A Little More Dead (2 page)

“On three,” Dan whispered, gripping the worn
knob.

Normally, they didn’t waste ammo if they
didn’t have to but this
sonofabitch
would eventually
get inside and it wouldn’t be long before he attracted others.

“One,” Dan started.

A window broke out in the kitchen behind
them and this time Sophia screamed.

“Open it!”

Dan yanked the door back and the thing
barged inside, slobbering and snarling. Floor lamps shook with each heavy step
and despite the man’s speed, everything slowed to a crawl in Paul’s mind. He
had time to adjust his aim and time to notice the Rick’s Heating and Cooling
logo on the man’s coat. Bloated hands reached for Paul through bloody sleeves,
clawing at the frigid air, desperate for purchase. And holy shit, Dan was
right, he was a big one. Had to be close to three hundred pounds, yet moved
like he was half that. Paul unloaded a shell on him right away to keep most of
the mess outside. They still might spend the night here. He watched the ghoul
slide backwards across the front porch and bounce down the steps head first,
leaving his only shoe behind in the doorway as a souvenir. Dan scanned the
porch for more decaying visitors with his gun leading the way while Sophia put
her back to Paul’s to cover whatever was coming in through the kitchen. To her
chagrin, Paul insisted they start practicing these SWAT-like moves after they
fled their home and now it was paying off. Common sense was a hell of a thing
to go to waste.

“
Look out!” Carla
shouted.

Sophia’s body recoiled as she sunk a hollow
point into the slight kid limping out of the kitchen. Paul whirled around so
fast he bumped the coffee-table and knocked his apple pie onto the dirty
carpet. Last one too. The kid jerked backwards onto the linoleum with his
sunken eyes staring vacantly at the useless kitchen light above. Matt bawled
louder than ever, reaching the boiling point for eight year-olds. His older
brother sat beside him looking like he’d just seen a ghost, and he had.

“Matt, it’s alright, buddy!” Paul said,
gliding across the living room while Dan shut and locked the front door. “It’s
over. They’re gone.”

“I
wanna
go
home!”
Matt blubbered, clear liquid gushing from his eyes and
nose.

Carla hugged him tight and told him everything
was going to be okay, another blatant lie.

Paul stepped over the dead kid’s body,
careful not to slip in the pooling blood, and examined the broken window above
the kitchen sink before turning back to the fair-haired little boy on the floor.
Blood matted the kid’s strawberry blond hair and he probably wasn’t much older
than Matt. Paul stared at his blood-stained John Deere sweatshirt, wondering
what nearby farm he shambled from, wondering how far he traveled through the
snow with no shoes. “Damn,” he whispered, looking up to find Sophia’s frightened
eyes. A tear streamed over the apple on her cheek and she was about to say
something when her gaze slowly rose over Paul’s shoulder. He turned to see a
woman with long gray hair and a dirty nightgown folding her bony limbs through
the broken window like a poisonous spider. Paul raised the shotgun. Her thick
toenails perched upon the sill like a gargoyle. She stared at him and he stared
back. Paul adjusted the weapon and she screamed at him, baring her bloody teeth.
He winced with the painful cry and squeezed the trigger, blasting her back out
into the night. Paul spun back to the farm kid, positive he would be getting
back up right about now and looking for an ankle to munch on. But he was as
motionless as the look gripping Sophia’s face. She stared at the boy on the
floor with her chest heaving beneath her puffy red coat, Matt’s cries in the
living room a hundred miles away.

“He looks like Jason.”

Paul’s incredulous gaze dropped to the
kid. She was right. He did look like her nephew, freckles and all. Paul
sharpened his gaze. Or were those blood spots? Matt suddenly stopped crying out
in the living room, turning Paul and Sophia to stone. Their eyes met, the wind
whistling through the busted window, stinging their cheeks.

“We should check upstairs again.”

Paul turned to see Dan standing in the
archway with his hand resting on the
Glock
tucked
into a paddle holster clipped to his hip.

Dan stared at the dead kid on the floor
and blew out a long breath. “If we’re not safe way out here…” He looked up, a
grave look in his eyes. “There are over three hundred and twenty million people
in this country alone.”

Paul tried rubbing the wrinkles from his
forehead. It didn’t make any sense. This kid should be home in bed with a Thor
action figure tucked under his pillow, not lying on the kitchen floor in a pool
of blood. Paul ran a hand down his grimy face, grief blocking the air from
entering his lungs. How did it come to this? Two weeks ago he was running the
number one rated morning show in town. Today, he was running for his life.
Movement out the corner of his eye spiked his adrenaline. He turned to see the
frizzy haired lady stand back up outside the window and stare off into the
backyard as if something had snagged her attention, something like an easier
meal. The moonlight turned her skin white and Paul had to know what she was
looking at. Were more of those things coming? Perhaps a lone survivor lost in
the storm. Paul took a step closer and she turned to meet his eyes, his heart
sinking when she reached her arthritis-twisted fingers through the window. Sophia
said something but it sounded like she was talking underwater and Paul was too
busy watching the old woman grab the faucet and pull her skinny-ass inside.
With the shotgun tight against his shoulder, things slowed down again, giving
him too much time to notice she didn’t feel the piece of glass slicing through
her back. He also had time to observe she had a new wordless language as well.
She grunted and snarled and Paul took her head off with a booming indoor blast.
Her body jerked back outside, fingers taking a piece of the laminate countertop
with her on the way out.

Paul stared out the window, ready for
more if she was, heart pounding beneath his heavy
coat
.

Sophia lowered her gun, a long breath
streaming from her red lips. “I told you I had a bad feeling about this place.”

He turned back to the dead farm kid on
the floor. Paul was positive they would be okay this far out in the middle of
nowhere but apparently
the middle of nowhere
was just as unsafe as everywhere else. After all, there were three hundred and
twenty million people in this country alone.

Chapter
Two

TWO DAYS BEFORE OUTBREAK

The Friday night crowd went wild when
Paul took the stage, punching their fists into the air and rattling the rafters
with their enthusiastic screams. They knew him as much as they knew Lars Ulrich
and it was a hell of a rush each and every time, a perk of the job. With a
cordless
mic
hanging in his hand, Paul assumed the
front of the massive stage and rested a black boot on a monitor, scanning the
sea of black staring back at him inside Wells Fargo Arena. His silence only
made them grow louder, more restless. They knew what time it was. They’d been
waiting for this all week and he was about to give it to them. Most radio jocks
would’ve opened their stupid mouths by now and stepped on the moment but not
Paul. No, Paul waited for them to get louder without a single word, making eye
contact with each and every hell raiser in the house. The crowd roared with
anticipation.

Sometimes less was more.

Satisfied with their passion, Paul
brought the microphone to his lips and spoke in a calm voice. “You got anything
left in the tank, Des Moines?”

The crowd screamed louder, twenty
thousand pairs of bloodshot eyes all on him – including the blue pair belonging
to a pretty blond with huge tits in the front row. She waved to Paul and he
filled his lungs with a deep breath.

“I can’t hear you!”

The crowd roared again, vibrating the
metal scaffolding and shaking the floor.

“Alright, I hear
ya
.
I’m standing right here, for Christ’s sake. What’re you people, drunk?” They
cheered and Paul let them settle down before speaking again. “Listen, it is an
honor to stand before you today and introduce one of the greatest American rock
bands of all time, and I have just one favor.” Sticking an index finger into
the air, he linked eyes with the pretty blonde in the front row. “Make
em
feel at home, Des Moines, and please welcome, Blackened
recording artists,
Metallicaaaaa
!”

The crowd
orgasmed
and Paul left the stage, receiving a sweet head nod from James
Hetsfield
on the way out that Paul would never forget. A long-haired
roadie swung a flashlight ahead of him as the two sinuously navigated the darkened
ramps and taped down wires running like veins across the backstage flooring. A
long guitar chord ripped in his ears, making the crowd cry out louder than Paul
could ever get them to. The band’s manager fist-bumped him just before he
slipped into a winding concrete tunnel. Paul waved to the roadie and kept
going, pulse racing with something no drug could ever touch.

Back in his station’s sky box, coworkers
and friends high-fived him to
Wherever I
May Roam
. Finding a patch of carpeted wall to lean against, he checked his
phone to see that Sophia had made it okay to a small business seminar in
Minneapolis for the weekend. He began texting her back when someone stuck a cold
can of beer in his face, blocking the screen. He looked up into a pretty pair
of hazel eyes and smiled.

“Thanks,
Bec
,”
he said, cracking the can open and stealing a look down Rebecca’s double tank
top – black on white. Falling somewhere between a C-cup and a D-cup, he guessed
they were real.
Real nice.

Rebecca tossed a sweet smelling river of
black hair over her shoulder and leaned against the wall next to him. “You have
such great stage presence.”

He cheered her with the beer.
“Liquid courage, my lady.”

Her eyes glittered under the sky box
lights when she smiled. “Were you ever in a band?” she asked, her left breast
brushing against his arm, flushing his side with heat.

“No, and that’s for the best.”

In a shiny pair of red fuck-me pumps,
she stood at nearly eye level with him, peering into his soul. “So what’s the
plan for after the show?”

Paul glanced out into the arena, stage
lights flickering across the standing crowd below. Under his breath, he cursed
Dan for picking the worst night of the year to work late at the mall. Paul
needed a reverse-wingman to stop him from acting upon the knot of need
tightening in his gut. His eyes glided across Rebecca’s plump breasts again,
heart pounding at just the thought of it. “Not sure what we’re doing yet.”

Chapter
Three

DAY SIX

Dan leaned against the farmhouse front
door, peering out the peephole with one eye closed. “Man, that is one big dead
dude,” he said, jerking Paul from his thoughts.

Carla’s wide eyes cased the room and landed
on Paul. “Why is this happening? And if you tell me everything happens for a
reason I’ll smack you.”

“Terrorists,” Dan said bleakly, turning
to face them.
“Or the rapture.”

Carla frowned. “So we got left behind?
But we go to church every other Sunday!”

Paul leaned in the doorway to the
kitchen and scratched at the stubble on his neck, keeping his back to the dead
kid as much as possible because it was easier that way.

Carla turned to Sophia for an
explanation but she was too busy slouching in a dog hair-covered recliner to
notice, staring distantly into the smoldering fireplace they put out just before
dusk. So far, the farm kid was the youngest any of them had put down and Paul
could see the gravity of it weighing on his wife’s shoulders. He closed his eyes
and rubbed his temples, intestines twisting into wet knots. These were good
people making an honest living and didn’t deserve to go out like this. No one
did. The more he grew accustomed to the horror show confronting them on a daily
basis, the more the whole thing pissed him off. Anger danced with sorrow and it
was anger’s turn to lead. Fucking shit!

“We should leave.” Carla gripped Matt
and Mike on the couch like someone might steal them out from under her nose. Both
boys shook beneath a hand knitted afghan and it was hard to tell if they were
cold or scared to death.
Probably a lot of both.

Paul crossed over to the front windows
and carefully peeled the dingy drapes back. The full moon above painted the
snow-encrusted landscape with an angelic glow, leaving pockets of shadows
hugging the tall pines and peeling barn. At least it had stopped snowing. “It
looks clear.”

“Well, we can’t stay here! Not with
that...
thing
in the kitchen,” Carla barked. “Plus the window is
broken!”

“It’s too dark and snowy to clear
another place tonight.” Paul let the drape fall back into place, struggling to
restrain his voice. “If more come, we’ll take off in the Jeep.”

Dan jerked his jittery gaze from a
living room window to upstairs, like he’d just heard something again. He
reminded Paul of when they rented an old house on
Saylorville
Lake right after college. It was the perfect place to launch their trusty Mark
Twain ski boat and didn’t take long to figure out why the rent was so dirt
cheap. After spotting a few beady eyed mice sneaking around the house, Dan
started setting traps like he was on
Scooby-Doo
. Eventually, the mice,
more or less, disappeared but Dan always thought he saw something scurrying
across the kitchen floor or hiding under the couch. He was like that now,
seeing things, hearing things, eyes rising to the ceiling even though they’d
already rechecked every square foot upstairs.

Paul set a hand on his shoulder, making
Dan jump. “It was just some snow sliding off the roof. Relax.”

“What if those things heard the
gunfire?” Carla asked, pressing the point. “Let’s just get in the car and go!”

Paul bit his tongue and reloaded his
sidearm. “I say we stick around and see what happens.”

“See what happens?” Carla’s soccer-mom hairdo
bounced when she cocked her head to one side. “Excuse me, but I have two young
boys to think about here, Paul, and I’d rather not just leave it up to chance
and
see what happens
!”

“We all have two young boys to think
about now,
Carla
,” he said curtly, holstering
his flat black Beretta PX4 Storm. “I have a wife and best friend to think about
as well.”

Carla opened her mouth but thought better
of it and turned her pointed glare to a window over a messy desk. “This place
isn’t safe,” she muttered under her breath.

Paul groaned and tried to think of a
nice way to tell her she was free to leave anytime she fucking wanted, just not
in his truck. Mike and Matt drew air through gaping mouths, round eyes locked on
Paul. He noticed Dan staring at him as well. They all were. Paul’s brown eyes
darted back to Matt and Mike. They were so young. It wasn’t fair. They should
be building snowmen and drinking hot chocolate; not covering their ears and
screaming when Sophia shoots some random farm kid in the kitchen of some
stranger’s house.

Paul let out an exhausted sigh. “We’ll
board up the window and leave at dawn.”

Carla opened her mouth to protest.

“We’ll be fine,” he cut her off, tapping
the nylon holster strapped around his right thigh. “We’re not carrying Nerf
guns here. Try to get some rest for tomorrow. We’ll need it.”

Carla’s jaw came unhinged. Her eyes
toured the others before falling back on Paul. “That’s your plan? Board up the
window?”

His face soured. “Do you really want to
drag your
two boys
out there into the dark?
The cold?
It’s
suicide and you know it!” He paused to lower his
voice. “Look, I get it. I don’t want to stay here either, but we probably just
took out the closest neighbors around. We will be fine. I promise.”

Other than an incredulous huff, Carla
didn’t respond. She planted a kiss on her boys’ stocking caps, bravely staving
off the tears for their sake. She reminded Paul of his own mom. After he and Sophia
abandoned their dream home to rescue his mom on the way out of town, his mother
had been panic-stricken as well. What mom wouldn’t be? Then she got sick. So sick,
she didn’t even want to crochet anymore and she loved to crochet! With her cat
softly growling under the bed, he remembered her telling him about the flu shot
she got at the pharmacy the day before. Two days later, she shut her eyes and
stopped breathing, the cat still hiding beneath the bed.

Hiding like they are now, with the Devil
snapping at their heels.

Paul turned his attention back to the
window, wondering if there were others like them out there. He shuddered when
he thought about
out there
because out
there is where the full moon cast tangled shadows of withered branches upon the
pearl white snow. Out there, even the shadows reached for you. His glowing
reflection swallowed thickly in the glass. During the first few days of the
pandemic, the majority of the zombies they’d seen on the news were children and
the elderly, which played perfectly into Paul’s flu-shot theory. When the
government and medical communities started dishing out H1N1 warnings like white
cake at a wedding reception, the young and the old had been the first to get in
line. They’d also been the first to turn, but that was changing. Case in point:
The repairman, who was probably close to thirty-five.

Paul took the family portrait into the
kitchen, trying to piece together a grisly puzzle in his mind that, in the end,
would never make a lick of difference. It didn’t matter what caused it because
it was too late to stop it now. That ship had sailed. He held the picture over
the broken window to check the fit, staring into the father’s probing eyes. With
some nails and a hammer he found in the basement, Paul attached the portrait over
the broken window with the family facing outside. The picture wouldn’t stop
much but the wind from getting in but it was nice not to have to look into those
eyes anymore.

Back in the living room, he knelt next
to Sophia in the recliner and placed a hand on her leg. His swollen brain
searched through endless combinations of reassuring words, each one sounding
worse than the one before it. “Hey, you know you had to do that right?”

She stared past him with unfocused eyes,
lower lip quivering. “He was just a little boy,” she said faintly, wiping a
tear from her cheek with the back of her glove.

“He used to be, baby, but he was gone
before we got here. One of us could’ve been killed or infected if you hadn’t protected
us like that.” In spite of his careful choice of words, they still fell on deaf
ears. Paul hung his head. They would need her back in the game by morning or
next time they might not be so lucky.