Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse (11 page)

“Fucker!” he hissed at me, “let’s
get this over and fucking done with.” Then he seemed to recognize the shape of Walker’s teenage daughter huddled down deep in the cushions of the sofa, and he was overcome by some ridiculous attempt at manners. “Fuck. Sorry,” he mangled an apology. “I fucking forgot about you.”

The girl said nothing. Walker and
Harrigan got to their feet. Walker glanced at me. “We’ll do it in the bathroom,” he said. “It will be easier to clean up afterwards.”

I nodded. “Will there
be blood?”

Walker’s face twisted into
some kind of a smile. “Oh, yes,” he said. “There will be blood.”

Walker turned to his daughter. “Stay here, Millie.”

She sat up with sudden alarm. “No!” she blurted, and there was a flush of fear beneath the skin of her cheeks. She was terrified of being alone. “I… I want to stay with you,” she said softly, and then added, “Dad.”

There
were a couple of straight-backed chairs nested around a table in the kitchen. I carried one of them through to the bathroom and set it down on the tiled floor near the vanity sink. Walker had two pairs of pliers in his hands, and Harrigan gave me the flashlight and stood back. Jed slumped down onto the chair, and his head lolled to the side. His eyes were bleary and unfocussed. There were little frothy bubbles of spittle at the corners of his mouth.

There w
as just one small window in the bathroom and we had drawn the curtains shut when we had first cleared the house. Now Harrigan hung heavy towels over the opening so that we could use the flashlight without fear. I flicked it on. The light was dazzling – a piercing beam that bounced off the white tiles of the walls and floor, and illuminated the whole room.

Walker chose the long-nosed pliers and tested them, snapping at thin air. They looked vile and menacing, and the serrated grip was crusted with dirt. He cleaned them on the tail of his shirt and looked at
Harrigan.

“You’ll have to hold him down,” Walker said. “Get behind him and pin his arms.”

Harrigan looked doubtful. He was a big man, but Jed was bigger and more finely muscled. And Jed had a temper. Harrigan hesitated. “Shouldn’t…. shouldn’t we tie him down?”

I shook my head. “No rope,” I said.
“And I’m not going back out into the night to find any.”

Still
Harrigan hesitated. He edged himself behind the chair and took up a position where he could press down on Jed’s shoulders. Walker snatched another towel from a railing and wrapped it across Jed’s chest, like a hairdresser’s cape.

“For the blood,” he explained to me – not that he needed to.

I leaned close to Jed and looked him in the eye. We were gathered in a tight knot around the chair and Jed was beginning to look alarmed. He knew what was coming – and the imminent fear of pain was starting to seep through the whiskey-fueled haze.

“You can’t make any noise,” I said to Jed, speaking slowly and clearly to make sure he understood. “It’s important,” I explained. “The undead are like sharks, Jed. They hear noi
se – it sounds the same as someone splashing in the water does to a shark – so if you start screaming, they are going to hear you. They’ll find us and kill us all. Understand?”

Jed nodded, but it was a jerky, spasmodic gesture that spoke of his fear. He was tense in the chair. I could see the
thick corded veins in his neck beginning to swell. His jaw was clenched tightly shut. Walker leaned over him.

“Open up,” he said.

Jed hesitated. His eyes flicked to me, then up to the ceiling. His mouth opened reluctantly.

“Wider.”

Jed made a sharp hissing sound through his nostrils, like a bull about to charge. I turned the flashlight round and shone the bright light into his mouth.

Walker hunched
down a little and his voice became perfunctory and practical. I crouched down close beside him. Jed’s breath stank. It smelled like a skunk had crawled between his lips and died. Walker reversed the pliers in his hand. They had a yellow plastic grip. He eased them inside Jed’s mouth and rested the edge of his hand on Jed’s bottom jaw to stop him slamming his mouth shut. Using one handle of the pliers, Walker gently tapped at a lower back tooth that was barely visible, surrounded by infected red swollen gum.

“Is this the one?” He touched the tooth – and Jed’s body went stiff with an electric jolt of pain. His hands clawed at the armrests of the chair and he thumped his foot on the floor.
Harrigan jumped in alarm and locked his big beefy hands down on Jed’s shoulders, clamping like a vice.

Jed wailed in low pain and said something that was dist
orted by the shape of his mouth.

Walker straightened and turned to me. “It’s nasty,” he said. “Very nasty. The gum is swollen so that it will be hard to get a grip on the tooth.” He looked
thoughtful, and then bent back down to look inside Jed’s open mouth again.

“See the tooth?
” he asked. I peered over the rim of the flashlight. “See the cavity in the middle? That’s going to make it tough to get a good grip with the pliers,” Walker explained. “Because if I grab too hard, the tooth might shatter completely.”

I
raised an eyebrow. “Is that bad?”

“Very,” he said. “Then I’d have to dig around
, trying to remove the broken fragments. We could be here for hours, and I might not get it all.”

I caught a glimpse of Jed’s expression. He was going white. The blood was draining from his face, and his eyes were wide, rolling in their sockets with absolute terror.

“Jesus,” he said in a quiet, fearful whisper.

Jed was a big guy, and he had spent over a decade in one of the country’s toughest prisons. He was as hard as nails – utterly fearless
and grim-faced in the fiercest fight – and yet here he was, confronted with having a simple tooth extracted, and he was on the verge of sheer blind panic.

I
concealed a grin of pure enjoyment.

“But can’t you just grab the top between the pincers and yank it out?” I asked. I saw Jed flinch. He was trembling
. His eyes rolled from side to side, following the conversation as Walker and I stood over him.

“Oh, hell no,” Walker said. “
That is the worst thing you can do. I saw a buddy try that in the field when I was in the Middle East,” he said, delighting in recalling the details. “A guy’s tooth had become infected, and we were miles from base. My buddy tried to get the tooth out with a little pair of pincers. He practically had to put his knee on the guy’s chest.” Walker shook his head. “No, no, no. You see there’s roots and all kinds of gristle around the tooth, so you’ve got to grip it, then push down hard. Then you twist the pliers one way then back the other way. Then you pull.” Walker made a graphic demonstration with the pliers, close to Jed’s face.

Jed sat bolt upright. “No fucking way!” he hissed.

I turned on him. “Quiet!” I snapped. “Remember, the zombies have incredible hearing. Any sound from you is going to bring them down on us and we’ll all be killed.”

“Better that than this,” Jed growled. “Christ almighty, you bastards are fixing to kill me.”

“Quiet!”

Jed threw himself back into the chair, muttering darkly and dangerously. Walker leaned over him again
, and Jed’s mouth fell open, showing dull yellow teeth. “Might as well get it over and done with, I guess.”

I le
aned in close, holding the flashlight steady. Walker eased the pincers around the top of the tooth and took up the pressure. His brow was furrowed in concentration. I saw Jed’s throat begin to convulse as if he was trying to swallow. Behind him, Harrigan was almost as white-faced as Jed. He clamped his hands down on my brother’s shoulders and clung on.

Walker got the pliers in place. Jed’s whole body was rigid as a board.

“There,” I said solicitously. “Now that doesn’t hurt, does it?”

Jed made a sound in the back of his throat but it was indecipherable. Walker took up the pressure – and then stopped suddenly. He glanced at me. “Did you find any salt when you searched the kitchen?”

I blinked. “I think so,” I said slowly, remembering. “I think there’s some in the pantry. Why?”

“There is going to be a lot of blood,” Walker said.
“Most likely it’s going to spray everywhere, and there will be yellow oozing puss from the infection. If the tooth doesn’t shatter completely, and we yank it out in one piece, it would be helpful for your brother to rinse his mouth in salty water for a day or two.”

I nodded.

Jed groaned. His face was beginning to sheen in fearful beads of perspiration – and then before I realized it, Walker seemed to lean his body forward and press down hard on the handles of the pliers.

Jed started to keen – a wailing, moaning noise of terrible pain, a sound low in the back of his throat but rising higher. Walker changed his grip. He twisted the pliers and I heard a sound like bone breaking. Then he quickly reversed the action, twisting in the opposite direction.

Blood and puss gushed across Jed’s tongue and spilled over his lip. The sound of his agony became a sound like a kettle boiling. Then Walker pulled back on the pliers and Jed’s pain became a long terrible moan.

For long seconds nothing happened. I could see
Harrigan struggling to keep Jed still in the chair. His knuckles were turning white. Jed started to strain. He lashed out with his leg and his big hands balled into clenched fists. He pounded them on the armrest, and I saw the look of murderous rage blazing in his eyes.

Then I heard another
‘crack!’
– a distinctive sound above the pained noise – and the pliers slid from Jed’s mouth, gripped around a huge decayed tooth with tattered shreds of flesh and root clumped around it. Blood gushed, flooding down Jed’s chin and spattering across the towel, and he reeled away, broke free of Harrigan’s powerful grip, and lunged to his feet, one hand slapped across his jaw, and the other bunched into a fist the size of a sledge-hammer.

“Bastards!” Jed hissed – and more blood spilled down his chin. The towel fell to the floor.
He kicked it away and then bent double with pain. I glanced urgently at Harrigan. We had about three seconds to escape the bathroom before Jed turned his blazing anger onto anything – or anyone – within reach.

“Everyone out!” I said urgently. I could quite easily have said ‘run for your life!’

Jed’s temper was like a volcano. I’d seen him erupt before. We scrambled through the bathroom door while he was bent over, moaning in pain, and I slapped Harrigan on the shoulder. “Grab hold of that door handle and don’t let go for the next five minutes,” I said.

It was fifteen minutes before I finally got up the nerve to go into the bathroom. Jed was pale-faced, grim, leaning over the bathroom vanity, staring at his reflection in the mirror. The murderous blaze of anger in his eyes had died. He turned and glared at me. I handed him a plastic bottle of water I had poured salt into.

“Rinse,” I said.

The bathroom looked like murder had been done. There was blood spattered on the floor and on the sink, and more blood on the towel. Jed took the bottle from me without a word. His eyes were clear and steady, and it looked already as though some of the swelling had gone from around his jaw. He took a swig from the water bottle and spat a bloody mess into the sink.

“You okay?” I asked.

Jed looked at me hard, and his lips compressed into a thin pale line. “Fucker,” he said.

Walker leaned in through the open bathroom door and surveyed the area. “We had better clean this up,” he said. “Just in case.”

I looked alarmed. “What? Could zombies pick up the scent of Jed’s blood – through walls?”

Walker shrugged. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “Maybe. Maybe if they were outside the house…” his voice trailed off. He didn’t sound like he believed it. “But there’s no point taking chances.”

I rinsed the blood away and wiped down the walls and floor.
Harrigan helped me. Walker took Jed back into the living room and by the time Harrigan and I had rejoined the group, Jed was asleep on the floor, snoring.

It was late. Outside the storm seemed to be finally exhausting itself. We could still hear rain spattering against the windows, and the low mournful moan of the wind through the nearby
tree tops, but for all that, the elements seemed to have lost their venom.

I looke
d at Walker. His daughter was asleep, curled up into a ball on the sofa like a kitten. “You should get some rest,” I said. “Harrigan and I will stand guard during the night.”

Walker bridled at that. He shook his head. “I can pu
ll my weight,” he said with dogged resolve. “I’ve got military training. I’m used to long hours and long nights on sentry duty.”

I nodded slowly. “I’m sure you are,” I said carefully. “But you’ve
been in a helicopter crash, you have a bump the size of a golf ball on your head… and, quite frankly, I don’t trust you yet.”

His eyes snapped to mine, and went hard as stone.

“What did you say?”

“I said I don’t trust you,” I measured my words and tone carefully. “It’s nothing personal. It’s just how things are. We don’t know a damned thing about you,
Mr Walker – and until we do, I’m not willing to put my life in your hands.”