Dead Hunger V: The Road To California (5 page)

“Okay,” she said.  Then: “Oh, my God!”

“What?” I asked.

“The street!” she said.  “There’s … people out there.  Some of them are naked!”

“What?”

“I think that’s Bill Pace from down the street.  Dave, he’s running around naked!”

“He’s not in his head, Lisa.  And he’s dangerous as fuck.  Stay there.  You know it’s going to take me a while to get there, but whatever you do, you have to stay safe.  Don’t move.  You’ve got an attached bath, so you have water.  Just wait.”

“Dave, he’s attacking a woman!  Bill Pace!  What the hell’s going on?”

“It’s bad.  Don’t trust anyone, and don’t leave your room.”

“I won’t.  When will you be here?”

“I don’t know, but I’m leaving now,” I said.  “I’ll take this cell with me.”

“Okay, I have the number showing on my phone.”

“Charge it up.”

“I will,” she said.

“Bye.”

“Dave,” she said, her voice worried.

“Yeah?”

“Be careful, okay?”

“From your lips to God’s ears,” I whispered, and hung up.

I grabbed the bag from the floor and jammed into the garage.  I searched for the light, but as I fell into the room, it went on automatically.

Motion sensor.

The 2012 BMW S1000RR gleamed in the florescent lights.  My eye caught the key in the ignition and I fed my arms through the straps of the stuffed, ritzy backpack, situating it on my back.  I jumped on the bike and turned the key.  Full tank.  Using the electric start, I fired the engine, leaving the stand down.  I jumped back off and ran to the door, hitting the garage door opener.  There was a helmet hanging on a peg by the door.  I grabbed it and stuffed it on my head, snapping the strap as I returned to the bike.

I sat down, pulled the clutch and put it in first gear.

I was very aware, as the garage door rose, that I didn’t have the guns I needed, but I would have to deal with that later.  I never said I was the brightest fucking bulb in the box.

I was in panic mode, but some of my decisions weren’t bad.  The BMW would handle beautifully and get me outta Dodge.

Right now I wanted the protection of speed; something these things did not seem to be in possession of.

When I saw enough light to jet, I let out the clutch, cranked the gas and rode for daylight, the rear tire squealing on the painted garage floor.  Poor Mrs. Dunaway had severed part of her right arm as she followed me through the window, and I tried not to think about Leona, dead in the spare bedroom. 

I would try to always picture the beautiful woman I had known and loved for those years, and work to convince myself once and for all that what I had seen her turn into was not something that anyone could come back from. 

For Christ’s sake, Mrs. Dunaway didn’t even seem to notice that her arm was dangling from a few straggly tendons, never mind that her tits were still out.

I loved Leona, and it killed me to know she wouldn’t be there to listen to all my bullshit, support me when I was struggling, and to hold onto when I needed someone to keep me from going insane.

But I wasn’t Flex then, just as I’m not him now.  I was scared, Leona was gone and I had my mom and Lisa to think about.

My little sister, whom I now knew was okay, was my only real hope for sanity at that moment.  In my heart, I think I had begun to fear the worst about my mom.  The house wasn’t that big that she wouldn’t hear her phone from her bedroom, even if it were in her purse in the kitchen.

I was in the clear as I hit the street, and I was glad to feel the wind whipping my long hair against my back as I realized I still had no shirt on.

I rode.  I’d deal with that later, too.  There were shirts in the backpack.

*****

Cars were driving crazy, and it didn’t take me long to figure out why.  Some people had clearly been on their way to hospitals when the person in their car with them made their terrifying conversion into something that wanted only to attack.  I couldn’t imagine the horror that ensued at that point then, and I don’t like to think about it now.

But I will, if only for those reading about this later.

If you were driving when it happened, you’d be helpless to do anything with one arm on the steering wheel and the other fending them off.  As it turned out, the BMW motorcycle was the perfect escape vehicle.  I dodged around several crashes and was able to avoid more than my share of vehicles driving even crazier than is typical in Florida.  Season was already over and most visitors from up north had already gone home to suffer their transformations there.  That was good, but for six months out of the year, Floridians saw a ton of visitors from Indiana, New York, Minnesota, Ontario, Canada, New Jersey, and everywhere else, so we were used to people driving like they owned the road.

This was different.  It wasn’t just
possible
that a car was going to careen toward you at any given moment; it was likely.

  The Beemer had a GPS that I figured out how to use while I guided the bike down more open stretches of road, but I didn’t need a bitch in a box to tell me how to get to my sister’s place, just to guide me around blocked roads should I come across any. 

The helmet had an intercom system with Bluetooth, and luckily, it had automatically paired with the system on the bike.  This meant I could mess with the radio and try to get signals, but also could hear the GPS lady when she had the urge to tell me things I mostly knew.  I had ridden maybe thirty minutes and had only gotten just over two miles.  It was almost immediately after turning onto East Avenue when I first saw these new creatures in greater numbers.  I was struggling with the process of accepting the truth about the once-humans, but they were doing their share to convince me what I and the rest of the uninfected world faced.  I can tell you that at that time I kind of looked at it like a horrible fire or a riot or something; the blind faith that ultimately, our government would find a quick cure and put everything back to normal.  After all, I wasn’t catching it yet, so there had to be a lot of people like me working on this.

But as I rode on, I realized I wasn’t seeing a lot of people like me.  As I worked my way north up East Avenue, I took the horror in that surrounded me.  I could see the colorless, vein-riddled skin of the afflicted from a distance; the way they moved as though stiff – somehow unpracticed in the art of walking.

I slowed the bike initially, a morbid curiosity or maybe just spacing out a bit as I observed them – I’m not sure which – but soon snapped to reality and remembered that to allow any of them to reach me was to die at their hands.

I’d seen my share of them feeding and tears ran from my eyes beneath the helmet’s shield as I watched what was happening.  I never saw an uninfected person actually get taken down, but I did see them fleeing for their lives.  I saw uninfected people locked in cars, obviously without keys, looking out at me in desperation as I rode past; me avoiding their faces like they were dirty, homeless people on the corner looking for a buck.

The truth was, I gave
those
guys a buck.  I could
not
risk my life for these doomed souls.  Not at the risk of letting my sister die.  No way.  I put on my heartless fucking mental  blinders and stopped looking, and I used my high-aim steering to chart my path through the more congested parts of East Avenue, anticipating my arrival at US 231 that would roll me onto the 431 into Dothan, Alabama.

The whole trip was around 500 miles, so I’d need gas sometime, and that I’d play by ear.  If I came across somewhere that seemed safe enough, I’d swing in and do a quick fill-up.

*****

Mrs. Steele’s phone was a Droid Razor Maxx, and the son-of-a-bitch really did have all-day battery life, according to everyone I knew that had one.  I was happy to see a solid battery icon on it when I’d pulled it out of my neighbor’s purse, but I also thought it wise to grab the car charger that was tucked in beside it.  I couldn’t afford it to run empty, because as I approached the house, I wanted Lisa to know I was there.  I also wanted to call her and let her know I was safe, like right now.

Thank God I was safe.

After getting off East Avenue, I’d gone about sixty miles in just over an hour.  I saw a Racetrack gas station and pulled in.

To my surprise, a cop car was parked in the lot with its lights on.  The siren was silent, and I rode toward the car with caution, easing my bike to a stop about ten feet back and off to the passenger side.  If the cop was jumpy – and who the hell could blame him if he or she was – I’d feel better if I sat in their blind spot.

With my left foot I kicked the kickstand down and eased myself off the bike.  I still had the gun stuffed into the front of my pants, and hadn’t even realized it.  I instinctively turned away from the police car in case the officer was aware and watching, and carefully pulled it out of my pants.  I rubbed the painful, dark purple impression the bulky weapon had pressed into my skin at my belt line, forgot it and opened the cylinder.

Four of the brass cartridges looked different, which corresponded to the number of shots I had fired.  There were five left.  I was okay for now, so I closed the cylinder again and hoped I was on a live round.  I held the revolver in my right hand.

I looked again at the police car.  The engine was turned off, yet I could hear the tick-tick-tick-tick-tick of the almost silent lights as they flashed.  I moved to the passenger side of the car and approached the back seat, where I pressed my face to the heavily tinted glass and tried to see inside.  The cage separating the criminal element from the good guys eventually came into view as my eyes adjusted.

I was squinting, trying to see if anyone was in the front seat, when a face slammed into the glass, directly against mine.  An involuntary scream left my throat as I tripped away from the car, falling flat on my ass.  The face slammed into the glass again and again, its teeth shattering with each impact until only cracked, jagged shards remained.  Alternately, it pounded the window with gnarled hands, mad eyes demanding that I come closer, closer, open that door and let it get at me.

I looked in all directions as I scrambled back to my feet and picked up the dropped revolver. I was freaked out then, I won’t lie. I shook like someone who had no right to hold a gun of any kind, but I gripped that thing like it was a lifeline.

I moved around the back of the police car to the other side. As I did so, the creature in the back seat, which wore a tank top and tattoos beneath its black, roadmap veins, pounded on the glass, desperate to reach me.  From this side it was more illuminated, and I could that half its chest was ripped away; the musculature – stringy tendons and raw, rotting meat – exposed, making me want to vomit.

I swallowed my fear and steeled my nerves, moving to the front of the car to see inside the front seat area.  As I did my best to ignore the frantic display of desire coming from the back of the car, I saw the cop.

It was a woman, and she was lying on her back on the bench seat, her hand hanging down with a pistol still in it. Her brown hair was cropped short, and her eyes were wide open, staring upward. She did not look like the thing in the back seat.  She looked uninfected like me, only female and dead.

I tried the driver's side door. It was unlocked. I pushed it closed again and walked around the front of the car, this time to the passenger side door. I put my hand on the door and felt everything inside of me coming up.

Construction had not prepared me for this. None of it. I’d seen guys put nails through their hands and I’d seen guys saw off fingers, but I’d never seen walking monsters or dead cops, mere feet away from me.

I finally threw up, but there wasn’t much to eject.  I hadn’t eaten breakfast and there hadn’t been time for lunch.  Hell, I hadn’t even stopped for water, and suddenly I realized I was dying of thirst
and
hungry as hell.  I felt neither like eating or drinking now, though.  Not when I was about to do what I had in mind.

The cop was dead.  One way or the other, she was dead.  It was at least 85 degrees out, and the car’s interior would heat up to crazy temperatures inside in a half hour, never mind a couple of hours.  I pulled on the handle and the door swung open.  I stood there, the stench blasting me in the face, the creature’s hungry growls audible to me now, and the dead cop’s bullet wound to the head clearly visible.

I ran three feet away from the car, took a deep breath, and turned and ran back.  I leaned in and peeled the gun from the female cop’s stiff, dead fingers, and I stepped back again, kicking the door closed behind me.

Sticky wetness coated my hand, but I refused to drop the gun.  I needed it.  I knew I would need it.  And more of them, wherever I could get them.  Had I known where cops kept their extra magazines or ammo, I would have gone back, but I didn’t, and I didn’t feel like searching anywhere near the dead woman or the live thing in the back seat that should be dead.  At least it was trapped in there.  Maybe it would die from the heat eventually.  In any case, I didn’t need to waste a bullet.

Suddenly I had the strong desire to call Lisa.  As I pulled the phone from my pocket, it rang.