Dead Hunger V: The Road To California (45 page)

The water was flowing into the center chamber fast, raining down from the conduit pipe and splashing down onto the floor.  We could barely see at all now, as it had created a fine mist that could only help the situation – the more airborne urushiol, the better.

We waited.  Bug was by the door control button and Rachel stood to the side of the door with the Mossberg in her hands, clutching it tight.  Nelson had come down the ladder.  He would not need to shut the water off.  If the red-eyes did make it past the shotgun, they would have to run directly beneath the urushiol-contaminated water, and that could not help their condition at all.

“We’re almost at a foot!” one of the men shouted, dropping out of the camera’s view for a moment.  He stood again.  “Can’t seal it where the bones are jammed.  Water’s leaking out.  This has to be good enough!”

“No time like now,” said Bug.  “I’m ready on the button.”

“Pull it!” I yelled into the microphone.  “Get it flowing and run back to the other door as fast as you can.”

“Wait until all of it drains before you open the door, Bug,” said Rachel.  “Take out as many as we can first.”

Our eyes were peeled on the monitor.  They yanked their makeshift stopper out and as the water rushed past their feet and legs and the light filtered in from beneath the flowing water, we could see them slightly better.  Not much, but it was clear that all of them were now crowded toward the upper part of the chamber.

“It’s almost drained!” shouted another woman.  “Please, open the door!”  She pounded on it, and we all heard the desperate plea from inside.

Our eyes remained peeled on the garage monitors now, and as we watched, zombies went down, one after the other.  The normal rotters stood for a brief moment as the water hit their feet and ankles, eating them away.  When their legs dissolved, they collapsed among the shoes and bones of human and zombie alike.

Like dominos, down they went, and I heard a strange screaming coming from the room, combined with the familiar popping-hissing as the rotters dissolved and fell over one another, the red-eyes pushing off of them in an attempt to stay upright as the flood of deadly oil and water rushed farther and farther into the room.

This served to push the red-eyes back, and now the door area was clear for ten to twelve feet.

“Hit it, Uncle Bug!  Open the door!”

Bug hit the button.  The upper and lower doors began to rise.

When the interior door was two feet up, filthy bodies began pushing through, and Nelson and Serena pulled them inside, to safety.  Rachel stood aside, staying clear for the initial rush.  Five, then ten were through, and as Albert’s mother fell into the room she was quickly scooped up by her son, her frail, thin body nothing in his arms. 

“Mama!” he said, lifting her and carrying her to the sofa across the room. 

Rachel pushed by them and into the room.

“Three coming!” I shouted, watching the monitor as the focused red-eyes flew up the steps toward the middle chamber, the door now all the way open.  I watched as they deftly clamored over the skeleton and took two steps into the room. 

Rachel fired her first shell, and I cringed at the sound of the explosion echoing through the chamber.  The shotgun was as effective as Bug said it would be, though, and the bitch in the lead’s head disintegrated, the blasted chunks destroying the head of the one behind her so effectively you literally couldn’t distinguish one’s body parts from the other.  Both creatures flew backward with the shell’s impact, slamming into the third red-eye that was now spattered with the gore from her formerly undead sisters.

She was down and out of the camera’s view, but not for long.  She had apparently escaped serious injury, for she moved into the camera seconds later, and I had a direct, head-on view.  Not for long.  Now fully illuminated by the light streaming in from the garage and Bug’s chamber, I saw that she was another of the fully nude creatures.

Despite the gore running down the front of her body, She appeared well-preserved, her skin gray but not mottled and pustule-covered, the eyes bright, red points, and again – the disturbing phenomena of long, straight hair, in this case as white as cotton.  With her clothing long stripped away, I was amazed to see her visible baby bump churning and roiling  within her as though the undead infant forever trapped inside was as angry and bent on reaching either the survivors or little Isis as was her deceased mother.

Rachel slammed another shell into the Mossberg, pumped the weapon and raised the gun again, firing directly into the face of the reanimated mother that would never be, blowing her too-perfect, dead face into fleshy particles that painted the camera lens and the wall around it like a Kandinsky abstract. 

All of our refugees had now made it into the upper chamber, so I grabbed Rachel by the shirt and yanked her backward.  Once we were clear, Bug slapped the button again, starting the doors on what seemed to be an agonizingly slow downward crawl. 

We were wrong about there being only four.  Two more red-eyes had entered the middle chamber and were charging for the upper door.  As the gap drew to two feet, they left their feet, diving toward the gap.  Rachel eyed the monitor and saw what they had done and with the Mossberg already reloaded, she aimed downward.  As the monsters slid beneath the door, both making it through to their knees, it slammed down on them both, trapping them there.

Rachel fired, destroying the head of the one on the left and sending chunks of flesh, gore and bone in all directions.

We all covered ourselves, but none of us escaped the flying meat that had, just a split second before, been the creature’s physiology.

Rachel managed to ignore it and went to reload again, when I ran forward, wiping the stinking muck from my face and beard, and said, “No!”

Following my single word, there was relative silence, broken only by the low sobs of people who had been locked away and living in hell for a year.  I turned around and saw what we had accomplished, and looked back at Rachel.

“We need to save that last one,” I said.  “She needs to see Isis.”

“Jesus,” said Bug.  He walked quickly over to the bank of monitors and pressed a button.

The main exterior camera monitor lit up, and it was our turn to gasp in unison again.

They were back.  The horde that had been drawn away by Lolita Lane was back and growing larger as we looked on.

The siren calls
, I thought, then almost laughed out loud that I had even used such ridiculous, poetic phrasing, even if only in my head. And still, when I considered how overdramatic the words sounded even to me, I followed that with another thought: 
Isis, the first goddess of the new world, beckons.

*****

While Serena and Rachel got towels for everyone to wipe away the biological debris that had spattered them, Bug and I went to the nursery.  He had a blue Steve Miller Band tee-shirt, complete with the Pegasus logo, that he let me put on to replace my nasty shirt, and he pulled a new one on, too.  Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy. 

I thought of Charlie then.  I remembered putting her in the Hall & Oates tee in Shelburne and having her so pissed off it was hilarious.

These little memories kept me sane.

“If she gets scared, she’s outta there,” said Bug.

“Absolutely,” I said.  “We need to see if she’s it.  The draw.”

“I’m telling you,” said Bug.  “This room is airtight.  Especially when that door’s closed, but … hold on.”

Bug walked out of the nursery and back to the monitors.  I was on his heel.  He pushed the button on the garage exterior cameras.

My heart sunk.  The creatures were there, too.  Now there were twenty or so.  There had been zero when we approached the place.

“Your girl was really working a number on them,” said Bug.  “She must still be out of commission.”

I took my radio off.  “Russell, come in.  Russell.”

We waited.  I tried again.  “Russell!  If you can hear me, answer, please!”

I heard something, but it was low, tentative.  “Dave, I hear you, but I have to be quiet.  The last of them are making their way up the trail.”

“Where’s Lola?” I asked.

“She’s about five feet below me,” said Russell.  “I was about to work my way down to her, when I saw more of them coming.  No red-eyes over here right now.  This WAT-5 works.”

“Yes, but we’re down to the wire,” I said.  “You might have fifteen minutes left.  I need you to get to Lola.  Can you tell if she’s alive?”

“Yeah, yeah.  She is.  I can see her breathing from where I am.”

“We need her awake.  It’s the only way we’ll get out of here.  The only way out is packed with them again.”

“I’ll do my best, Dave, but I don’t know if she’s going to be in any condition to do what she did before.  It was a good tumble she took.”

“Do your best.  We’ve got some ideas.  Long shots, but we’re working on it.  Have you heard from Maddie?”

“They’re fine,” he said.  “I got them on channel 16.”

“Good.  Do what you can.  God, I hope she’s alright.”

“Going down now,” said Russell.  “Path is clear.”

I clipped the radio back on my belt.  “Let’s go.”

We got back into the nursery and Bug picked up Isis.  She laughed and looked at him, smiling as he bounced her.  “I love you, kiddo,” he said.

“Dada!” she said, smiling, slapping his face with her tiny hand.

Bug had a smile on his face, too.  It was hard to look at the baby and not smile, despite what lay ahead.  We carried her toward where the last red-eye was trapped.

The first thing we noticed was her singular focus.  From the second we walked into the chamber, the creature stopped all moaning, all bodily movement.  Its head turned toward Isis and it stared intently at the child.

Had I walked into a Halloween haunted house, I would have believed it a rubber statue.  Not one iota of motion.

Bug walked slowly toward it, then carried his daughter off to the side.  Now the zombie turned her head to follow.  Its mouth did not gnash, or chew at a blackened, rotted tongue.  It was fixated.

“Mama,” said Isis.

“No!” shouted Bug, and turned on his heel, charging back toward the nursery. 

“Uncle Bug!” I shouted, and followed.

“Where did that come from?” he said, hyperventilating.  “Why did she say that?”

“I don’t know, man.  I don’t know,” I said.  “It’s that thing, getting in her head.”

“That thing is not her mama!” said Bug.

“I know!  You know that!  Let’s figure this thing out, Uncle Bug!  Don’t freak out on me.  That’s why we took her out there, to see what would happen.”

“I wanted to see what that thing would do,” he said.  “I don’t like that bitch in my baby’s head.”

“Neither do I,” I said.  “But we still need her.”

“For what?”

“This,” I said, reaching into my shirt pocket and withdrawing the baggie that once held the WAT-5.  I held it up.

In the bottom corner was about a quarter inch of powdered residue from the wafers.  “We need to see if we can put Isis out with this.”

*****

Everyone was settled onto the floor of the room, and Bug had plenty of pillows and blankets to make them comfortable.  As it turns out, Angela had been one for comfort, and insisted that Bug have loads of plush bedding if she were going to be living inside a mountain for any amount of time.

He had complied.  Serena, Nelson and Rachel had gotten them all clean water and had also brought out several containers of baby wipes, which was the first time most of the people in that room had removed any of the grime from their bodies in a year.  It was unknown how many infections or other issues existed among them, but considering how long they had been locked away, the gaunt-looking group was in pretty good shape.

While our new charges rested, many of them falling into what may have been their first comfortable rest in a long time, Serena, Albert, Rachel and Nelson joined me and Uncle Bug.

“First off, we’re about five minutes from being off WAT-5,” I said.  “So that protection is out the window.  But if this stuff puts Isis out, we can take her in there and see if old red-eyes is still so interested.”

Nelson stuck his head out the door.  “She’s still staring right here,” he said.  “All those tasty people there on the floor off to her right, and she’s staring right where we are.”

“Confirms my suspicion, but not like this will,” I said.

“Give it to her,” said Bug.

“We’ll need to mix it in with the beef,” said Serena.  “Think she’s hungry again?”

“Isis is always hungry,” said Bug. 

One WAT-5-laced bite later, little Isis took the first nap of her strange, young life.

*****

“I’ll carry her,” said Serena.  “We don’t want to throw things off.  She might just be drawn to Bug because he was carrying her last time.”

Nelson poked his head out again.  “I don’t even know if you have to,” he said.  “Look”