Dead World (Book 2): Headed North (9 page)

The stranger runs up to the car waving at them, saying something that none of them can make out. In moments he is next to the car, still waving frantically. Daniel rolls the window down to look the man in the eyes. He is a middle aged with a splash of grey at his temples, heavy bags under his wild eyes.

“We need to get inside now,” he says motioning towards the school.

“No we can drive out of here,” Daniel argues, afraid to stay in any one place.

“No it’s too late. Those damn things are everywhere. They have the whole place surrounded,” the man says urging them to hurry. “We don’t have time for this!” he screams. His buddy fires off a few more rounds as some of the dead break off towards them. Some of them are still aflame, stumbling along as they melt.

“Daniel I think he’s right,” Valentine says, looking behind them. Zombies are running everywhere. Fleeing survivors are torn down and the zombies set upon them with sadistic hunger, tearing into their flesh.

Daniel shakes his head again, unwilling to believe that they are stuck. He knows going into the school is a death sentence. Being trapped will kill them. But then it is too late.

They are already trapped.

He finally nods at the man and whips the door open. Isaiah and Sasha have already jumped out of the idling car. Chloe is huddled between them clutching her teddy bear as tightly as she can. Her eyes are wide with terror.

Daniel reaches back and grabs the rifle out of the car. The stranger turns and grabs the other man by the shoulder. They turn around and begin sprinting towards the entrance to the school. Screams come from everywhere but one arrests Daniel’s momentum like a lead weight.

He didn’t see it coming. None of them did. He turns around and sees Sasha on the ground. She clutches at her arm where blood flows freely. Isaiah screams, throwing himself at a zombie wearing a ruined police uniform. The thing is on top of Sasha though and it is too late.

Daniel pauses raising the rifle and fires into the zombies that surround Isaiah. He is surrounded and goes down under the mass of bodies. Isaiah beats at them wildly before one of them is able to grab his arm from behind. The zombie bites deep into his shoulder. Isaiah releases a scream of rage and agony.

Chloe was knocked aside during the exchange and she is wailing gripping her bear, watching her parents torn apart before her. Daniel runs towards Sasha and Isaiah yelling. But the zombies block him off. He fires into the horde not even taking the time to aim. All he can see is red.

Then he catches a glimpse of Chloe. Valentine appears out of nowhere grabbing the girl up by her arm and scooping her up, adrenaline fueling her movement. She races past Daniel with the small girl bouncing in her arms.

The moment stretches out as time seems to slow for him. The violent rush of the fight. Bodies pressed up against each other as the zombies tear at Isaiah. Daniel has lost sight of Sasha. Isaiah holds onto her arm through the melee but that is all that is visible. Blood flows from uncountable scratches and bites on Isaiah’s body. He makes eye contact with Daniel and for a brief second the understanding passes. He mouths the words “protect her” before he is pulled down.

Daniel fires into the horde. It is too late.

Isaiah reappears for the briefest moment as the bodies part. Daniel raises the rifle to his shoulder and fires once. Isaiah’s head snaps back, the back of his skull blown out. Spared from becoming one of them.

Daniel swings into the group with the butt of his rifle still trying to get at the screaming Sasha. He can’t believe she is still alive. A hand grips his shoulder and he whips around to face the attacker stopping just short as he recognizes the man from earlier. He is pulling him back. The man wrestles Daniel away pulling him toward the school in a rush.

The door slams shut behind him with a heavy thud. Daniel falls in a heap, breath coming in ragged gasps and his head pounding.

The men who saved them wrap chains around the doors metal handles bolting them with a padlock just as the slam of dead echoes against the door. Daniel reaches for Valentine tears streaming from his eyes. Valentine clutches at Chloe who is wailing.

The muffled sounds of screaming and moaning continue through the other side of the door. The sunlight streaming through the tiny windows goes black with smoke and the reek of burning flesh fills the wide corridor.

“My name is Peter,” the man who stopped them outside the school says, still standing. He is looking through the door out at the horde of zombies pressing against the reinforced door. The moans are like a buzz, constant and terrible.

“Daniel,” is all he can manage. He is eyes are wide. He desperately wishes he could wake up from this nightmare. Sasha and Isaiah can’t be gone. His chest is hollow, empty.

“What is your name?” Peter asks Valentine who is holding Chloe to her chest. Chloe is crying into her shirt in long sobs.

“Valentine,” she says running her hands through Chloe’s hair. She is trembling from exertion. Fear is evident on her face. And her eyes are wet with tears.

Daniel tries to come up with something to say. His whole body shakes. He fired a bullet into the head of the man who had saved his life so many times. He did it to save him. To stop him from becoming one of them. But that doesn’t change the fact that he killed the man who had become his best friend.

“I’m glad you all made it,” Peter says.

“What’s next, sir?” the other man asks. He is gruff. His facial hair trimmed short and a large scar running down from his temple to the left ear.

“This is Terry” Peter says, introducing them. Terry nods at the group and then turns back to watch the undead pressed against the door. The chains rattle but the door holds. Daniel can still hear the screams from outside growing more and more distant. There is the sound of gunfire but even that has become sporadic as the living are hunted down.

“Well we won’t be leaving for a while,” Peter says matter of fact. “We might as well try to hunker down and see what we can do,” he looks at Daniel. “Listen Daniel, we all lost people here. This is a real bad spot. I know it is not easy for you. It isn’t easy for any of us. But we need to think about that girl right now,” he nods his head towards Chloe. “Be strong for her,” he says in a low whisper.

“What can we even do?” Daniel asks, despair threatening to overwhelm him.

“We can get deeper into the school. We have food and weapons,” Peter says, “Most of it is in the gym. So we will head that way and try to come up with a plan.”

“How long can that last us?” Valentine asks.

“It will last us long enough,” Peter says, “Listen, if we can just wait these things out. Let them freeze over then we might be able to get out of here.”

“The temperature is dropping,” chimes Terry, still staring out the window.

“Maybe you can tell us how you came to be here too. I don’t remember you from the town meetings,” Peter says.

Daniel nods at him placing his hand against the wall to help him stand. “Ok. Let’s try to get away from the doors though.”

“Good idea,” Peter replies and they head off into the hallway.

The rows of lockers on either side bring back memories of a simpler time. Before any of this was all happening. Daniel hated High School. But he would give anything to be back there, away from all of this.

“So where are you all coming from?” Peter asks.

“Denver,” Daniel replies.

“Wow, that’s a long way,” Peter says surprised, “How did you end up all the way up here?”

“When everything went south we holed up in an apartment for a while,” Daniel says, “We thought maybe we could wait it out. We were hoping that help would come.”

“I think most people were,” Terry says.

“Well when no one came after a while and we were almost out of food and water. We ran into an old friend who told us that we needed to leave the city. I mean we all saw the news, we saw how bad things were out there. People were dying all over the place and then when they started coming back… well no one has an answer for that,” Daniel says, “Anyways, he told us that we need to leave the city. We heard that there were safe zones north of here. Up in Canada. We decided to aim for one of those.”

“You believe there is somewhere safe from these things?” Peter asks.

“We need to believe in something. And staying put doesn’t work,” he gestures around them. “You all seem to have made a good try at it and look what happened here.”

“You’re right,” Peter replies, “We thought we could wait them out. You know hang on until the weather got cold enough. We figured those damned things would freeze up and we could work out what to do next. Lot of good that did us though.”

“Why do you think it will work now?” Daniel asks.

              “There were too many of us to hide out in here before. I wasn’t willing to give up on them, we needed to hold the wall,” Peter says, his voice hollow. “The school is more secure than out there.”

              “So much for all that, sir,” Terry says.

              Daniel walks in silence for a moment, listening to Peter he doesn’t think he could have made the call either. How could he decide who was to be sacrificed outside the school? In hindsight it might have saved more of them. But, how could anyone but a madman make that decision?

“What happened here?” Valentine asks.

“I lost my wife and son when things first got bad.” Peter says. He takes a deep breath and continues, “She got infected in the first wave. And then we saw what was happening on the news. How the cities were becoming battlefields and then the dead started coming back. We weren’t hit as hard as some other places. So we tried to make the best of a bad situation. We walled off the part of town we thought we could save.”

“It took us a while getting it up but it’s amazing how people will work with that kind of motivation. There were outbreaks of course that had to be put down. A lot of good people died in those first few weeks. Once we had the wall up, we thought we might be able to just wait it out. But then there were just so many of them. I don’t even know where they were all coming from. We saw a long line coming from around Billings. As if they could smell us, or sense us from all that way. They came here in droves and then there was the accident at the wall. And here we are.”

“I’m so sorry about your wife and son,” Valentine says.

Peter takes a moment to respond. His eyes are hard, dark in the shadows of the hallways. “What’s done is done,” Peter replies, “I can’t bring her back. And I’m the one who had to put her down. At least the thing she became. It wasn’t easy.”

They take a left and Terry takes the lead in silence. There are hand-made posters on the wall proclaiming the rules of their new society. Simple things like rationing, and cooperation all things an impromptu society might have needed in such turbulent times.

“Here we are,” Terry says, walking up to doors with gymnasium stamped in block letters above. He pushes the doors open and leads them inside. The expansive gym is well light from the high windows but the cast of smoke hazes the sunlight in dirty hues.

“This is where we kept most of the weapons,” Peter says. And he isn’t lying. There are rifles and shotguns in cases stacked up against the long wall as well as boxes of ammunition. “We were able to get to the police station before things got really bad and we got most of the guns there. Everyone who had a gun at home brought it in as well. Seems kinda useless now huh?”

“We couldn’t have expected there to be so many of them, sir,” Terry says, “There is no way we could have gotten enough ammo to put down an entire city of those things. And that’s exactly what showed up at our front door.”

They look around at the room. Besides the guns there are cardboard boxes stacked against the wall labeled food, medicine, blankets, flashlights, everything they could need to survive for an extended period.

“So what do we do now?” Valentine asks. Chloe is still clutching at her arm. Her face is red with tears and her eyes are wide with shock. She hasn’t opened her mouth at all. Her face is stained with blood, not her own. The fatigue of everything is shutting her down. She is trying to fight it but Daniel can see that she doesn’t have much longer. “We need to make her up a bed,” Valentine adds.

“We can use these blankets here,” Peter says, walking towards one of the boxes. He flips the lid open and pulls out a comforter. “It’s not some fancy hotel but it’s what we have.”

“This will work,” Daniel says. He walks over to where Peter stands and pulls out blankets piling them into a makeshift bed. Chloe and Valentine come to stand beside them, Valentine is running her hands through Chloe’s hair. A nervous trait to try to calm the child after everything that has happened. “Why don’t you lay down here with Valentine Chloe?” Daniel says, kneeling in front of her.

Chloe nods her eyes looking distant and she lies down. Valentine sits down next to her and works her head into her lap brushing her hair out of her face.

“We should check the doors. Just to be safe,” Terry says ever pragmatic.

“You’re right, Terry. Would you care to join us?” Peter asks Daniel, “We could use you if things go bad.”

Daniel nods and then looks back to Valentine. “Is that OK Valentine?” she nods at him her eyes also red with tears. Her hair is a rumpled mess about her head and there is a scrape along her left cheek that Daniel hadn’t noticed before. The bleeding was minimal though. He touches her cheek gently. “We will fix this up when I get back OK?”