Zombies! A Love Story (6 page)

A lot of them were blood and goo smattered. Not rotting, the way you see them in zombie flicks. Why would they be rotting when they’d only been dead, if you could call it that, for a matter hours? A lot of them had chunks bitten out of them or limbs missing or their insides spilling out through gaping holes in their bellies. They were blue. Purple in places. Their hands, especially. The ones who had hands. Their eyes were dull, unfocused, and bloodshot, and since they were sloppy eaters, they were mostly dripping with gore. I figured they must feast on us living type folks until we turned, and then move on to someone else. So almost none of them were intact. Probably the only intact ones, were the ones who’d changed from eating those mutant potatoes, in chip form.

Then a couple of them looked our way, right at Chuck and the chief leaning over that ladder.

“You’ve been spotted, boys,” I said, moving to Chuck’s side, gun drawn. Okay, maybe he had ditched me for seven figures, but he’d also laid down his handy nail rifle, and I was going to watch his back. I’d think about why I cared so much later.

Or maybe not, because what I saw when I looked down the ladder scared me so freaking bad I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to think about anything else again. “Jesus, Chuck, they can climb.”

One of those things was clambering up the ladder, one flailing arm following the other, grabbing a rung, pulling itself up. Slow, but steady.

I pointed the gun.

“Don’t!” Mom snapped, grabbing my wrist. “You’ll bring them all back here. Put the gun down and help them.”

Chuck and Chief Mallory, I finally realized, were pushing and pulling the ladder where it was attached to the roof, working the bolts looser and looser with every shove. I joined them and so did Mom.

There were three of the creeps on the ladder now, crowding each other, knocking each other down, falling, then climbing again. And they were making progress, dammit.

I pushed and pulled harder. The first set of grasping, purple tinted hands gripped the edge of the roof. I stomped them with my boots, but it didn’t even flinch. Mom let go of the ladder and pulled her handgun, while Chuck gave one last mighty push. The ladder gave, and crashed to the alley below. A bunch of them crashed with it.

I leaned over, braced my hands on my knees, and fought to calm my racing heart. Chuck put his hands on my shoulders. “You okay, Suz?”

“I’ve never been so scared in my life,” I told him.

“Neither have I.”

I lifted my head to look him in the eyes. “You’d never know it to watch you. Jeeze, Chuck, when did you turn into Jack Bauer, anyway?”

He smiled a little, probably flattered. Okay, he should be. Let him have that one. I had to look away, because if I didn’t I was going to end up falling into his arms like some swooning lovesick female. Two buildings down, I saw people on a rooftop, waving at us.

Chief Mallory was on the walkie again. “Knock the ladder down, Bill, they can climb. Hurry, before they figure out you’re up there.”

I watched, saw the group, one man (the detestable Mr. Reynolds, a.k.a. Chuck’s new boss,) and four women, two of whom must’ve been the teenage girls the chief had mentioned, spring into action two roofs over, while a little boy cowered near an air vent.

“We’ve gotta help them,” Chuck said. “They can’t knock the ladder down. That buliding’s newer. The bolts won’t be all rusted out like these ones were.”

I looked at the building between us and them. There was a ten foot gap between one roof and the next, and they were pretty much the same height. A long ways to jump, especially over the horde of undead cannibals in the alley below, clamoring for a meal. What the hell were we going to do?

Chapter Six

CHUCK SPUN IN
a slow circle, looking for something, anything. Maybe some stray boards we could use to make a bridge or–

“The ladder,” he said at length, looking down into the alley where the ladder we’d stupidly sent crashing to the ground lay amid the dead. They were snapping their teeth and pawing at the sides of the building. “Dammit, it would have made the perfect bridge, if we hadn’t dropped it,” he said.

“Yeah, well we did drop it, so think of something else, Chuck.”

“There is nothing else.”

I shook my head. “Then we’re going to stay up here until help arrives, and hope it’s in time to save us. All of us,” I added with a look toward the roof of the diner. They were all still working on their fire escape, while the little boy and the aging librarian stood arm in arm, looking on.

“One of us has to go down there and get that ladder.”

“And by one of us, you mean you,” I interpreted for him, and I shook my head. “There’s no way down. And even if there was, you’d be zombie meat in two seconds. And even if we could avert those two scenarios, the ladder would be too heavy to carry back up.”

“Jeeze, Suz. Negative much?”

I shot Chuck a scowl, but he just winked at me and looked around. Then he pointed at a big glass case mounted to the inside of the adobe facade on the front of the building. Behind the glass case were a fire alarm and a heavy duty hose, rolled up neatly on a wheel. A small axe hung beside it. Chuck walked over to it, grabbed the axe and smashed the glass. Then he yanked the fire hose out and carried it to the roof’s edge, unrolling it behind him as he went.

“I can climb down the fire hose, tie it around the ladder, and climb back up. Then we pull the ladder up here.”

I stared at him like he’d grown a second head. “Who the hell are you and what have you done with my favorite science geek?”

He met my eyes, shrugged a little sheepishly. “I don’t know. Maybe my new healthier lifestyle has me feeling more...capable.”

“Yeah, and clearly your iron pumping has replaced your brain with muscle. I’m not letting you do it, Chuck. You’ll be eaten alive down there.”

“Not if we can distract them,” Chief Mallory said. “Get them to leave the alley.”

Mom grabbed his arm. “John, you can’t let him–”

“It’s that or watch those people get eaten alive, Mary,” he said softly, with a nod toward the other rooftop. Their movements were more frantic. I figured the z-meisters would have to try a few dozen times to get up their building’s fire escape, but eventually, they’d do it, and it looked like they were getting closer.

I looked at Chuck. He was tying knots in the firehose, every couple of feet. Smart. It would be easier to climb that way. Maddening, because it looked like he was determined to do this boneheaded thing. I didn’t want him to. I couldn’t bear to watch him be torn apart by those things.

“All right,” he said when he’d finished. “Everyone go to the other side of the building and make some noise, see if you can lure them around that way. They’re not all that bright, so maybe it’ll work.

Mom and Chief Mallory went to the opposite side of the building, leaned over, and started shouting, clapping their hands, throwing stray bricks down there, whistling, hooting, you name it.

Chuck tied the hose securely around a metal chimney pipe, then crouched near the edge and waited. I knelt beside him, watching. And it seemed to work. The creeps started looking up, turning one way and another, trying to home in on the source of the noise. Clearly they responded to sound. And pretty soon, they started shuffling to the mouth of the alley and into the street again.

“I just hope the hose is long enough,” Chuck whispered.

“It will be.”

He met my eyes, and I felt the old feelings well up inside me, old feelings that were somehow new and more intense than ever before. It hit me how little it mattered that Chuck had taken a job working for the enemy. I loved the idiot. Always had. It was a shame he didn’t feel the same. Couldn’t. Or he’d have never accepted Reynolds’ job offer.

“Don’t die down there, okay?”

He smiled a little, maybe seeing in my eyes what I’d figured out. “Okay.” Then he looked away, down into the alley again. “It’s working. They’re going.”

I signaled Mom to keep it up, and she upped the volume. Soon the creeps must have been surging into the alley on her side, because she gave me a thumbs up sign. And then my Chuck was dropping that hose over, and vanishing down into hell. I wanted to go with him, but had to settle for watching him, making sure he was okay. I had the gun in my hand and knew I wouldn’t hesitate to use it. I was already rethinking my stance on gun control.

I had to keep reminding myself not to stare at Chuck, but at either end of the alley, so I could let him know if any of them came in. And then I heard the awful noise of the metal stairway banging against the adobe and I think my heart stopped. Creeps lumbered into the alley after him, and he jumped for the fire hose and started climbing. A couple of stragglers were snapping at his heels as he scrambled up. He made it just out of their reach, but they grabbed the hose and were pulling and jerking it all over the place, while Chuck held on for dear life. Literally.

“Get over here! Hurry!”

Mom and Chief Mallory ran across the rooftop. They grabbed the hose to help me and we pulled for all we were worth. The ladder rose, one end still on the alley floor, but the three zombies were in the way, preventing it from raising any higher. Still, we got Chuck over the top, and into my arms, which was all I could ask for at the moment.

I held him hard. “Thank God, thank God, thank God.”

He squeezed me back all too briefly, then pulled free. “Come on, pull!”

The four of us heaved, and the ladder smacked one, then spun and hit another in the head as it rose. It was heavier than I’d expected as we hauled it above the creeps, and then I saw why. One was dangling from it.

Mom pulled out her gun and popped it in the head. It fell and I stared at her. “When did you learn to shoot like that?”

She said, “John taught me.”

The ladder was suddenly much lighter, so we completed our task without any more trouble.

When the ladder was up top, we stood it on end, with the hose on the highest part. Mom the Chief held onto the bottom where the curved handles braced against the inner lip of the roof. Chuck and I pulled the hose tight, over top of the tallest chimney pipe for leverage, and then we slowly moved forward, lowering the ladder as we did.

And it worked. It spanned the gap to the next building.

We untied the hose, rolled it up. Chuck looped it over his shoulder, and then led the way as we crawled on hands and knees, from rung to rung, forty feet above a slathering mob of undead something or others, to make it to the roof of the bank next door.

Chapter Seven

ONCE WE WERE
all safely across, on the middle building, the bank, we raced to its far edge. There was a smaller gap, still too wide to jump. The people on the diner roof, which was lower by six feet than the bank roof, were beating zombies over the head as they tried to get to the top of the fire escape ladder.

“Why aren’t they using the guns they took from your office?” Mom asked. “You said they had them.”

“He also said he went back for more ammo,” I said quickly. “They used it all getting into the diner, didn’t they Chief Mallory?”

He nodded. “It’s probably about time to start calling me John. Given...everything.”

Chuck was, as usual, thinking. Crouching near the ledge, looking at the people fighting to stay alive on the next building over, and thinking. Then he said, “Got it. Quick, unknot the firehose.”

He took the hose off his shoulder, unrolling it and stretching it out across the roof. We each picked a knot and loosened it. The entire operation took three or four minutes but it felt like hours. Then Chuck tied one end of the hose around a smoke stack and carried the other end to the edge of the roof.

He waved an arm at our neighbors. “Hey!” he shouted. “I’m going to throw this hose over there. Someone needs to tie it off, so I can come help you.” He swung the hose over his head and let fly. It landed on the roof beside ours. One of the other survivors, a blond girl who looked about sixteen, came running.

“Tie it around something,” Chuck told her.

“Tie it good,” I added. “Are you sure someone older shouldn’t do this?” She looked back toward the fire escape. I did too. Blue arms were clawing their way up, while the increasingly exhausted crew of others pounded, pushed and shoved. Old Mrs. Applegate had taken the teenager’s place, using the butt of a shotgun to pound on zombie heads. God, she had to be seventy-five.