Zomb-Pocalypse 2 (17 page)

“Why do you think that?” I ask, causing Silas to look back impatiently. “None of these little side rooms would be big enough for the holding cells, or the bull pen,” he says, shining his light down the hallway to the blue door at the very end of the hall. “That door,” he says, increasing his pace. We can see from here that the rest of the doors down this hallway are shut, thank God!

I’m beginning to think this hallway is a cake walk when Silas stops abruptly before we reach the door on the end, and I accidentally run into his back. “What’s wrong?” I hiss in the dark, checking nervously behind us with my light.

Silas turns to me and grins. “For once something is right,” he tells me, motioning to the door in front of us.

“Armory?” I read out loud, not exactly sure what that is.

“It’s the guns,” Silas tells me with a small snort of distain. “Geez, Blondie, were you raised under a rock?” he can’t resist adding, and I bite my lip to keep myself from arguing with him. This isn’t the time or place.

Silas presses his ear up against the door and listens while I keep an eye on what’s going on behind us. “Okay, I have good news and bad news,” he tells me, stepping away from the door, and I look at him expectantly.

“What?” I ask, curiosity getting the better of me when he doesn’t reply until I’m forced to ask.

“We found the guns, but there are zombies in there too,” he tells me, and I swallow.

“Can you tell how many?” I ask, having some faith in Silas’s abilities. Silas shrugs.

“Maybe five,” he estimates, and I really want to ask him how he came up with that number, but, again, it’s not the time or place for chit chat.

“Guns blazing?” I ask, knowing Silas better than I probably want to. He nods, and I wince but slap a fresh mag into my 9mm—just in case his guess is wrong.

Silas tries the door knob and it turns. I’m kind of surprised they would leave the armory open like this, but I guess since the zombies are inside, someone probably ran in and didn’t make it back out.

“Ready, Blondie?” Silas asks, and I make an agreeable sound come out of my constricted throat. Silas and I stand shoulder to shoulder, probably because he doesn’t want to risk having me accidentally shoot him in the back. Silas takes one more look up and down the hall and then throws open the door and raises his gun.

Two things occur to me at once. One, we are lucky. This room has a barred window so we can actually see what’s going on, and we don’t have to use the flashlights. I throw mine down to the ground to free up my hands. And two, Silas was wrong. There are a lot more zombies in here than he thought.

I hear Silas’s pistol fire in quick succession, and it wakes me up a bit. I aim at an ugly bastard with flaking skin, wearing a cop uniform, and I fire into his face as he heads towards me, teeth snapping. He drops and another one instantly takes his place. The zombie behind him trips over the body of his fallen comrade, and Silas moves in quick to strike him with the axe. I force myself to follow Silas deeper into the room as we make a push towards the zombies. “Watch out!” Silas calls, and I feel a bullet rush by my face to plant into the skull of a zombie that was just about to take a bite out of my shoulder.

“Shit, thanks,” I mutter as I raise my gun and fire at the next rotting corpse. I miss and hit him square in the chest.

“A little higher, Blondie,” Silas grunts as he swings his axe and splits a zombie from forehead to nose. I readjust my aim, and this time my bullet hits true.

I’m breathing heavily, and a cold sweat is rolling off my body as I take out another two zombies, and Silas takes out four.

I lean against the wall panting and wipe my forehead with my sleeve. “What happened to five?” I demand, and Silas shrugs, not even bothering to look apologetic.

“It’s not an exact science,” he tells me, making me frown. I glance around the room and am surprised by the body count littering the floor. I’m also a little leery that some of them might not be completely dead and could spring up to bite me in the leg.

“Do you think they are all dead?” I ask, hating the whine in my voice, no doubt Silas will laugh at me.

He actually doesn’t, and it surprises the hell out of me. Silas bends down and quickly examines each corpse before he nods. “They are all dead,” he confirms, ignoring the bodies again as he heads over to a locked gun rack.

“Awesome, this place hasn’t been picked over,” he tells me with excitement, emphasizing every word.

“There are a lot missing,” I point out all the open lockers, but he just shrugs.

“That’s probably from the cops. If it had been hit up since then, these shelves would be picked clean.” he explains as he walks around. He finds a set of keys hanging out of one of the open locker doors and tries them out on a couple of the other locker doors.

“Jackpot!” he exclaims, pulling several small black handguns from the locker. He sets them down again and glances around, spotting a large black canvas duffel bag against the far wall.

“What are those?” I ask, coming up to stand beside him.

“Glock 22,” Silas says proudly. “These guns are wicked because they can fire both 9mm and .40 caliber ammunition.” I watch him load six into the bag and frown.

“Why do we need so many?” I ask as he moves on and tries the keys in another locker. He pulls out a wicked looking gun and strokes the barrel—this is just like the gun store all over again!

“We can always use more guns, or use them to trade for other supplies if we find other people who aren’t lunatics,” he answers me as he loads two of the large guns into the bag.

“Is that an AR-15?” I ask, my untrained eyes not really seeing much difference, but Silas’s scoff alerts me to my error even before he corrects me.

“Wrong again, Blondie,” he retorts. “Colt M4 Carbine,” he tells me, and I nod, even though I have no idea what it means.

He opens the next locker, and it’s stacked with boxes of ammo. “Do me a favor and load these boxes for me, would you?” he asks, and I nod, stepping over the fallen body of a zombie to get to work. It figures that he gives me the boring job!

Silas has added a couple more guns to the already straining bag by the time I get all the bullets loaded. He even has to lean on it to get it zipped up. I look at the bag and am skeptical that he will be able to carry it.

“Give me a hand with this,” he tells me, proving me right. I grab one end and grunt when I lift it.

“Silas…” I start to say, but he shakes his head.

“We’ll leave it in the hallway and grab it on our way out,” he says, and I grumble but nod. I know we need these weapons, but we also need to be able to run away from the zombies, and we won’t be running anywhere lugging this thing around.

We dump the bag outside in the hallway, and I can already feel the strain in my back. I loudly roll my shoulders until they pop, and then I give Silas a dirty look. It really isn’t his fault, but it’s nice to blame him anyways.

“Let’s keep going. The sooner we can confirm this joker is dead, the sooner we can get the hell out of here,” Silas says, and I nod, remembering that we are on schedule to reach the cabin today if we hurry.

We reach the door at the end of the hall, and I don’t even bother asking Silas how many he thinks we’ll find on the other side. He pauses to listen at the door but doesn’t volunteer any estimations.

“Okay,” he says, throwing the door open, and light momentarily blinds us. I blink rapidly, panicking that a zombie is going to get the jump on me before I have my 20/20 vision back. I only see spots for a couple of seconds, but they are the longest few seconds of my life. Silas is careful to shut the door behind us so we won’t have to clear the hall again—it’s smart. I scan the area for danger, and Silas does the same. We are in a wide open area dotted with tons of windows. There is a huge wooden counter that separates the public waiting area, where we are standing, from all the desks on the other side. A snarl brings my attention to a zombie on the other side of the counter.

“Damn, that’s an ugly one,” Silas remarks blandly as he walks over and cracks its skull open with his axe. The zombie falls to the floor, ceasing its rage-filled howls, and smashes its face on the countertop on its way down, leaving a nasty, gooey smear on the wood. I watch Silas hop up on the counter and swing his legs over, landing quietly on the other side. My heart skitters in fear of being left on the wrong side of the counter—it’s girly and foolish, I know—but the zombie apocalypse is really a time when you want to be able to rely on the buddy system.

I jump up on the counter too and carefully check out the floor before I jump down. There are a lot of desks set up, and a lot of them have pictures of families on them. I look away from one particular picture that stands out—a smiling picture of the little boy I had to take out in the hall. His Dad probably thought the police station would be the safest place for him when this all started.

“Come on, Jane,” Silas calls me over impatiently, and I jog to catch up, trying to shake off the image of the smiling little boy. Silas points to a door he’s found with a sign that says Holding Cells, and then he steps boldly inside. I am really starting to hate walking through doors. The mystery of what might be waiting on the other side is terrifying. It doesn’t seem to bother Silas though, so I do try and suck it up.

A zombie in a policeman’s uniform snarls at us immediately and starts towards us with a look of hungry intent. Silas drops him before he even gets close. I take a deep breath and instantly regret it. This room stinks!

I gag a little and pull my shirt up to cover my nose. It doesn’t really help, but it makes me feel better. The cells are filled with bodies, all dead, some still walking around snarling, and others that are curled up on the floor, slowly starting to rot into the concrete.

We look in each cell as we walk all the way to the end, stopping at the last cell to stare. There is a half-chewed, naked body lying on one of the beds and another body sitting cross-legged at the top of the bunk. Blood, piss, and crap dot the cell, making it stink worse than the others. Silas and I glance at each other in surprise as we stare at a blood-covered creature sporting a thick beard as he slowly gets off the bunk. He opens his mouth, and a weird rumbling sound comes out. Silas raises his gun to shoot this terrifying thing, probably, like me, thinking it’s some kind of new hybrid zombie.

The zombie holds up his hands in surrender and finally gets one word out. “Please,” he groans and then drops to his knees.

Silas lowers his gun, stares at the guy kneeling on the floor in a pile of human feces, and sighs. “Tell me that’s not the guy,” he begs, and my heart stutters when I realize that, underneath the blood and other nastiness, there is something kind of familiar about him.

I reach into my pocket, pull out the picture Natalie gave us, and hold it up to compare. “Yep, it’s the guy,” I say once I confirm that the two bear a striking resemblance.

Silas looks almost queasy. “Shit,” he mutters, and I have to bite my tongue to keep from pointing out just how accurate his sentiment really is.

Chapter Seventeen

“Hank?” Silas asks apprehensively, and the man on the floor nods his head weakly.

“Do you know where we can find some keys?” I ask. I see Silas shaking his head out of the corner of my eye, and I ignore him. Hank looks up and points towards the zombie cop we’d taken out earlier.

“Guard,” he manages to get out around a throat that sounds like he’s spent the last two weeks chewing up and swallowing gravel.

Silas mutters something illegible and stalks towards the downed zombie. I watch him as he starts rooting through the zombie’s pockets with a disgusted sound, and thankfully he finds the keys pretty quickly. They are covered in some gelatinous zombie goop, and I have to suppress a shiver—poor Silas.

“Natalie sent us,” I say, kneeling down so I can look the man in the eyes, and they immediately start to water with tears. “She’s okay,” I say awkwardly, having absolutely no experience in these type of situations to fall back on.

“I’m going to let you out, but if you try anything, I’ll shoot you,” Silas tells him, not messing around. “Do you understand?” he demands, not moving an inch towards the cell door until he gets an answer.

I see Hank’s eyes widen in shock and am hit with the realization that he’s been locked in this cell for the last two weeks. He might not have that much of an idea about what’s going on. I glance at the snarling corpse in the cell beside him and wince, then again, maybe he has some idea.

Hank nods his head and pulls himself slowly to his feet as Silas quickly opens the door and steps back. He doesn’t offer to help the man. I almost offer but then see the smear of blood mixed in with the wild tangle of his beard, and I step back behind Silas. I’m still not exactly sure what’s going on with this guy, and the word of a pregnant chick we only met three hours ago is definitely not enough.

Silas looks at me, and I give him an exaggerated eye bulge and eyebrow wiggle, trying to point out the blood. Silas scrunches his nose up at me in confusion and looks back to Hank. Hank’s got himself up and is clinging to the bars for support.

“Help,” Hank rattles out between gasps.

Without thinking, I move forward, but Silas pushes me behind him and strides forward instead. I watch as he hesitates, trying to find a spot on his orange jumpsuit that isn’t covered in blood and other equally distasteful things; he finally settles on gripping the other man’s wrist.

Hank tries to lace his arm around Silas’s shoulder, but Silas ducks away. “Sorry man, but you’ve got to take that suit off,” Silas demands, and my mouth opens to gape at them both. “Blondie, don’t look,” Silas instructs me, and I immediately turn away without any argument. I might be a worldly zombie slayer now, but I’ve actually never seen a naked man before.

“I’m sure there is something around here to change into,” Silas mutters. I hear the faint rustle of clothing and feel a blush creep up into my face. Okay, let’s get out of this nasty cell block.” Silas says, and I glance at the bodies of the other men curled up in their cells.

“Are you sure that they’re…not alive?” I ask in trepidation. I’d hate to leave anyone trapped inside a metal cage to die slowly.

“All dead,” Hank’s gravelly voice answers me, instead of Silas, and I almost turn around until I remember that Hank is now naked.

“You take the lead, Jane,” Silas commands.

I nod and start heading for the door.

“Be careful, you never know what might be on the other side of that door,” Silas adds, his words making my blood run cold. I already knew to be careful, but Silas really has a way with words.

I slowly start to push the door open with my gun held at the ready—another creepy door—great! I only get the door open a few inches when a rotting hand snakes its way through the open jam and takes a swipe at me. I let out a shriek, and by the sound of things, so does Hank. An ugly face with half-chewed-off, rotten lips and teeth dripping with strings of viscera joins the hand.

The zombie has his hand caught in the door, but his brain is so far gone that he no longer understands the concept of an outward swinging door, and his own weight keeps pushing it closed on his hand.

“Silas…” I start to say, but he interrupts me.

“You can handle this,” he says, and my heart drops into my toes. “What if I wasn’t here?” he questions, and it actually does help firm my resolve. I raise my gun, and the zombie stupidly bites the end of the muzzle, so I pull the trigger. He falls to the floor, and I wait, heart hammering in my chest, to see if another one will take his place. A few seconds go by and nothing happens, so I start to push the door open. It’s a lot harder now with a corpse blocking the way, but I put my shoulder into it and, eventually, it gives. I step out into the bullpen and scan the area. I don’t see anything else, so I take a step further.

Silas huffs a bit as he deposits Hank into one of the office chairs and hands him a notebook off the desk to cover himself. “I don’t suppose you remember where you got your jumpsuit?” Silas asks.

Hank nods and raises a shaking hand to point to a closed door beside the one that leads back to his cell.

Silas looks at me briefly before motioning for me to come with, and I know he was probably weighing the pros and cons of leaving me alone with a strange man that we just liberated from jail, versus the need for someone to stay behind and protect Hank in this seemingly clear room. I’m actually a little touched that he cares.

We make our way over to the closet, making sure that we still have a clear visual of Hank, and we both lean in and listen at the door. We can hear some bumping around, and I feel a stab of annoyance—another zombie. “You throw the door open, and I’ll shoot it,” Silas says, letting me catch a break, and I nod gratefully.

I grip the door handle and pull, stepping back behind the door as I go. I can’t resist the suspense, and I peek around just in time to see a zombie come charging out of the linen closet. Silas raises his gun and then seems to think better of it. He holsters the gun, pulling his bloody axe from the loop on his belt and cleaving his attacker right through the forehead. The zombie twitches and falls to the floor, taking Silas’s axe with him. Silas reaches down, pulls the axe from the biter’s head with a wet slurp, and then shines his flashlight cautiously inside the small room.

I gingerly step over the zombie’s body, trying not to look too closely. I wrinkle my nose as the stench of zombie attacks my senses when I step inside the closet. The zombie has probably been in here since the beginning—I shine my light around at all the shelves that have been knocked into disarray and wince when I see that some of the jumpers are messed up and crusted over with zombie goop.

“What size do you think he is?” I whisper to Silas, and he shrugs, frowning at me.

“This isn’t a fashion show, just get him a large—it should fit,” he snaps.

I don’t argue, but I do let out an annoyed huff that hopefully leaves no doubt in Silas’s mind just how annoying he’s being.

I grab a couple pairs to tide him over for now. Even though I’m sure prison orange isn’t Hank’s favorite color, it’s better than his birthday suit!

“Who are you people?” Hank asks as we step out of the closet, overtop the downed zombie, and Silas throws a jumpsuit at him. “I mean…you’re just kids, but your shooting guns and murdering those…things…with an axe.” Hank takes a shaky breath and starts to pull his coveralls on. I turn my back to avoid seeing anymore of Hank than I’d like.

“Zombies,” Silas says, and I hear Hank suck in a breath.

“Come on, kid,” Hank says in a disbelieving voice, and I have to supress a smile to hear someone call Silas a kid—I bet he loves that.

“What do you think’s been going on for the last couple of weeks?” Silas asks the other man, and he must not have an answer because he doesn’t reply. “Did you think they just forgot to come in and feed you guys?” Silas snorts. “What did you think those things in the cell beside you were?” he presses, and I hear Hank let out a sniffle.

“Silas,” I warn him, and he lets out a sigh of frustration.

“The world’s changed now, almost everybody is dead. You get bit by one of those things—you die,” I hear the zip of fabric and turn around to see Hank wobbling as he stands holding onto the desk for support.

I look at Hank with a critical eye. He looks like he was already on the slender side even before spending two weeks in an unattended jail cell. I’m not sure how we are going to evade the zombies with this guy in tow; he can barely walk! I dig in my bag, pull out a bottle of water, and hand it over to him—feeling like the biggest jerk on earth, making him wait this long! The thought occurs to me, with the reduced human population, I could actually be the biggest jerk on earth right now.

Hank’s hands shake as he sinks back down into the chair, trying to twist the lid off the bottle. Silas reaches over and gives the lid a quick twist, using only two fingers to show off, and I shake my head. I’m pretty safe from the title of biggest jerk left on Earth—as long as nothing happens to Silas. All joking aside though, I’m stunned by how weak this guy is. I give Silas a worried look over the top of Hank’s head, and he shrugs.

“Thank you,” Hank manages to gasp after he’s chugged more than half the bottle. Silas hands him a power bar and from his own bag, and the guy barely chews it.

“Natalie is okay…she’s here?” Hank asks when there’s nothing left but the wrapper, which he’s even licked. I’d started to pull another one out of my bag, but Silas had shaken his head. I guess after not eating for so long, he would probably get sick.

“She’s okay. She’s been trying to get to you,” I reassure him, and he sighs.

“And the baby?” Hank asks with a great deal of trepidation on his face, and I nod.

“She’s still pregnant,” I say awkwardly, not really sure what the guy expects from me. I’m no OBGYN— and honestly—anything could be going on inside that enormous baby bump.

“I have to find her,” Hank says, standing up and swaying dizzily on his feet.

“You might want to wash some of that blood out of your beard first,” Silas says pointedly, and I gasp—I can’t help it. It’s such a terrible thing to bring up. It was pretty obvious to me when we rescued Hank, and Silas too, I’m sure, that the only reason he was still alive this long was because he’d been eating his cellmate. I swallow at the mental image that comes back to haunt me of the naked man on the bunk with pieces missing out of him. It’s honestly like Hank is already halfway to being a zombie.

Hank’s face falls at the reminder, and even though he’s deathly pale, he somehow manages a blush. “You have to understand…I didn’t know what else to do,” he says brokenly, and it’s quite obvious to me that Hank regrets what happened. My own stomach heaves just thinking about eating the flesh of another person, though in his defense, he was starving to death.

“Did you kill that guy?” Silas asks, and Hank’s expression goes from regret to horror.

“I’ve never killed another person in my life,” he denies hotly. “I don’t know if Nat told you, but I was only in this cell for a DUI.” He takes a deep breath, and I can see the expression of self-loathing on his face. “That guy was a diabetic. After two days, when no one came back to inject him with his insulin, he died.” Hank is actually shedding tears by this point in the story. “I didn’t…you know, at first,” he admits. “I made it nearly a week before I couldn’t stand the hunger anymore. We’d just been given lunch when everything started to happen, so I had a bottle of water that helped keep me going.” He scrubs his hands over his face and winces at the feel of his dense beard.

“Let’s find a bathroom or something,” I suggest, not particularly wanting to hear much more of his story—it’s not really our business anyway. Silas looks annoyed that I’ve interrupted just as things are getting good, but he gets to his feet from where he was leaning up against a desk.

“I saw a locker room just over here,” Silas tells us, leading the way to another set of doors. We bust the door open, prepared for a fight, but it appears to be one of the few places that are zombie free in this whole police station.

“You will probably be able to find something in here,” Silas says, pulling open a couple of the lockers and throwing a shaving kit at Hank. Hank tries the faucet, but nothing comes out. So I give him another bottle of water, and he takes a sip before setting the plug in the sink and dumping the rest inside the porcelain bowl.

I watch him with blatant curiosity as he finds a cordless beard trimmer in the bag and quickly runs the blade over his face. A lot of his matted, dirty beard hair falls to the floor in a heap. He quickly washes the rest of his face before running a regular razor over the rest. He cuts himself in several places because his hands are shaking so badly, but Silas doesn’t step in to help him, and I certainly am not going to offer.

He wipes away the blood and splashes water over his face and head before standing up and using the spare pair of coveralls to dry himself off.

“What now?” he asks, and I’m surprised at how different he looks with a clean shaven face.

“We connect with the rest of our group and get the hell outta here,” Silas says, and I pray that it will really be as easy as he says.

Silas takes the lead, with Hank in the middle and me taking up the rear, and we make our way back over to the large wooden counter. We’d just jumped over it before, but now we have Hank, and he seems pretty weak, so Silas walks around to the far side where we can see a small swing door built right into the counter.