Zomb-Pocalypse 2 (5 page)

“Let’s just go,” I mutter, resisting the urge to take a kick at the bloated corpse of my captor. I shiver when I feel the zombie crud settle more firmly inside my ear drum,
thank you gravity
, and my hearing is muffled like I’ve dipped my head under water—or, more accurately, zombie guts.

I want to freak out, scream, stomp my feet and, most importantly, race to the bathroom and promptly rip my own ear off and throw it into a bucket of bleach– possibly light it on fire, but Silas is already scooping up the spilled basket and running off, and my legs grudgingly follow.

We’ve almost reached the stairwell when we hear the screams. I skid to a stop, but Silas keeps going.

“Silas!” I call out, knowing full well he heard it too. If I can hear it with my ear full of goop, he heard it for sure.

“Jane,” Silas says, turning back to me, and I know in my very marrow that he isn’t going to help.

“It’s our fault they broke in here. I’m going.” I say, turning around and dropping my basket as I start off in the direction of the screams, but Silas grabs my arm.

“No,” he pushes the heavy shopping basket loaded down with ammo into my arms and gives me a push towards the stairs. “I’ll go check it out. You head upstairs and try to draw them towards the back like we planned.”

I want to argue with Silas, but he’s already running towards the noise. I watch his retreating back for a minute before springing into action.

Keeping more zombies out of the mall is probably the most important thing right now. I’m sweating and tired by the time I reach the top of the stairs; this basket probably weighs twenty lbs. My legs shake, but I force myself to keep running towards the back end of the mall. I set the basket down with a thud and lean over the edge to see what I’m dealing with.

A lot of the zombies did end up where we wanted, only a few rogue zombies wandered off on their own to crash the front windows. I take a quick moment to swipe my hand across my ear. It comes away wet and black, and I wipe it on my pants as I pull my gun off my hip.

“Hey!” I yell, making several zombies look up and moan hungrily. I try to take careful aim before I squeeze the trigger, but I miss my first shot. The zombie beside the one I was aiming for takes the slug in the chest, but stays upright.

It’s difficult to shoot downward, so I aim a little further to the back of the crowd. My next shot hits its target, a female zombie with muddy blond hair sticking up in every direction.

I miss the next shot, but I hit the next zombie. It continues like this until my gun runs out of bullets and I have to reload it. I take a minute to look over my shoulder to see if there’s any sign of Silas, but he hasn’t shown up yet. I get a sick knot in my stomach and pray that my demands don’t get him killed. I shake it off pretty quickly though. If, in this entire apocalypse, I have faith in any one person’s ability to survive—it’s Silas.

My hands are trembling as I finish reloading my gun, so I shake them out before picking the pistol up again. When I do, I take deep, steady breaths, and this time I shoot a little better than fifty percent. I load the pistol for the third time, noticing that the barrel is starting to feel warm.

I fire the next fifteen rounds into the crowd and count eleven take downs. I feel pretty impressed with myself, but I know if I was in a situation where I didn’t have time to sit and line them up so carefully, my numbers would be much lower.

The end of the gun has heated up even more, and I don’t want to be responsible for wrecking it, so I grab the Glock from the shopping basket. It’s different than my nine millimeter, but similar enough that I figure out how to load it with the .45 ammo.

I take aim and am surprised at how much more of a recoil it has. It also doesn’t have a silencer, and the crack of the pistol makes me jump. I hear it echo back to me and worry about how many zombies might hear it. I miss the first shot because I wasn’t expecting it to be so different. I brace myself the next time my finger squeezes the trigger and smile when a zombie goes down like a bag of hammers.

“Good shootin,” Silas drawls from behind my shoulder, and I almost drop my gun off the roof.

“You scared me,” I accuse, turning around and feeling relief when I see a pale, shaking Ryder standing a few feet away.

Silas winks, and I send him a smile that I hope conveys how much I appreciate what he did.

“You’ve thinned them out pretty good, Blondie,” Silas says, surveying my handy work, and I feel a glow of satisfaction in my chest at his praise. “Now it’s time to finish them off,” Silas says, getting in behind the AR-15. I hand him a magazine, and he snaps it in.

The sound of round after round chambering is a sweet one as the zombies start to fall. I quickly stuff another magazine for Silas and leave it beside him.

I look for Ryder, who’s still pale and shaking. He’s walked a few feet away and sat down on an upturned milk crate.

“You okay?” I ask, walking towards him, and he jumps like I spooked him.

Ryder doesn’t say anything. He just nods his head, his eyes looking off vacantly, and I have the distinct impression that he’s mad at us for ever coming here. The mall is pretty much ruined now.

I want to tell him that this could have happened at any time, but Silas’ gun is empty and I know he’s going to need more magazines filled.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble, patting him on the shoulder as I turn and jog back to Silas, who’s cutting a huge swathe through the zombies with the automatic weapon. He’s not really aiming, more pointing at head level and letting loose.

I kneel down and start loading magazines while Silas keeps dishing out a little justice for the human race. We fall into a pretty good routine, though my fingers are starting to get sore, and I’d imagine that Silas’ trigger finger must be getting numb.

Out of the corner of my eye, I sense Ryder get up and come stand behind us.

“Do you want to take a turn loading ammo?” I ask, turning to look at him just as he lunges at me. I dive out of the way on adrenaline fueled instinct, and Ryder trips over the knee-high wall and scratches at thin air.

He doesn’t even try to catch himself. I reach for him, but it’s too late.

“Ryder!” I scream, looking over the edge just in time to see him hit the ground with a dull thud.

Silas stops shooting and joins me looking over the edge.

“What the hell happened?” Silas demands, but I can only shake my head. I have no idea why Ryder did that. I turn and press my face into Silas’ chest, and he puts his arms around me. I don’t want to see the zombies attack him, I can only hope that he died on impact.

“Holy shit, he’s getting up!” Silas exclaims, making my blood run cold. I know I don’t want to see this, but I peel my face out of Silas’ shirt and look anyway.

Chapter Five

Ryder staggers to his feet. Even crazier than getting up from a twenty-foot nosedive off the roof, is the fact that the zombies aren’t attacking him.

I lean forward to get a closer look, and Silas clutches at the back of my hoodie, probably afraid I’ll be the next one off the roof. “He’s a zombie,” I say when I get a good look at his blank eyes and broken bones sticking out at odd angles, and my mouth hangs open in shock. “Did the fall kill him, and he turned that fast?” I ask, even though I know Silas doesn’t have the answers.

“Maybe when you die the zombie infection takes over, and you come back like that?” Silas suggests, and it’s a grim thought until I remember Kyle’s mother.

“No. I don’t think so,” I say with a frown. “Before we met up with you, we went to a house where the woman had killed herself in the garage.” Remembering Kyle is like a bucket of cold water getting dumped down my icy spine. “She didn’t turn,” I say quietly.

Silas looks relieved to hear it. “He must have turned on the roof, that’s why he was grabbing for you, and that’s why he was clumsy enough to fall off the roof,” he says and then frowns. “That sonofabitch. I asked him if he got bit, and he lied to my face!” Silas looks mad enough to spit nails, and I can see his point. Ryder put us all in danger, but I still feel the need to defend our would-be zombie murderer.

“Silas, you shouldn’t talk like that about the dead.” I say, feeling pity more than anger towards Ryder. He was probably terrified and didn’t want Silas to shoot him while he still had a pulse.

I reflect for a moment about how awful it would be to die alone, or even with a bunch of strangers. It makes me think about Ryan. “Let’s finish up,” I say with a fresh flood of determination. I get up and go back to my position, reloading Silas’ magazines with the AR-15 cartridges.

It doesn’t take much longer to clear out the zombies. I watch them fall one by one and feel nothing until he shoots Ryder, and then I have to look away.

“That’s the last of them, Blondie,” Silas says proudly, standing up and stretching, making his back pop loudly.

“Good,” I say, getting up as well. Spending the last hour crouched on the cold cement hasn’t done me any favors, and I need to stay limbered up for our venture back down through the mall.

The thought of fighting our way through the mall makes me tired just thinking about it, but we need to find Ryan, so I put on a brave face.

Silas digs two flashlights out of his pack and hands me one. “The staircase is going to be dark, and I don’t know if those things can climb,” he says, making me feel even more daunted by the task at hand.

I chuck the Glock and spare ammo into my pack, feeling the added weight settle not just on my back, but around my heart. I hand Silas the other one, and he packs it and his share of the ammo into his own bag. He also throws in the spare magazines for the AR-15 and then hefts the AR up onto his shoulder, leaving his pistol at his belt.

“Ready to go Rambo?” I ask, and Silas chuckles.

“Born ready,” he quips, throwing the door to the staircase open and stepping back in case zombies surge out. “There were at least ten beating against the bottom door the last time I came through,” he warns when we see that the stairwell is clear all the way down.

The stairs are empty, the concrete thankfully doesn’t leave any places to hide. We reach the bottom without incident and pause to listen outside the door.

“I don’t hear anything,” I whisper, and Silas nods, bringing the AR-15 up to his shoulder and motioning for me to open the door.

I pull the door open and jump behind Silas, and the rifle goes off as soon as I’m clear. The sound is deafening against the concrete. Silas takes a step back, and I get ready to retreat back up the stairs. I want to look over his shoulder and see what’s going on, but the empty casings are being flung from the gun and I don’t want to get hit in the face.

The shooting stops and I pop my head around Silas’ shoulder, ready for hand-to-hand combat if I have to, but we are the only ones around. I count four zombies on the ground. “Where did the rest go?” I ask in a quiet voice, and Silas shrugs.

“They might have followed our gunfire back outside earlier, or they could be in the mall somewhere still,” he suggests, and I liked his first idea better.

“What now?” I ask, keeping my eyes alert and scanning the area. I don’t like the mall anymore. There are too many places for the dead to lurk.

“Let’s go get your lover boy,” Silas says, and there is actually less spite in his voice than usual when he talks about Ryan.

We are already wearing our backpacks and carrying our weapons, so we have no reason not to leave right away. We keep going and walk right out the front door. We don’t encounter a single zombie. In a weird way it’s almost worse than having to fight our way through a bunch of deadheads—waiting is the worst part, and it gets me jumping at shadows.

Once we get outside in the hot, dusty parking lot, I feel a lot more exposed than I had up on the roof. Silas leads us around the side of the mall, making us walk right past the piles of zombies we killed.

The flies are already buzzing around so thick that it looks like black clouds moving from corpse to corpse. I swat a fly away from my face and try not to let it remind me about the zombie guts I’m still accessorizing with.

“It’s that hill, isn’t it?” I ask Silas, pointing to the lone rise off in the distance. We don’t have the advantage of height anymore, but it looks like the same hill—it even has the same black smudge of zombie sludge marring the grass.

“Yep,” Silas says, never willing to waste words when a simple grunt will do. He digs in his pocket and pulls out a crinkled pack of smokes. “Want one?” he asks, holding them out to me, and for a second, I’m tempted. I’ve already turned into a badass zombie slayer, sort-of, maybe a smoke would help cement my image?

I finally shake my head when I think about my parents, and what they would want me to do right now. “Keep those cancer sticks away from me.” I grumble, feeling ashamed by my urges.

“Suit yourself,” Silas says, lighting one up and taking a deep puff. We walk in companionable silence for fifteen minutes, our eyes scanning the landscape. It’s a bit chilly since it’s the start of fall, but I’m sweating by the time we reach the top of the hill.

Silas grabs my arm and pulls me down, when I would have simply walked over the rise of the hill. “If you stand at the top of this hill, every zombie for miles will be able to see you,” he hisses at me as I lay stretched out on my belly. I don’t really like being on the ground either; it’s a lot harder to run away from this position, but I decide to trust that Silas knows what he’s doing.

We peek over the hill, only popping our heads up enough to see the neighborhood that comes into view. It looks like it’d been a nice subdivision with new houses in neat rows, there’s even a park, but it’s destroyed now from the dead and is littered with the skeletal remains of people, pets, and a surprising amount of trash.

It’s a ghost town. “I think I’ve found Ryan,” Silas says, making my heart speed up in my chest. I scan the area, trying to see what Silas sees.

“I don’t see him,” I whisper finally, frustrated with myself.

“See all those zombies gathered around that one house over there?” Silas asks, and with a sinking feeling in my gut, I nod. “That’s most likely where Ryan is holed up. He must have gotten trapped.”

My head knows that Silas is probably right. Why else would the zombies be gathered there? They don’t give a shit about anything that isn’t warm human flesh. “How can you be sure?” I ask anyway, not wanting it to be true.

“I’m not, but we won’t know until we get them to move,” Silas says as he stares out at the group with a calculating look.

“Are you going to shoot them?” I ask, hesitant to fire bullets towards the house Ryan is trapped in, but he shakes his head.

“If I can avoid it, I will. The noise will bring every biter in the area to investigate.” Silas runs his hands through his short, brush cut hair, and I notice for the first time that it’s not as short as it’d been when I first met him a week and a half ago. It’s even more sobering to realize that I’ve known Silas for such a short time. He’s become such an integral part of my life it feels like he’s always been around.

I peel my eyes away from Silas to look around and make sure there aren’t any zombies coming up behind us. The hill behind us is clear. “Okay…” Silas says, bringing my attention back. “We’re gonna need a vehicle. If Ryan is trapped in there, then he hasn’t found one yet. We can’t lure that group away on foot; it’s too dangerous.

I nod. “Sounds like a plan,” I agree as I pick my 9 mm up off the grass.

“We’re gonna have to be quick and not make any noise when we go down this hill, use the houses for cover, and try not to draw their attention until we’re ready.”

Silas peeks over the hill one more time and then gets to his feet, staying hunched over as he runs, like he’s trying to take up as little space as possible. I was expecting him to take off, so I’m not the least bit surprised. I try to emulate his movements. Silas ducks behind the odd tree as we go, and I do the same.

I’m out of breath when we reach the bottom, not from lack of energy, but from the spike of adrenaline and fear. I don’t hear anymore moans than usual, so I’m pretty sure they haven’t seen us. Silas ducks behind the first house we come to, and I lean back against its solid frame trying to catch my breath.

A gentle thumping behind me makes me spin around, gun up at the ready, and my heart pounds even harder in my chest. A child-sized zombie is staring at me from the other side of the massive window. He bares his small teeth at me and then runs a black, bloated tongue across the glass like he can taste me.

I don’t want to risk making noise when it’s so important to be quiet, but this kid has me tripping balls. I reach out and yank Silas’ sleeve to get his attention. He turns and sees the zombie, and a pained expression crosses his face, and remember too late that he lost his little brother to the zombies.

I put my hand on Silas’ arm, but he shakes me off and takes off running to the next house, leaving the disturbing little zombie behind.

We work our way in the opposite direction from the horde. It won’t do us any favors to get spotted before we have a vehicle.

We scurry along back alleys, and it reminds me of the night before I found out zombies were real. I’d taken the back alley as a shortcut home in the dark. I am one hundred percent sure, now, that the person who ran into me in the alley had actually been a zombie, and not a drunk like I had first assumed. I haven’t had a spare minute to reflect back on that night since this whole mess started, but now that I do, I am so grateful that I wasn’t turned into a zombie before I even knew what was going on. So many people probably died in confusion at the beginning; they didn’t even have a chance of escaping their fate.

A zombie that looks like it’s been through the wringer is staggering along ahead of us. It’s missing patches of hair and flesh from his head, and dragging a leg with the foot completely facing the wrong direction. Silas shoulders his AR-15 and pulls his trusty pistol from his belt—it’s the wiser choice because it’s easier to use and will be quieter.

Silas drops the zombie by shooting it through the back of the head. It never even knew we were here. Up ahead there’s a minivan that might be alright. Silas jogs over and tries the door, but it’s locked.

“Can we break the window and hotwire it?” I whisper, but Silas shakes his head.

“Too risky, this van is new, it would be tough to wire, and breaking the window might set off an alarm.” I shudder thinking about setting off an alarm that would bring every zombie for miles to our location.

“Yikes,” I murmur, and Silas nods.

“I’d only risk breaking a window if the keys were sitting out where we could see them.” He pauses and scans inside the van again for a second time, cupping his hands against the glass. “There’ll be something else—let’s keep moving,” he says as he starts walking away.

I jog to catch up, and have to keep jogging just to keep up with his long-legged strides. Ryan would have slowed down for me, I can’t help think, and it makes me miss him even more. Ryan is the perfect balance to Silas’ prickly personality, his polar opposite.

We reach the end of the alley and will have to cross the street if we want to continue down the next alley. It’s dangerous to go out in the open where we could be spotted by a hoard. The house across the alley has a large garage though, so our risk might pay off. We poke our heads around a tall, cedar fence and spot a group of three zombies tearing something apart.

I look past the zombies, and something about the truck parked further up the road catches my eye. I poke Silas and point to the black truck with the red fuel tank in the back. “Is that our truck?” I ask incredulously, shock making me stand up a little straighter.

It really can’t be
this
easy to get it back. I can’t help thinking, and then cuss myself out for jinxing us.

Silas had already spotted it and nods grimly, “Yep.”

“What are we waiting for, let’s get it back!” I say excitedly, remembering to keep my voice low at the last moment. It’s a massive breakthrough to find our own truck. The external fuel tank Ryan found had really given us an edge, not having to stop at gas stations so much cuts down on our exposure to the dead.