Allison Hewitt Is Trapped (6 page)

“This is a good thing, Ted, I can feel it. Look, if there’s still wireless then there are still people
doing
things, right? Normal things! Or at least, not everything is fucked, you know? I mean … Right?”

“You have to tell the others,” he whispered, frowning and shaking his dark, moppy head. “They deserve to know.
I
deserved to know. I wish you had told me what you were up to.”

“Well, now you know. It wasn’t …
intentional
, I just didn’t think anything would come of it, you know? It felt more like therapy than an S.O.S. No more secrets from now on, Ted, I promise.”

That seemed to calm him down a bit so our congress of two moved on to a new topic: Dapper. Dapper doesn’t bark. He hasn’t barked at any of us for any reason. Maybe he’s intuited the danger we’re all in; maybe he’s just trying to fit in and be as likable as possible (which has worked, by the way). But last night after haircuts, we started to notice noises up above us, loud, scraping noises like furniture being moved around. At first we didn’t think much of it but then Dapper started barking his head off, jumping up and flashing his teeth at the ceiling.

Ted and I have determined that this is significant. The barking coupled with the noises … We think there might be survivors up there. It’s entirely possible too, considering they’re on the second floor. I have no idea how agile those undead things are. They might not be able to handle stairs very well and if stairs slowed them down then maybe the tenants upstairs managed to hold them off. We wonder if maybe Dapper came from one of the apartments upstairs and this is his way of telling us to go up.

And that brings us to the unpleasant task of asking, yet again, for volunteers. Ted and I are less certain that we can safely get through the store, out the back and up the fire escape with just the two of us. A third person would be nice, someone to keep watch in the back, just one more pair of eyes on the lookout. I can see Matt is rousing himself for an argument and he’s shifted forward a little, as if putting himself between us and Janette. Matt has taken the long, thoughtful pause to organize his thoughts and prepare for the inevitable showdown, his death glare booted up and set to disintegrate.

“No,” he finally says, predictably. “No way. It’s suicide.”

“It’s not suicide, Matt. Don’t be so dramatic.”

“You have no idea what’s up there, how many of them are up there.”

“But what if it’s not so bad? What if we can clear it out? We might actually be able to live like real human beings with couches and countertops and beds!” I say. This is getting bad—if he keeps the doom and gloom going then no one will volunteer to help us.

Then Janette, wonderful, gorgeous, Peter Pan Janette, murmurs very quietly, “A bed would be nice.”

Matt balks at her, appalled and utterly betrayed, and then sits back hard against the cupboards. He crosses his arms over his chest and looks in the other direction. I’m hoping this means Janette will join us, but she’s silent again. Ted and I glance at each other and I shift awkwardly from foot to foot. I can feel the frustration building. I want to shout:
Don’t you get it? Don’t you see what’s happened? We just have to get along! That’s all we have to do, just fucking get along!

“Please?” I ask, sighing.

“I’ll go. Damn it, yes, I’ll go.”

It’s Phil and he’s standing up, looking down at his comrades with a slight sneer. He’s woken up at last. He nods, either to bolster his own confidence or ours, I can’t tell, and then strides to the door. “Well? What are you waiting for? Are we going out there or not?”

“Yeah, of course we are, but let’s take a minute and get ready, okay? No rush.” Ted pulls Matt’s shirt off the counter. He looks skeptical, chewing on his lower lip, and I can see why: Phil’s just a bit too enthusiastic.

Phil refuses to go out unless he can use the baseball bat. Fine. We get the fire extinguisher down from the wall in the safe room and give it to Ted. We figure he can at least slow them down if any get too close. I’m not sure how much damage a fire extinguisher blast to the face does, but none of us are willing to experiment.

The plan is to move fast, to not get bogged down in one area of the store. Keep moving until we make it out the back. We hope that once we make it onto the fire escape, any Groaners that have decided to follow us will disperse by the time we come back down. I’ve checked the monitors and the store looks nice and quiet. Between taking Dapper out to go toilet and trips across the hall to the bathroom, we’ve cleared out most of the trouble in the immediate area. I’m less confident about the back of the store, where there are plenty of bookshelves for hiding and skulking and ambushing.

But my real fear is about going outside. Once we open the very back doors, the ones leading out from the storeroom, there’s no telling what we’ll see.

We’ve wrapped up our heads and reminded Matt to keep a close ear to the door. Secretly, we’ve asked Holly to listen for us too. Of the three of us, Phil looks the most outrageously stupid. He’s using an old Windbreaker for a head wrap and his glasses are poking out, resting a little on the fabric. His white polo shirt is now more off-white or yellow and his khaki pants are hopelessly wrinkled. Grunting, he scoots up his pants and nods to Ted, who has his hand on the door. When we go out, it’s pretty anticlimactic. The area outside the door is empty and there’s nothing but the sound of a distant car alarm.

I go out in front with Phil and Ted takes the back position. We turn right, going up the stairs and past the empty refrigerators and cash registers. It’s hard to resist the bookshelves when we get there, but I’ve learned my lesson and I know that behind any one of them could be a whole mess of undead. Before going out, Ted asked me to please only grab one book on the way back if I had to, two at the most. Cheeky bastard.

Once you get past the cash registers there’s about twenty or thirty feet of bookshelves before you get to the back storeroom. We stay hard to the right, leaving only one side open for an attack. There’s a low grumbling from the left and Phil whirls around to face it, ready, poised, and he’s raised the bat and taken a hard, crashing swing before I even have time to warn him. I glance at Ted, who seems less skeptical now, even through the barrier of Matt’s flannel shirt.

The floor is littered with books, stained, ruined books with pages glued to the floor by God knows what. I ax down a few Groaners right before we take the right turn into the storeroom and I can see that in the bookshelves across the room, there are more and they’ve noticed us. But the plan is to keep moving, so we do, and we maintain a fast, shuffling walk that turns into a jog when we make it into the back room. The storeroom is a big, open area with a few long tables for organizing shipments that come in. There are two areas, the first large room which has mostly empty shelving units and restocking supplies, and then the very back room which has the doors leading to the outside world. We make it to the very back and I know it’s grim before we even get there—the noise, the grumbling, pained noises of dozens of undead shifting around. They’ve anticipated our arrival and begin slowly meandering out to meet us at the doors.

Phil is still focused and on point and cracks a few right on top of the head. I don’t recognize any of these Groaners, which makes it a little easier to clean up Phil’s work with a few well-placed swings to the neck. The hardest part is keeping a good, safe distance from Phil, who throws himself into the work with a real admirable zeal. Ted hangs back, shooting out loud jets of foam with the fire extinguisher, pushing the oncoming undead back so Phil and I have time to dismantle each one. We work out a rhythm.

When the storeroom is clear and the floor is covered in a sticky, black sludge, we take a moment to breathe. Phil’s shoulders are shaking from the exertion, and he leans over to rest his hands on his knees and pant. I forget how lazy we are, how we sit around all day passing around the same book, the same magazines, playing cards, eating junk food and sleeping.

The back storeroom isn’t anything remarkable. There’s a long table and a few ancient computers for checking in shipments and a few more shelving units. I can see that the back doors are open a crack; a thin, ghostly line of sunlight runs down the middle of the floor. Phil staggers upright and soldiers on, boldly striding toward the door. It feels like something big, something important. We’ve conquered something, reached a goal that was once just a vague, imaginative “there.”

I’m worried about Phil. I know he’s a grown man and he can take care of himself, but I’m not sure he’s prepared for what he’ll see when those doors open all the way. I’m not sure I’m prepared either. Phil pushes hard against the heavy door and it lets loose a long, metallic squeal. The world outside is gray, punctuated by a few slender shafts of sunlight bleeding through the clouds. It’s colder than I expected, late September, chilly and overcast and crisp. It’s the kind of weather I used to love, sweater weather, sit outside bundled up in a blanket weather. But there’s no lush, amber scent of burning leaves and no squirrels frolicking in the trees, just abandoned buildings in the distance, standing like forgotten monuments, the lights out, the people gone.

I can hear that car alarm again but no running engines, no mysterious rescue vehicle en route to save us. It’s ghastly and quiet. The cement landing outside the door is empty. There’s no greeting party of undead to interrupt the horrible, aching calm. This was a city once, a living place, and now it’s gone muted and gray. Phil stumbles out onto the landing, heedless of the cold, but I can see the hairs on his arms standing up and goose bumps. I go out too and then down the steps. The big recycling Dumpster and the garbage Dumpster are open, riffled through, papers and boxes scattered across the pavement. Ted is jabbing at my back urgently. I turn and see he’s pointing at something. It’s a car, Phil’s car, and suddenly everything becomes clear.

Phil’s running toward his old maroon LeSabre before either of us can put out a hand to stop him. Even if we had, Phil is a huge guy, with linebacker shoulders and enough weight to throw us off without effort. He’s sprinted down the stairs and over to the car, but he doesn’t even make it to the door before he’s stopped.

I can’t explain it. Everyone knows it’s uncomfortable and heartbreaking to see a grown man cry, but it’s worse somehow when it’s your boss. He’s fallen just short of the car and stumbled down to his knees; his entire body is jolting forward and back as if he were being electrocuted. The gas cap is open, hanging down. It’s the same with the car next to his, Janette’s. There’s no gas. It’s been siphoned, stolen.

He came with us to escape. That’s clear now. I should’ve thought of that possibility. I want to be mad, I want to stand him up and shake him hard and then slap him across the face. But I can’t. I want to ask him:
Where would you go? Where do you think there is to go?

Instead, I walk over to him and gently put my palm on his shoulder. He’s tense all over, one big knot of nerves and frustration. “It’s okay. I won’t tell the others.”

We need to keep going, to push forward, but I don’t know how to rouse him from the grief. It’s just another wave of horror, another in an unending series of unwelcome surprises. Phil stops shaking after a moment and gets to his feet, slobbering across the back of his hand as he tries to wipe the tears and snot off of his cheeks and chin. There’s a tear caught in his goatee but I don’t say anything about it.

“There are golf clubs in the trunk,” he says in a sad, calm voice. He pulls a key ring out of his khaki pants and goes to the trunk. Inside, a big bag of golf clubs wait, sleeping in the gleaming leather bag, their fat heads covered in hoods like executioners. Phil reaches over and carefully, lovingly pulls out one of the clubs. “Ain’t she a beauty?”

She is.

“Here, one for each of us.”

Phil hands me a club. He tells me it’s a “driver.” It’s light, unnaturally light considering the enormous metal head. I pull off the cover and even in the dull, overcast light the silvery metal gleams.
DIABLO
is etched across its face. “We’ll take the drivers and the woods,” Phil says, handing Ted a club and keeping two for himself.

He seems to be composing himself. I think just holding the clubs again brought him back to a state of normalcy.

After that it’s time to keep moving. I’m getting nervous standing out in the open for so long. I keep imagining that just around the retaining wall to our right is an entire army of Groaners scuttling toward us. We go back to the cement landing, where Ted slaps Phil on the back and thanks him for the clubs.

The fire escape hangs down from the apartments above, ending a few feet above the landing. I’m too short to make it up to the top rung by myself, so Ted gives me a boost with his hands cupped into a stirrup. I’m not excited to go first up a ladder that could very well take me right into a room full of undead, but there’s a shiny new golf club hanging from my belt loop and I’m itching to try it out. Not that I’ve grown tired of the ax, it’s just nice to know that I’ve got a backup.

The wrought iron of the fire escape is freezing cold and covered in little pits that hurt my hands. I go as fast as possible, hoping to get to the top and inside a window before the creatures waiting inside have a chance to anticipate us. We still don’t know how they find us—is it scent? Is it something worse, some evil gift acquired at the moment of death?

I reach the slatted metal landing with my teeth chattering from the cold. Once your adrenaline drops, the freezing temperature moves in, shimmying inside your clothes and making your bones ice over. The window immediately in front of the fire escape is wide open. Not a good sign. Whoever lived inside must have tried to escape, and why would they do that if they were tucked away safe and sound in their apartment?

Once Ted and Phil are on the escape with me I peek inside the window. I’m looking in someone’s kitchen. It’s been totally ransacked. The drawers and cupboards are open or yanked down onto the linoleum; silverware and plate fragments litter the ground and countertops, and the refrigerator door has been propped open. Not seeing any immediate danger, I climb inside and then open the window wider for Ted and Phil. They struggle through the small opening, sighing and grunting as they wedge themselves through the window.