Zombie Ascension (Book 1): Necropolis Now (12 page)

"Watch how you talk to her!" Derek said, resuming their rivalry.

"That's enough!" Desmond put his hands up to stop them. "Derek, what's your little girl's name?"

"She's not…" Derek began, but seemed to regret his words. "Her name's Shanna, I think."

The girl clung to Derek's jeans and hid against the garage door in the big man's shadow. Her wide eyes were full of shock and disbelief.

"What about you?" Desmond nodded to the thug.

"Nigga, what I tell you? Ain't a part of this meet-and-greet bullshit, just need to get back out there and take what's mine. I got an arsenal that can help put these bitches down for good."

Jerome said, "Vincent Hamilton."

Desmond had heard the name before, but he didn't care for drug-dealing weapons smugglers. Vincent shook his head and gritted his teeth, but Desmond was more concerned about the little girl. He turned back to the sobbing mother and knew he didn't have it in him to console her.

"We can't stay here long," Desmond insisted. "Just to catch our breath. No matter how slowly they move, they can overwhelm us with numbers. But I don't know what else they can or can't do. I doubt they can smell us in here, because… living people can't smell like that. Then again, we can't assume. Let's keep our voices down for the time being."

"Agreed," Jim didn't move, his arms hanging at his sides, his shoulders perfectly squared.

Desmond knelt next to the woman and buried her face into his shoulder while he rubbed her back. He was going to have to take charge, and he didn't want to. Jim was clearly capable of making snap decisions, but if they were going to survive and pick up other stragglers along the way, they would have to depend on somebody to point the way.

"We don't have time to compare notes," he announced. "The dead are coming back to life and they're hungry. I was on the Ambassador Bridge when it was locked down by the military, and this thing got out of control fast. If our troops barricaded the bridge, then we can assume they have the whole city locked down. This is… an outbreak. It's worthless to sit here and wonder if it's viral, or something else. We don't know if we're on borrowed time. The only thing we can do is find someplace safe. There has to be safe zone where they're evacuating people."

The light bulb in the garage flickered.

The corner of Jim's mouth twitched awkwardly. "You're wrong, Desmond. This is a large city, and no matter how quickly the military reacts, it won't be fast enough for containment. They'll be spread thinly across the freeways and side streets, and there won't be enough men. I'm sure they already set up a temporary safe zone and extracted rich people and politicians."

"So what happens to us?"

"Well, with the speed of outbreak and fatalities rising exponentially, there's only one way to stop a complete, national emergency, money be damned."

The woman wept into Desmond's shoulder. Mina stared blankly at her bloody hands, while Jerome rummaged through a toolbox on a dusty bench behind Mina and removed a claw hammer.

"What you're saying," Desmond began, "is that we should just let them things get us now, and save us the trouble? Right? We're just wasting our time?"

Jim said, "We can do whatever we want. Why do you think it devolved into this? When the first corpse awakened, why didn't everyone just retreat to safe havens and wait for the military? The corpses are slow, and likely primitive. We've seen some of them with guns in their hands, but they don't fire. This was a containable situation, even in this large city. A dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand such creatures can’t destroy the American military. The living destroyed this place, Desmond, not the dead. Looting, raping, killing. The freedom to create our own apocalypse. An excuse to destroy ourselves."

"Fuck that," Desmond said. "There're millions of people who live near the city, more than the people who live inside of it. The government might bomb it, but they won't nuke it. They won't give up on us. The panic will subside, because it has to. It's all just a shock right now, and we can get control of it. It's not over, not like you say."

Desmond stood up and addressed all of them as he assumed his salesman-stance; once again, he was the lawyer who spoke to the jury box with his closing speech.

"I'm not going to believe for one minute that we're going to be left out to dry. I'm not going to believe for one minute that our military has been compromised, and they're giving up. I don't care if we're at war with human nature or impossible monsters. The human spirit will prevail, because it must. We can't be stopped, because we're free to save ourselves, and we'll do it. And it starts with us. We'll look out for one another, and we'll take as many people with us as we can."

He looked down at the sobbing woman and reached out his hand to her. Instead of taking his hand, she buried her face in the body of the dead boy.

"You're a righteous man," Jim said. "I thought you would have protested my extermination of the boy. But what's done is done, and like all crusaders, you remain blind to the truth. You're an amusing, doomed soul."

Desmond fought the urge to grab Jim by his shirt and shove him against a wall. So what if he had a gun? Sweaty, agitated, and afraid, Mr. Cool wouldn't have a chance against his desperation. But what would that solve?

He removed his cell phone from his pocket and discovered it still didn't have a signal. He knelt again beside the mother and rubbed her shoulders.

"You have to come with us," he tried to sound reassuring. "You can't stay here. It's not safe."

"Byron," she said through her sniffles. "He was just a boy. A good boy. I don't… I don't know… I don't understand…you didn't have to shoot him! He was still… my boy…"

Jim's smug look didn't waver. "It makes little difference how he died. We don't often choose our fate. He could have been killed in a drive-by, or shot in a fight at school. His death, like any other child, would have made the front page of the papers until the next casualty came along."

"Son of a bitch," Desmond clenched his fists.

"Shall we mourn this boy?" Jim pointed at the corpse with his gun. "There are thousands more like him, now. If we destroy one of them, shall we stop and say prayers? Shall we bury these dead?"

"We're not going to debate this, not now. Every life is precious, and that's the end of it. You want to go your own way, nobody asked you to tag along. You can do whatever you want. I'm not asking questions about the dead soldier that followed you out of the Humvee, or how you even got your hands on it in the first place. I'm not asking questions about your gowns. You're a dangerous man, I get that. What do we do about it?"

Derek interjected, "I thought we didn't have time to stand around and argue? What happened to getting out of here and finding someplace safe?"

A loud slam against the garage door caused all of them to jump. Derek backed away from the door as Shanna cried out.

"Are we done standing around?" Rhonda asked.

Another loud slam on the garage door jarred all of them.

"Ha!" Vincent shouted. He began reciting the lines to a popular rap song while he pulled up his jeans and pointed his gun at the door.

"How much ammo do we actually have?" Desmond tried to ask while the garage was pounded several times.

Nobody answered him. Instead, they all stared at the door, preparing for the worst. Derek began arguing with Vincent again about tactics, while Mina sat on the floor, watching the other survivors fearfully count the last few seconds of their lives.

"I know where we can go," Jerome said. "There's a church just two blocks over. We can go there and wait. At least until your phone works again, and we can figure something out."

He put a hand on Jerome's wrist. "We're not going to fight them. We're going to run. And run. We're going to open that door, and whatever happens, happens. We have each other, and that's it. We'll help as many people as we can, but we can't force anyone to come with us."

Jerome nodded absently. He put the hammer into his pocket.

"We're not going to make a last stand!" Desmond shouted. "Let's open the door and push right through them. We can do it, but we have to do it right now!"

Derek didn't hesitate. He bent down and lifted the garage door over their heads.

Shanna still clung to his leg when one of the dead wrapped its arms around Derek's broad shoulders. He didn't scream, nor did he drop his axe. Instead, he wrestled with the creature for a moment as Vincent slammed his gun into its open mouth and pulled the trigger. The corpse sagged, its hands still holding on to Derek until he kicked the dead thing aside.

Desmond regretted his decision. There were so many of them lingering there silently, waiting patiently in the darkness, their bodies mangled in Halloween-costume fashion, each one uniquely horrifying.

Jim had the assault rifle on his shoulder and he looked down the length of the barrel. He squeezed off a series of rounds expertly, his aim that of a videogame marksman as corpses dropped to the pavement. Derek and Vincent both ducked their heads as the living dead fell atop one another with each short burst from Jim's weapon.

He stopped for a moment and methodically ejected an empty clip, produced a fresh clip from one of his pockets and easily slapped it into the gun. He said, "I know everyone's enjoying the show, but maybe we should… move?"

"This way!" Jerome shouted as he stepped back out into the night. The others followed him, save for Desmond, who lingered for a moment near the grieving mother.

Across the street, an unlucky man was held high above the heads of a crowd as if were an object of worship. His clothes and his flesh were shredded by eager hands, strips of his bloody skin becoming tasty morsels that were fervently shoveled into greedy mouths. The victim continued to cry out, as his insides were ripped through his backside, blood raining down upon the upturned mouths.

"Please," Desmond pleaded with the woman.

She didn't move. A black man with his shirt ripped off dragged a twisted ankle across the cement toward Desmond. Veins hung disconnected, swinging and dripping, behind an exposed, bloody rib cage and chest as if they were the electrical cords to an old television.

Desmond closed the garage, slamming it onto the cement. He shuddered for a moment, and worked up the courage to run.

Strangely, he thought about Bella. If she was safe in Windsor, then there was still hope. He refused to surrender, and he knew she needed him to be okay.

There were too many of them. Where were they all coming from? Out of derelict homes, they stepped over broken porches. They oozed out of shattered windows. Each slowly turned as the survivors fled the damnable scene. There were fewer bullets fired, fewer screams. A house burned. Shadowed figures walked slowly, not hurrying to get anywhere in particular. Pit bulls barked and growled, and Desmond could only wonder what might happen to the animals. Could they be affected by whatever was happening?

Desmond caught up to the ragged band of survivors. They raced along the battered street until Jerome crouched and pointed at the neighborhood church.

The lights were still on, but the walking dead surrounded it. Several of them milled around the front steps, while others hung around inside.

Vincent laughed. "Not enough bullets for all these skulls! We keep running or we get chewed!"

"No!" Desmond shouted. "We can do this! It's safe in there if we can get in!"

"Safe?" Rhonda shrieked. "Are you out of your mind? They're inside!"

It was the last bit of hope he still had. They could run through the streets forever, but they might never find a place where they can wait for rescue to come without fearing for their lives. He'd been running for hours since the bridge, and he was tired of running.

He jumped up and down and waved at the crowd of corpses. "Over here! I'm over here! Come and get me!"

"What the hell are you doing?" Vincent said while he was bent over and gasping for breath.

"They're slow!" Desmond pointed out. "But they're in one big group. Just get inside that church and start clearing them out! Go! Get inside, dammit!"

Rhonda screamed and pushed one of the corpses over as she ran toward the church. Derek, Vincent, and Shanna followed her.

Desmond ran a circle around the crowd to get their attention. He could hear Vincent shouting obscenities inside the church, and he could only hope that they had enough bullets to make a dent into population of corpses that had taken refuge inside.

His lungs were on fire, and he was cramping up, but he had to keep running. The dead were attentive, and they tripped over one another to get to him.

Where was Jerome? Did he get inside?

His brother was entangled in a forest of outstretched arms. Desmond pushed his way through the crowd while Jim's machine gun rattled. One corpse's skull suddenly exploded; skull fragments and chunks of gore splashed into Desmond's face, temporarily blinding him.

"My eyes!" Jerome howled in pain.

"Don't shoot!" Desmond wiped blood out of his own eyes. Jerome fell onto the concrete as a crowd of creatures loomed over him.

Desmond pushed one aside, and then delivered a heavy punch straight to the jaw of another. It did more damage to his fist than the creature; the corpse simply swayed as pain flared up his arm. They seemed to be everywhere at once, but it didn't stop him from shoving them out of the way to get to Jerome.