed without protest. Unbuckling her seatbelt, she slid to the floor on the passenger’s side, pulled her knees in tight, and wrapped her arms around them. Sort of like a tiny ball.

The door to the sports car opened. A tall, very attractive in an out-of-my-league sort of way, brunette emerged. My mind sped through several scenarios. All of which ended up with me as the hero and her falling into my arms. She proceeds to show her gratitude and admiration for my heroism...

“Thank God!” she screamed, and ran to my truck.

I rolled down the window, seeing no reason to open the door. I mean seriously, there are a bunch of walking dead shambling this way. Sure they’re still a ways off and moving slow, but my mind is still trying to process what’s happening.

“You
really
shouldn’t be out of your car.”  I glanced again at the group of undead closing the distance slowly and steadily. One of them was outdistancing the others and had his arms outstretched.

“My neighbor did this!” the pretty brunette said, holding up her left arm. Blood dripped from a shallow but jagged rip below the elbow.

My look must’ve given something away, because she hastily covered up. Her expression was a crazy mix of fear, embarrassment, and confusion. Without warning, she lunged at my door, pulling wildly on the handle. I went for the lock, but a shade too late as the door opened and I tumbled gracelessly to the ground.

Thalia screamed.

Scrambling up as quickly as I could with the wind only partially knocked out of me, I had no idea what to do. Was this lady one of
them
? Maybe the newly turned are different. Perhaps the brain died slowly, and they kept certain functions for a while. I really had no clue where the movie stuff was right or wrong. Hell, maybe it was
all
wrong. All of that jumbled around in my mind like rocks in a dryer as I came to my feet.

She was apologizing over and over. Maybe she was sorry she had to eat me now. All I truly knew at that exact moment was that she was beside me with a vise-like grip on my arm. There were several of those things about twenty feet or so away, and I was not ready to die.

I shoved her as hard as I could, sending my closest threat stumbling back towards the street. I snatched the gun from the cab where it had fallen to the floorboard in all this insanity. My finger curled around the trigger as I spun and fired.

She was in the process of climbing back to her feet. With an expression of astonishment, she looked down as a bloom of red spread across her blouse. Her eyes returned to mine in shock.

“Why?” She staggered sideways a step and fell…hard.

I still heard screaming. While I was shaking my head rapidly to clear it, something grabbed my shoulder. I whirled around face-to-face with the speed-walker of the bunch. It was a woman. Or had been. Her dark hair clung to her face, glued in place by dried blood. Most of the left cheek had been ripped away. Greyish gums and blood-smeared teeth greeted me in what looked like an exaggeratedly evil grin. I raised the pistol and fired. The bullet tore through its throat, jolting the upper body backwards. I felt the grip upon my shoulder tighten, and the head snapped back toward me with mouth open wide.

It’s strange, the little things that capture our attention in a crisis. I noticed that the flat, lifeless, black-blood veined eyes never changed expression. No anger, hunger, victory, desire, pain...just empty. Truly empty.

I jammed the barrel of the gun into the now gaping maw and fired. The creature simply dropped. Again, it was as if the plug were suddenly pulled, like on a radio.

Without waiting for more bad things to happen, I jumped into the truck, slamming the door, locking it, and rolling up the window seemingly all at once. I shifted into drive and launched the big truck into the street, clipping the sports car enough to turn it a little sideways. My hard right turn aimed us back towards the interstate.

***

I’ve risked my life a whole bunch of times since that night. But at no time was I as stupid or out-of-control as I was in the way I left that gas station parking lot. Six more inches to the left, and I catch enough of that sports car to probably end our ride.

***

Looking in my rearview mirror, I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The zombies had fallen on the brunette. That could only mean one thing. Since they ignored, and even stepped over the zombie that I had just blown the back of its skull off, the brunette was not, at the time just before I shot her at least, dead.

Adding one plus one, I had just killed someone. My mind began to argue vigorously the varying points.

She was bitten.

It was only a matter of time.

You saved her much misery.

All the way to the interstate, and for the next several miles, my mind continued. It tried to offer me the solace that no other living, breathing human being would if they’d seen what I’d done.

Eventually, Thalia fell into a fitful sleep. If things were as I suspected, and if they had just started…this was only the ugly beginning.

It would get worse.

2

Vignettes I

Portland, OR
—Lukas pushed the mop back and forth, paying no real attention to what he was doing. His ear buds blasted the newest
Avenged Sevenfold
cut, effectively blocking out the rest of the world. The music allowed him to endure what was just another in a string of crappy jobs. This one, in its third week, was fast approaching record breaking status. Three more days and yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’d have a winner.

Dunking the mop in the long-overdue-to-be-refreshed water that half-filled his wheeled, yellow bucket, Lukas plunged it up and down a few times, slopped it into the wringer, slammed down on the handle—wringing maybe half of the liquid from the gray-black strands—then jerked it out, sending the fetid fluid in a splattering arc across the cold, concrete floor. He resumed sloshing the mop back and forth, occasionally blurting out a few off-key, nasally lyrics.

Finishing up, he carried the bucket over to the deep-sink and emptied the filthy water down the drain. He gave the bucket a cursory rinsing, then hung the still-dripping, unrinsed mop on the wall and slid the bucket under the sink.

Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he came out with his baggie, some papers, and a lighter. One bad thing about looking for a job was the three or four weeks he had to go without smoking weed. Never knew if a UA was gonna be requested. He quickly rolled a joint and lit up. This was probably why his current job had lasted so long. Working for this contracted cleaning company, Lukas always volunteered for the ware-houses. He had no problem finding a nice spot away from everybody where he could take the edge off the workday. If any of the folks on his crew noticed, nobody said anything. Hell, most of his co-workers were fresh out of jail or prison. Didn’t those types have some code against being a snitch?

That total feeling of relaxation was seeping through his body when the creepiest scream he ever heard managed to break through the guitars blazing in Lukas’ ears. His thumb found the volume wheel as the scream seemed about to die, only to explode again with renewed intensity.

Climbing to his feet, he made his way to a door that opened out onto the loading platform of the warehouse. Plucking both buds out, he could better hear as the screaming slowly faded to some other sound that came through the steel door in muffled fits.

“Yo, man, you all right?” Lukas pushed the bar opening the door.

A smell so thick that it seemed to fill his mouth with a greasy film met him in place of the normal cool night air. Two people were crouched on the ramp leading up to one side of the concrete platform. A yellowish light flickered just above them from a thin, metal pole. A third person, it looked like Jimmy Jenkins, was sprawled on the ground. The weak whimper, rising and falling in pitch, was coming from him. One of the crouching figures turned its head at the sound of the door.

The scene before Lukas was unimaginable. It made no sense to the young man who gazed upon it. Aaron Milburn was staring up from Jimmy’s body. His face was smeared with a dark wetness that dripped from his chin in pencil-thick ropes. Something large and jelly-like dropped from Aaron’s open mouth, landing with an audible ‘splat’ on the concrete.

“What the—” was all Lukas could manage around the bile rising in his throat.

Aaron pulled himself to his feet like an old wino. He was staggering slightly, one leg seemingly on the verge of collapse. One step forward, fully into the light, revealed the reason. His coveralls had been torn open from hip to knee on the right leg. Strips of meat hung over the torn khaki; which was itself stained a dark, blackish color obviously from all the blood. For just a second, Lukas thought he caught a glimpse of what could have been bone from the depths of the wound.

“Holy shit!” Lukas reached behind himself for the door.

His hand found the handle and he pushed the lever with his palm. The door opened out towards him causing Lukas to turn his back slightly to step around and into the relative safety of the warehouse. A hand curled around the door before he could pull it shut. The dull thud was accompanied by a series of crunching noises from the breaking of fingers between door and jamb. The fingers still continued to clutch the door, attempting to pull it back open. Another set of fingers joined the first, adding to the force being applied to open the metal door.

Lukas wasn’t even considering the option of waiting around or checking anybody out to see if they were okay. His mind was struggling with the idea of what exactly was happening. There was definitely something wrong. That was really the only thing of which he was certain. Running through the warehouse to the front exit, he dodged a few odd stacks of aluminum, giving dark spaces a wide berth. He heard the clang of the door; once, twice, a third time. Reaching the front exit, Lukas turned the knob and bolted through the doorway…right into a hulking figure that could only be Travis Reynolds.

Of all the crew, Travis was the only one you could look at and know he’d done prison time. His upper body was gigantic. He had muscle packed onto his well-over-six-foot-tall frame from the waist up. His gut was equally huge, but as solid as a rock. Both arms were ‘tatted’ with designs that related to naked women and ‘White Power’. His head was shaved and sat on a neck that you could not find without close inspection. Travis sported a long goatee that he kept braided into a distinct fork. What finished off the look were legs that, if Travis wore shorts, looked like a pair of toothpicks sticking out of a potato.

Lukas careened off the body of Travis Reynolds and flipped over the metal railing that ran across the front of the raised entrance. He hit the asphalt of the parking lot and the air left his lungs in a sudden and painful rush. Try as he might, Lukas could not get himself to inhale. He lay sprawled, making weak croaking noises.

“What the fuckin’ hell is goin’ on, Lukas?”  Travis looked down over the railing with his usual scowl of disdain.

More croaking. Having never experienced the wind being knocked from him, Lukas was quite scared. He reached up, trying but failing to form any words. Tears streamed down his cheeks, a combination of fear and pain.

“Man up, you pussy!”

Travis walked along the landing to the steps, alternately scolding Lukas for being so weak, and demanding to know where the rest of the crew had gone.

“Can’t find fuckin’ anybody. That jig Aaron must be hiding from work as always. You smell like a two-bit bag a weed, and Jimmy-fuckin’-Jenkins is likely getting his knob polished by that meth-whore, Wendy.”

Reaching down with a ham-sized fist, Travis yanked Lukas onto his feet by the collar. As soon as he let go, Lukas slid back down on his ass, still struggling to get even the tiniest amount of oxygen into his lungs.

“Walk it off, man.”

The main door to the warehouse rattled, and then slowly began to open. Out onto the landing stumbled Aaron Milburn, Jimmy-fuckin’-Jenkins, and a third man neither Lukas nor Travis recognized.

“What the…” Travis’ voice trailed off, choked by a gag as the stench from the three figures caught him full force. He staggered back a couple of steps, and all three heads snapped his direction like birds spotting a juicy worm.

In the bluish-white fluorescent glow of the walkway and parking lot lighting it was much easier to see the horrific figures that were now staggering his way. All three bodies were missing chunks, literal chunks of meat. The corpse of Jimmy Jenkins had the added horrific effect of strands of intestine hanging in bunches from a gaping hole just below the bottom of the rib cage.

Travis glanced at Lukas, then at the abominations making slow but steady progress in his direction. He continued to back slowly away.

“You best get to your feet.”

Lukas reached out, his eyes pleading for help. Setting his back against the cool, smooth concrete, he pushed with his legs, trying to wedge his body up. His progress was slow, coming inch after agonizing inch. He tried again desperately to suck air in, and once more managed only a feeble squeak…but it was a little better. Some air actually found its way!

“Travis,” he could barely manage.

In unison, all three heads snapped in Lukas’ direction, forgetting all about Travis who continued to back slowly towards the parking lot. Reaching the bottom of the gently inclined ramp that had been put in for handicapped access, the trio turned and made for the closer prey.

Lukas willed himself forward. He was hunched over as if he’d been punched in the gut. In fits and starts, he tried to follow Travis. A hand clutched his collar much as the large man had done seconds before when hauling Lukas to his feet. Only this time, it didn’t jerk or snatch, it simply pulled. Lukas fell back as hands clutched him on wrists, shoulders, and even hair. He tumbled, bringing two of the three with him. He found himself staring up into dead faces with open mouths. One of those mouths came down on his nose and bit hard, crushing cartilage and ripping away not only the nose, but a strip of flesh under the right eye.