World of Ashes II (4 page)

“Things aren’t going to calm down.” Lea flopped down on the couch. “We just watched DC burn in less than a week. The news says this is all over the country now… We need a computer so we can find out more. I had one on the plane, but I couldn’t find it before we left. There isn’t one in this house either. The truth is always on the net, you just have to know where to look. I bet I can even find us a safe place that’s still up and running.”

“What makes you think the internet will work here?”

“I was going to MIT next year on a scholarship. I can make the internet work anywhere.” Lea boasted. They elected Rick to stay behind, everyone else would sneak over to an apartment complex less than a mile away while he guarded the nest, or watched movies on the homeowner’s ancient VCR. Greg found a ladder outside the complex’s maintenance shed and as silently as possible they made their way up to the third story of a building on the other side of a frontage road. The stairwell was blocked off by survivors that were long gone, and most of the first floor had markings spray painted on the doors by FEMA. Shell casings and dead people, some whom hadn’t been dead when they were shot, littered the concrete hallways between the upscale apartments. The smell of rot and animal urine was overpowering, forcing them all to tie towels around their mouths to keep from inhaling so many flies. It didn’t help much.

A locked apartment with the shades pulled down looked undisturbed and Greg skillfully picked the lock by putting his fist through the window and reaching for the doorknob. “Why are the lights still on?” He asked, flipping the switches on and off. He looked much older than he was with a scraggly beard coming in. “Shouldn’t this all be blacked out?”

“Why?” Lea asked, scoping out a laptop with a little girl’s Barbie stickers all over it. “It’s a national power grid. Most power comes from local plants, but they would keep the lights on for the government, especially around here. What I need to do is find a landline I can tap into because this wireless equipment isn’t picking up any signals.”

“Just grab what you need, I don’t want to be here for long.” Daniel was keeping watch on the ladder. They didn’t know anything about the plague victims, not really. Could they climb ladders or even open doors? The news reports were still sketchy at best, and in some places people were even being arrested for shooting or clubbing to death “Infected Citizens.” Daniel didn’t care if they were alive or dead, he was going to shoot the next thing that moved.

Greg was raiding the refrigerator for what might be his last cold beer when he screamed in agony. The preteen girl who’d owned the laptop, or what was left of her, was gnawing on his calf, her teeth sunk into the leather of his boot. He pulled the trigger of his M4 at close range, the high powered rifle blowing the rest of the girl across the kitchen floor. Lea and Daniel stood in silent horror, watching as Greg ripped his boot off.

“Stay where you are.” Daniel said, aiming his M9 at Greg with a steadiness he didn’t think he had in him.

“Chill, man. She didn’t get through the leather. Hurts like a bitch, though.” Greg was about to stand when the girl’s mother came through the 70’s era beads dangling between the doorway to the kitchen. She wasn’t undead, not yet anyway. She looked like she was starving even though food was everywhere in the apartment. With a scream that was barely human she pulled a cooking knife out of the wooden set holder and stabbed Greg in the shoulder. Lea raised her gun and shot the woman in the side just below her arm. She dropped to the floor like dropped groceries. Greg wasn’t dead and was screaming bloody murder, the knife was deep in the fleshy part of the shoulder. Daniel rushed over to bandage him, but had to shut him up first. A quick punch to the temple and Greg was out like a light. He almost woke up again, but Lea hit him too and he was back out while Daniel checked the knife wound. The blade was still in there, it had deflected off his clavicle and lodged in a rib. It wasn’t in deep and so Daniel pulled it out. There was alcohol in the bathroom and they poured it all over the wound. Somehow that didn’t wake him up at all.

Lea got their gear packed and checked the escape route. “Daniel, the ladder’s gone!” She shouted, her deep woody complexion blanching noticeably.

“What?” Daniel rushed to the balcony and looked down. A hundred or more shambling corpses had knocked the ladder over in their clumsy efforts to get to the noises above. “Shit. Shit shit fucking shit fuck! We’re going to have to take the staircase.”

“Fuck that. If the phones work I can call Rick. He can take their work truck and come get us. I’ve got a connection to the landline now...” Lea said after she’d gotten the computer to show a signal. Daniel admired her cool under fire. Her strength was keeping him going as reasons to hope were becoming fewer and fewer. The chat program Lea was using dialed the number to the house they’d hidden in while she checked another web page.

“Oh my God.” Lea said. “It’s all over Google and Yahoo. The virus has gone global. There are confirmed reports in Japan, China and Africa. They’re blaming Hamas and al-Qaida. They’re afraid it’ll be on every continent by the end of the month.”

“Super. Thanks for sharing.” Daniel went back to check on Greg. He was still breathing and was starting to wake up. That would make it easier to get him out of there.

“It’s connecting… What if he doesn’t answer?”

“He’s sitting on the recliner eating that last bag of Doritos. I’ve known Rick a long time.” Greg sat up, looking down at his wounds. “Fucker’s probably jerkin’ off, but he’ll answer.”

“Gross.” Lea dialed the number again when the call timed out. Finally, on the third try the someone picked up on the other end. “Rick, it’s us, we’re in the apartment complex across the drainage creek. We need you to come pick us up. We’re only gonna have one chance at this.” She said quickly.

“
This isn’t Rick.
” The voice said in return, and then the line went dead again.

“Fuck me…” Lea stood from the computer and looked at her confused friends. “Someone else is in the house with Rick.”

Not needing to hear another word, Greg grabbed his M4 and hobbled/ran down the balcony to the stairwell. They heard gunshots as they ran after him on an impulse, but didn’t see what they were flying into until it was too late. Lea followed Daniel to the second level of the stairs before stopping in their tracks. Greg was going at one of the undead with a hatchet and wasn’t doing too well. This one was one of the fast ones, someone who’d just recently become infected. The raging monster threw Greg the rest of the way off the stairs and went for Daniel and Lea. Leveling the gun at the raging creature Daniel shot it in the face, the forehead and occipital lobe were blown completely away. Blood sprayed all over both of them while Lea screamed.

Daniel ran down to Greg, but his concern was unwarranted. Greg was slowly picking himself up off the ground already. “Are you okay?” Daniel tried to get Greg to follow his finger with his eyes when he felt a sharp pain in his ribs and suddenly there was no air in his lungs as he lay in the grass on his side. Daniel’s mouth moved to suck down air but like a fish out of water nothing happened. He looked for the infected psychopath attacking them, horrified beyond words that it was Lea. She was grabbing her hair and screaming as if she were on fire. Her hands pawed at her face, smearing the dead man’s blood while she shouted nonsense. Her moves were clumsy and erratic, she stepped on the computer she’d grabbed, crushing it and didn’t even notice. Lea twitched, seemed to stop for a moment with clumps of her own hair in her hands and turned slowly to Daniel with bloodshot eyes that could only be called demonic.

“Lea? Lea what are you doing!?” Daniel said with what air he had managed to drag into his lungs. He reached for his gun, but it was nowhere to be seen. Lea charged at him, an unholy howl escaping her lips before Greg clotheslined her. Daniel scrambled to his feet and searched for his gun again, the paranoia the Army instills in you about misplacing your weapon took over his every instinct. Greg screamed like he had when the girl upstairs bit his ankle, this time it was Lea chewing on his exposed flesh. Her left hand plunged into Greg’s gut through a hole she’d torn out of him with her teeth, the fingers wrapped around whatever organ she could find and pulled it toward her mouth while Greg whaled in agony and tried to get away. When he mustered the strength to fight back again, one last surge of adrenaline, she grabbed him by his face and tore a chunk out of his neck the way the zombie had with Mark. She seemed to almost bask in the blood that sprayed from the gaping wound. Like a vampire in a fountain she drank the spray and tore out more chunks of flesh. Their burly friend sank into her arms like a slow dance until he lay beneath her in ruin.

Daniel pulled the trigger of Greg’s rifle after he’d lunged for it, the 5.56mm round exploded into Lea’s knee and the tiny woman fell, landing face first in Greg’s guts. Before Daniel could pull the trigger again she was up on her feet, the pain of the gunshot completely ignored. Gasping for air as his vision swayed, Daniel flipped the rifle to three round burst and shot Lea in the chest while she flew the last several feet toward him in one great leap. She landed next to him already dead, her fiendish eyes locked on him forever.

For a moment there was complete silence. Greg was dead, the slower moving infected were still too far away to get to him, and Lea was now laying in her own blood, her fragile body destroyed. Was the virus
that
easy to spread, that she would have become infected by blood spatter so quickly? Daniel dragged himself to his feet and looked for a place to hide. The closest thing was a car, a Nissan SUV with a flat tire. The door wasn’t locked, but that was because the driver had been dragged out and eaten just behind the car. Daniel locked the doors and got down on the floorboard of the back seat, clutching the M9 with his M4 in the seat next to him. There was a blanket in the back and he pulled that over him too, choking on the insane amount of dog hair he had to inhale. Someone had a Pomeranian, and a filthy flea-bitten one at that.

The crowd of slow walkers made their way to the bodies of Greg and Lea, audibly feasting on Greg as if he were a free buffet of ecstasy pills and jello. Daniel didn’t move, but could hear the munching sounds like overgrown maggots. Two Hispanic ghouls, one with his face and neck chewed off, the other missing an arm at the shoulder, seemed to know he was in the SUV. They reached out for the windows, smearing their coagulated blood all over the glass, dogs that slobbered too much. The one with no face smacked his head against the rear windows, Daniel was sure they would cave, but instead the last sickening crack was a hollow popping sound and the faceless freak staggered backwards and fell to the ground, twitching. It had cracked its own skull. There was a way to kill them after all.

The man with one arm swung his good one at the door, but not in a coordinated punch. It was just swinging the appendage for the sake of swinging it, possibly because it was frustrated, if they could feel frustration that is. The slower ones were dumb too, Daniel saw. Gunshots in the distance drew the infected people’s attention and they shambled off in that direction, leaving Daniel alone in just minutes. After making sure the coast was clear he climbed from the car slowly, looking for any threat that might have lingered. His eyes drew toward his dead friends, unable to prevent himself from looking. Greg was little more than a picked clean skeleton, a pool of blood and bits smeared everywhere. They’d left Lea’s body alone, Daniel guessed it was because she had turned before the end. The virus wasn’t interested in spreading to a host that had already been infected.

Standing over Lea’s body, Daniel studied her. He threw up a little, remembering how she had once looked, and seeing what he had done to her. She hadn’t been bitten, her death was entirely on him. He was about to walk away when he saw her hand twitch. At first he just thought it was her nervous system firing after death, but then her eyes opened, bloodshot and wild still. Her stomach muscles were destroyed, her guts blown out her back by the M4, it took her a minute to roll to one side and push herself up on her feet. Daniel couldn’t handle the idea of shooting her again. He’d already done so much. Instead he picked up the machete Greg had dropped and pushed Lea’s corpse down with a hard shove. Using his foot he held her head to the side and jammed the blade through her ear. She stopped struggling and went limp. Daniel closed her eyes and dragged the body beneath a tree. It might be peaceful here, a good place to rest forever.

“I don’t know any prayers.” Daniel admitted in a whisper, aware that the infected were still near. “I just want you to know, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I love you, even if we didn’t have long. I’ve never met anyone like you before, never meant for any of this to happen…”

Daniel left without another word. He snuck back to the house they’d hidden in to find Rick in the recliner with a porno on the TV, his pecker hanging out next to a bottle of lotion. He had a new hole to breathe out of in his forehead. For whatever reason this didn’t surprise Daniel, not after the day he’d just had. Everything worth taking had been taken, not so much as a blanket or a half eaten can of food remained. Daniel was on his own save a rifle and a handgun and half as much ammo, everyone he’d known since crashing here was dead in less than an hour. He didn’t stay there that night, he just set off down the road and kept walking until he found a home under construction. The workers had left water there and he drank all of it. His knees hurt almost as bad as his throat, Daniel’s mind ablaze with the images of his lover dead at his own hands... in his hands. The Virginia night was hot, even in the top floor of the skeletal house where the breeze was the best. He didn’t sleep, he just watched the cities around Washington, DC burn as brightly in the night sky as their capitol had. A gas station over a slight hill exploded, the people who’d been there were fighting the zombies hard until it all suddenly ended. He watched that drama play out until the last shot was fired in the early dawn. If those people hadn’t made it after such a heroic fight, had anyone?