Dawn of the Dead (6 page)

As if someone had turned up the volume, the distant sounds of the battle in the hall flared up again, reminding the men in the storage room that all was not over. The trooper, who had snapped his loaded clip into his pistol, took a few steps forward. He noticed a corpse wrapped in a bed sheet and tied securely with a clothesline. It looked like a mummy. Writhing and struggling, it worked to free itself. With the same calm, deliberate movement he had been using all day, the trooper shot the mummy through the head.

Nearby, a small corpse, that of a very young child, was also writhing. But, at the end of the shroud, where the child’s feet should have been, there was bloodied and shredded flesh. A stump kicked around where the foot was once attached. This time, with a slight shudder of revulsion, the man shot the thing’s head off.

“They attack . . . each other,” Roger said slowly as he reached the trooper’s side.

“Just the fresh corpses . . . before they revive,” the man told him softly.

“Why did these people keep them here?” Roger asked. “Why don’t they turn them over . . . or . . . or destroy them themselves? It’s insane . . . Why do they do it?”

“ ’Cause they still believe there’s respect in dying,” the man said as he fired into the head of another squirming zombie.

The two men, connected now by a powerful link, walked into the hallway where their comrades were still falling and being pounced on by the seemingly endless stream of walking dead. Others, the lucky ones, were able to fire their automatics through the heads of attacking zombies. The riot troops were trying to stay organized, even without the help of their retreating commander, but the onslaught was so mindless and random that all reason, tactics and coordination were meaningless.

3

Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, was littered with the bodies of its citizens. Moonlight loomed over the embattled city, illuminating the destruction. In the early morning hours, the few lights remaining on were reflected in the waters of the Delaware. The quiet was interrupted only by the sounds of the lapping water and the occasional creak of wooden floating docks as they strained against one another.

The sign that read “CITY OF PHILADELPHIA—POLICE—NO ADMITTANCE,” which usually restrained unwelcome visitors to the marina, was dangling and clanging against metal posts. Its chain had been broken. The few big police launches that were still docked there bobbed about silently.

Off in the distance, the low murmur of automatic weapons and loudspeakers could be heard. A few areas of the city were lit by the bright flames of fires set by irate mobs and looters.

Halfway down the long dock, the corpse of a uniformed guard sat at a radio transmitter.

Stephen Andrews, his eyes straining for the separate floating dock that was painted with a large square landing pattern, sat at the controls of the WGON helicopter. It was a jet turbine helicopter with an engine of about 420 horses. He knew it was powerful enough to carry a maximum of four passengers, including the pilot, although it would be pretty tight. The machine could cruise at about 130 m.p.h., and the jet-fuel-filled tank would last them about three hours between fill-ups. With the ability to fly day or night, with a hydraulically boosted flight control system and facilities for radio communication, Steve felt fairly secure and confident in the chopper. He knew it would get them to a safe place.

Francine Parker, his girlfriend, sat in a dazed stupor beside him. Their silence was conspicuous, but it told more than they could verbalize. They just looked out in utter horror at what had become of their city. Steve now maneuvered the helicopter and landed squarely in the middle of the pattern on the machine’s skids. Alongside the dock, afloat separately but securely chained, was a small fuel barge, with pumps and hoses for refueling the police choppers and launches that were used in the area.

While the blades of the chopper still spun loudly from the gear-down, Steve jumped out of the cockpit. Two other bodies, bleeding on the bobbing decks, appeared to him as shadows in the distance. A bell buoy rang out, but no ships or launches had approached since the early evening, when all manpower had been needed to quell the disturbances in the inner city.

“Come on,” Steve called to Fran inside the cockpit. “I need you.”

Francine unbuckled her safety belt and jumped out of her side of the machine. Steve ran around to the other side, ducking under the whirring blades, grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the fuel pump.

Her head was still clouded from the events of the past few hours, and Francine felt as though she were in a bad dream, a never-ending nightmare. She was so disoriented that she allowed Steve to pull her around as if she were a rag doll.

“I don’t see Roger,” Steve said, scanning the area. “We’ll give him ten minutes,” he said, looking at his watch.

“Oh my God!” Fran screamed. She had frozen in mid-stride, her eyes staring at two mangled bodies that lay near the fuel pumps.

Steve followed her gaze. “You haven’t been out in it at all,” he said sympathetically. “It’s tough to get used to.”

He said it like an old veteran, but he had only a few hours before been just as frightened and horrified. He marveled at the façade of calm that he exhibited to Fran. What a phony!

He pulled at the woman’s arm, but the civilian corpse was in the way and Fran froze again. An ingrained fear prevented her from walking over the dead body. Steve dropped her hand and sprinted over to the fuel pumps. Then, he activated the lever mechanism, checked the tank gauge and trotted back to Fran. He dragged the long, heavy hose over the civilian victim’s head, which had been blown out by a powerful bullet. It almost made Steve retch, but he remembered that he had to serve as an example to Fran, and controlled himself. He jumped over the body, still running blood, and moved to the helicopter with Fran following, unaware of what he had just witnessed.

With the blades still spinning overhead, Steve jammed the hose nozzle into the fuel tank receptacle. Fran was still glued to the spot. Her eyes wandered over the deserted area, but she still felt a sense of danger. A sudden jerking movement startled her out of her daze. It was Steve grabbing her hand and wrapping it around the nozzle mechanism of the fuel hose.

“Just like this,” he instructed calmly. “Like on a car.”

Fran’s fingers wrapped themselves around the mechanism, getting the feel of the nozzle trigger.

“That’s it. Just hold her there till she spits out at ya.”

As Fran took over, Steve ran back to the guard shed. The spinning propeller blades made an eerie, whispering sound as they passed over Fran’s head. As her eyes got accustomed to the darkness and her ears to the silence, she was able to pick up other sounds and sights. She heard the gentle, rhythmic sound of the water lapping against the docks and the creaking moans of the shifting old wooden structures. But it was too calm, too peaceful, and she sensed an underlying danger. With the look of a frightened animal, she glanced this way and that, primed for the unknown.

Steve ran into the cluttered guardhouse. The contents had been overturned, and it looked as though a struggle had taken place. The radio operator was slumped over the desk. Steve heard the clicking of a signal coming over the receiver in Morse code. His training in communications in college had included learning Morse code, and now that talent came in handy. The send key was covered by the dead man’s body, and Steve had to pull the body away from the key and into an upright position in the chair. He noticed that the cause of death was the small gunshot wound in the back of the operator’s head. But as Steve pulled the corpse away from the desk, he saw that the exit of the bullet had all but obliterated the man’s face. As he stared in horror at the sight, Steve realized that the wound was still bleeding and that bits of flesh and blood were splattered about the desk and radio unit.

A wave of nausea overcame him, but he soon recovered and clicked on the send switch, tapping out a message in Morse code:

“OPERATOR DEAD . . . POST ABANDONED.”

Then he sat down in an empty chair and held his head in his hands. Now was not the time to freak out. Not with Francine barely able to keep it together. Steve thought it ironic that after all his years of praying that something exciting would happen that would turn him into a star reporter, the most exciting thing was now happening to him but there was no one to broadcast to. And to think, after all the complaining he did about riding around in the helicopter—now it would save his life.

On the fuel dock, Fran’s arm was getting tired from holding onto the heavy hose. She was really getting jumpy and wished that Steve would hurry back from wherever he’d run off to.

A shadow, one that did not belong to Steve or Fran, moved across the corpse on the bobbing dock. Over the whooshing sound of the helicopter blades, Fran could make out the sound of another engine. She glanced toward the mainland and noticed the headlights of an approaching vehicle.

In the guardhouse, Steve was shaken from his thoughts by the sound of the car. He stepped into the doorway and looked up the dock.

“I hope it’s Roger,” he called to Fran, more to reassure himself that she was still there than to pass along any information.

“What are you doing?” she asked with an edge of panic to her voice.

“I’ll be right there.”

Ducking back into the house, he snatched up a first aid kit and threw it into a khaki knapsack that he had brought along for “borrowing” what had been left by the dead men. If he didn’t take it, someone else would. Rummaging in the darkened shack, he found a toolbox and grabbed that, too.

Standing up, he backed out of the shack, making sure that he didn’t leave anything worth taking. Suddenly, he felt something sharp and hard against his back. He recoiled and spinning around faced a shadowy tall figure in the corner of the shack. Steve didn’t know how long he had been there watching him.

The figure stepped forward, and the light from the dockside lamps illuminated the uniform of a police officer. Steve’s eye moved from the man’s grimly determined face to the rifle that the cop had leveled at his belly. From out of the darkness, another officer emerged. This one had a handgun cocked and aimed at Steve’s head. He knew he was trapped. A caged animal with nowhere to run. But he wasn’t guilty of anything but wanting to survive. He wondered if there were others and if they had gotten to Fran. He cringed with the thought of what they would do to her out in the dark night on the isolated dockside.

Fran’s attention was no longer on the nozzle, it was slowly dripping its precious supply of gasoline into the water, since she was not holding it securely into the opening. She strained her eyes to see the approaching vehicle. She hoped it was Roger so that they could get going. She really didn’t know him—just a few things that Steve had told her. They had been drinking buddies at the neighborhood bar and had become close friends. They vowed one night, after a few drinks, to stay together if things got heavy, and now, in a more than sober state, had remembered their mutual pledge.

Suddenly, through the open sides of the helicopter bubble, Fran noticed something out of the corner of her eye. It was a police van, and she didn’t know whether it had been there all along. She hadn’t heard it come up. The doors had been flung wide open, as though it had been abandoned hurriedly, and now one of the rear doors was moving. Or at least Fran thought it was moving. For a moment she thought she could be hallucinating. Staring into the blackness for the last few minutes might have caused her to see things that weren’t there. She wished Steve would come back. She hadn’t heard or seen him for at least fifteen minutes, and she was getting worried, really worried.

But then Fran realized she wasn’t hallucinating. She could make out a figure carrying a large packing carton. The figure, she noticed with relief, was in the uniform of the police and was carrying two rifles strapped to his back as he rushed toward the launch dock.

Abruptly, a sound jarred Fran’s concentration.

“Just stay cool,” a voice muttered out of the darkness.

Fran, already uptight because of the running figure, was shocked to hear the voice coming from behind her. Spinning around, she dropped the fuel nozzle in her surprise, and it clattered to the wooden dock boards. She was looking directly at the nose of a rifle pointed right at her head.

“If you die,” the policeman said menacingly, “it’ll be your own fault.”

Fran stood in stunned disbelief, but the moment was short-lived, because the officer who had been running with the carton shouted toward the guardhouse.

“Come on, Skipper. They got friends comin’.”

In the guardhouse, Steve was held at bay by the officer with the rifle while the one with the pistol went to check the progress of the approaching vehicle. The headlights were coming closer every second.

“Who are you?” the officer with the rifle asked.

“We’re with WGON. We—”

The other man cut him off. “About a minute and a half,” he reported on the vehicle’s approach.

The one referred to as Skipper pushed Steve with his gun barrel. The impact caused the slight young man to spin out through the open doorway. Looking up, he noticed that the vehicle was now turning onto the long, narrow pier.

The two officers led Steve over to the helicopter, where Fran stood, shivering with fear. The first officer reached inside the helicopter bubble and pulled out Steve’s rifle.

“Now wait a minute,” Steve shouted over the whirring of the helicopter blades. “We’re just here to refuel. These men were already dead. You were here. You know that. It looks like somebody was after the launches. We had nothing to do with—”

One of the officers who had been in the guardhouse with Steve noticed the insignia on the machine.

“Hey, WGON traffic watch . . . Steve Andrews,” he said with amusement.

“Right, that’s me,” Steve perked up, hoping that whatever celebrity or notoriety that gave him would help them out of this mess.

“No shit,” the officer answered.

“We’d get a lot further in this bird, Skipper,” said the officer who had cornered Fran. He was now happily ensconced in the pilot’s seat of the helicopter.