Books of the Dead (Book 1): Sanctuary From The Dead (11 page)

CHAPTER 16

Nomads

We quietly moved through the building without incident and made our way across Second Street until we got to the administration building.  Frank stopped to catch his breath at the southwest corner of the building before we made our way around back.

It was my turn to jab back at him for once.  “You going to make it,
Old Man?”

He gave me a look, but didn’t take the bait.  “I saw them drive around the back of Massie Hall,” he said huffing and puffing, his breathing labored.

“Frank, you really up to this?” I asked.

“Just a little out of breath.  That’s all.”

The nomads’ cars were parked as close as you could get to the building, almost kissing it -- probably to avoid being out in the open as much as possible.

Frank took out his night scope and scanned the building for several minutes. 

“I see movement.  Probably five or six people.  There’s one man.  He looks old because he’s stooped over.  I see two women.”  He paused and scanned for a couple more seconds.  “There’s at least one kid.  Can’t tell the gender.  Wait, there’s one more person.  Not too big.  Could be a kid or a small man.  I’m going with kid.”

“Should we call it in?” I asked.

He gave me an incredulous look.  “Hell no.  If I’m right, there’s only a handful of them.”

“Still, there’s only two of us.”

“But we have the element of surprise.”

“Surprise for what?  I thought this was just a reconnaissance mission -- check things out and report back.”

“I didn’t risk my neck to just go back with a report.  There’s only an old man and some women and kids.”

“An old man,
women, and kids with guns.”

“We’re armed,” he said holding up his gun.

“And what was your plan with the gun?  This is just a small group of people trying to get by just like us.”

“They can get by somewhere el
se.”  He stood and we moved around the Administration Building and to the back of Massie Hall.  It was four stories and was the biggest building on campus.  As we walked, my finger played with the walkie-talkies power switch, but I left it off. 

I always called Massie “the Barn” because the roof employed a Gambrel design that reminded me of an old country barn.  One of the main entrance doors was ripped off its hinges and laid on the ground.  We entered there.  The interior of the building was completely dark with
the exception of the moonlight streaming through the windows.  It was a particularly bright moon which worked both for and against us.  I used my pocket flashlight sparingly waiting for someone to shoot toward the light each time I flipped it on.

For a big man, Frank had a stealthy way about him.  He wasn’t ready to be a ninja, but he moved with a lighter ease than I would have imagined.   He probably thought I was stalling (which I was), but I insisted, just to be safe, that we make sure no one was on the first floor.  Our quick tour of the floor took less than five minutes.  I wanted to check the basement, but Frank saw through my stalling technique and pushed me to the stairwell and upward. 

As he pushed the door to the second floor open, there came loud clattering sound and I froze in place.  I started to back up, but Frank reached back with one of his beefy hands, grabbed me, and surged through the door, pulling me along like I was a rag doll.  A chair with several soda cans lay strewn across the hall, a warning system announcing our incursion to the second floor.  I bent over, trying to make myself a smaller target, in case someone started firing our way.  No shots came, but I saw a light flicker out at the far end of the hall as we ran to the first open room.  The end of the hall was about 75 feet away,  it seemed a mile away.  That was until the shooting started -- then it seemed like inches.

It was only two shots, but I could swear I heard a bullet whiz by me before chunking into the wall just over my head.

We dove into the room and I slammed into a chair, sending it flying across the room into several other chairs -- the commotion seeming like a brass band to my ears.  I ended up on all fours and when I got back to my feet, I noticed that we were in a classroom.  It looked like someone had a done a number on it.  Chairs were overturned and papers were strewn across the floor like over-sized confetti.  Streaks of dried blood painted a garish and frightening picture of what had happened here. 

I had one hand on my gun and the other on the walkie-talkie.  Franks saw my hand in m
y pocket and shook his head, pressing his index finger to his lips.  I removed my hand from the walkie-talkie and flipped him off.  He just smiled back.

He went to the doorway and slowly edged his head out, peering down the hall.  He pulled back into the room, pointed at me, and made a patting gesture with his hand towards the floor,
telling me to stay put.  He pointed at himself and then towards the hall.  I shook my head forcefully, but he ignored me and was out the door before I could protest any further.

I angled myself so that I could see down the hall and watched as he jogged into a room on the opposite side of the hallway.  Something in
me wanted to break and run.  Another part wanted to call in the cavalry, but I wanted to give Frank the benefit of the doubt. 

Frank ducked into the room next to mine.

“Hey, you down there,” a man’s voice shouted from the end of the hall.  It had a raspy edge to it.  “What do you want?”

A little voice in me wanted to say, “Nothing.  Nothing at all,” but I remained mute.

“I could ask you the same.”  Frank’s voice boomed down the hall.

“We’re just looking for a safe place to land.  Away from those things.”

“Why’d you shoot at us?”

“We thought you might be one of the zombies.”

“Where did you come from?”

“From down the River.  Ashland.  It was overrun.  We had to get out.”  I could hear a faint quaver in the voice as if it were from an older man.

Frank cleared his voice.  “Well, here’s the deal.  This is our town and we don’t want any outsiders taking up what we have.  What’s ours!”

Unlike the first exchanges, the reply was not immediate.  I strained to hear and thought I could make out whispers coming from the end of the hall.  The whispering went on for about thirty seconds.

“There’s only a few of us.  Portsmouth is a pretty big place.  There’s got to be enough for your people and mine.”

“I really don’t see it your way and we would appreciate it if you’d move on as soon as possible.  Like now.”

Another whispered exchange filtered down the hall my way, the voices indistinct. 

“We
can’t do that, mister.  We’re ‘bout out of gas and the way I see it, ain’t no one that can claim a town now that the law of the land has up and gone away.”

“We are the law here
, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll heed what I say.”

I didn’t like any of this.  This was just escalating and Frank was boxing them into a corner.  And had Frank just used the word, ‘heed?’
  Were we in an old west novel?

“Are you threatening us?”
the voice asked.

“Let’s just say it’s a strong word of encouragement.”

The back and forth ended and a heavy silence filled the hall between us and them.  I thought I heard sounds of movement and then Frank whispered down the hall in my direction, “Hey Joel, I’ve got them on the run.”

That was when I saw the silhouette creep by my door.  This silhouette was carrying a rifle.  

“Frank!” I shouted.  “They’re coming --”

I didn’t get the rest of the sentence out as the figure wheeled towards me and cracked off two s
hots.  The first one struck the wall a few feet away and the second one ricocheted off a desk.  I was on the ground rolling out of the line of fire before the figure could get off another shot, but I saw brilliant flashes filling the hallway accompanied by the booms of gunfire. 

The firefight was brutally quick.  There was a sound like sack of potatoes hitting the ground followed by metallic clattering. 

My heart hammered away in my chest and blood pounded in my ears.  I struggled not to hyperventilate but got my breathing under control.

“Joel, you okay?”  Frank asked.

My mouth moved, but nothing came out.

“Joel?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.”  I crawled across the floor, gun in hand, to the doorway.  “There’s someone lying on the floor outside my room.”

A women’s shriek resounded off the walls from the end of the hallway.  “Billy!  Billy!  You all right down there?  Are you all right?”

“You’ve got a man down,” Frank said.

“NO!  Oh my God, no,” the woman’s voice said, thick and wet.

“You should have listened to us,” Frank said. 

My head jerked back and forth from where the intruders were positioned and back from the direction we had come from -- the way they had sent someone around the back hallway to ambush us.  I dug in my pocket and came up wi
th my key chain flashlight.  Before turning it on I checked the hallway again, listening as hard as I’ve ever tried to listen to anything in my life.  Other than the sound of the woman’s wracking sobs, I heard nothing else.

Feeling like it was safe, I flicked on
the flashlight and shined it on the figure in the hall. 

It was a boy.  Only a boy.  He couldn’t be more than
twelve or thirteen.  There was an ugly entrance wound in his forehead, but his eyes were still opening, looking at me -- accusing me.  Those eyes held me for a moment and I slipped away into some sort of trance.  Reality skewed away from me for a moment as I felt outside myself, swimming along against some murky, blood-filled tide. 

My mind didn’t like the reality and horror of my role in this senseless killing of a child.  I wanted to be back in a world where my parents were still alive, where I could pick up a
coney dog from the Second Street Dairy Creme, and where I could download the latest indie music on iTunes.  Most of all I wanted to be where the dead didn’t walk the earth and where the living hadn’t turned against the living for the last scraps of what was left.

My senses became dulled for a few seconds, my vision narrowing down to a dark tunnel with only the faintest of light at the end.  My hands felt cold and damp.  Blackness swirled around the edges of the tunnel, thr
eatening to shut off the dim light in the distance. 

I failed to hear those first few shots, but it was screaming that brought me back, yanking me back to reality so forcefully that my mind felt whipla
shed.  The screams were ones of horrible anguish and pure fury.  Screams of wrath.  They were getting closer with every second.

When I looked down the hall I saw someone coming, handguns in each hand -- firing shot after shot towards the room where Frank was hiding.  It was a woman
, and in brief glimpses I caught in the muzzle flashes, her face was contorted in rage.  I couldn’t see Frank returning fire, but I did hear a couple shots come from his direction.  I got the sense that he was falling back from the hail of shots.

The woman stopped outside Frank’s room.  “You killed my boy, you son of a bitch.”  Then she started firing into the room and I heard the clatter of desks as Frank dived out of the way.

I was dealt a shitty hand, but it was one of my own making.  I didn’t have to come with Frank.  I could have turned around at any time and escaped to the safety of the church.  The walkie-talkie was in my pocket the whole time, just waiting for me to make the call back to Greg, but I did none of these things.  That made me just as complicit as Frank in this nightmare of shitty decisions. 

Frank was one of us and if I didn’t act, like in the next two seconds, there was a good chance he would be dead.  So, I did what I had to do, raising my gun and aiming.  The woman was so transfixed on her son’s assassin that I don’t think she even saw me.

For the briefest of moments I considered shouting for her to stop, but more than likely she would have turned and fired on me.  My choices ranged from bad to worse, and I chose the only real action I could.  My finger squeezed the trigger twice.  I was a bad as a shot, but I couldn’t miss from this distance.  The first shot caught her in the upper shoulder spinning her around.  My second shot hit her in the center of the chest, a large splotch of red forming there immediately.  The force of that last shot lifted her off her feet, sending her toppling backwards down the hall, her hands releasing their grip on the guns. 

One part of me thought that would be the end of it, but of course it
wasn’t.  

I heard something moving down at the far end of the hall.  Several shots rang out but they seemed random and badly aimed.  Several of them went into the ceiling, knocking down ceiling tiles.  After about ten shots, they stopped all together and we waited.  And waited.

Frank must have gotten restless. He came out of his room and slipped back into my room.

“What the hell are we doing?” I whispered, trying to keep my voice down.

“Protecting what is ours,” he said.