Elements of the Undead: Fire (Book One) (7 page)

He turned the door knob and pushed in with his shoulder, while trying to keep his eyes glued to the floor. Glancing up carefully, he saw that the bed was empty, the sheets twisted into a ball.
No. Not again
. His spirits sank. Peter pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped into the room. He wrinkled his nose.
What’s that smell?
It was like something rotting, like an old styrofoam meat tray in the kitchen trash he had forgotten to take out.

He went to the bathroom door. It was closed, but he could see light underneath. “Mom! Are you okay?”

That’s a stupid question
, he realized as soon as it crossed his lips.
Of course she’s not okay.

“Mom?” He knocked.

Crash
!

The door rattled in its frame. A chunk of hollow core laminate fell to Peter’s feet. A crack as long as his arm appeared in the top panel. Peter stepped back, wringing his hands. The smell was stronger now. There was another impact, followed by a mad scrabbling on the other side, as if a dog were trapped inside, trying to dig its way through. Peter took a tentative step forward and placed his ear a few inches from the door.

“I’m opening the door now, Mom.” He put his hand on the knob. A guttural moan emanated from the bathroom, deep and long like an old tornado siren. He twisted the knob slowly, trying to guess when the latch would cross the strike plate. Just when he thought it was almost there, the door was wrenched from his hand. His finger caught on the head of a screw in the knob, ripping a deep furrow along the length. Blood poured from his hand.

Peter gasped at the sight before him.

His mother stood hunched and naked in the doorway. The shriveled remains of her breasts swayed like rotten pears; the bones of her hips flared out in bold relief, rigid wings stretching her gray, mottled skin like a bizarre tent made of human flesh. Clotted blood coated her thighs. Something writhed between her legs, something small yet very alive, something that had clawed its way from inside her body.

Peter squeaked in fear. She rushed at him, a feral hunger on her face, focused on her next meal.
Just like the people on television
, he thought absently. He turned and ran for his life.

Twelve

Megan burst from her trailer at full speed. Her eyes were wild as she searched for
someone, anyone, who could help her with Sam. The nearest trailer was twenty feet away, diagonal from hers. She sprinted across the baked dirt and tugged on the cheap aluminum door.
Locked
. The adjacent trailer was the same.

She stood in the hot sun and racked her brain, trying to remember who was working today, and who was off.
Katy’s on
, she recalled.
She said so at dinner last night
. A lithesome, African-American woman from Miami, Katy was Megan’s closest friend in the brothel. For reasons Megan still didn’t understand, they had become quick friends when she first arrived, often watching television together between shifts, doing each other’s hair, and even taking shopping trips into Las Vegas.

Megan set off at a dead sprint for the brothel, a five-thousand-square-foot, 1960s-era, ranch-style house . It lay just behind the next trailer.

“Help!” she screamed, as she burst through the rear door. “I need help!” There was no answer. Her pulse boomed in her ears, blotting everything else out.
Wait…
She heard the television in the ready room, three doors down. Megan raced down the hall, skidding to a stop on the scuffed laminate floor just outside the room where the girls on duty waited to be called for their lineup. Katy and another girl, Melissa, were perched on the edge of a dusty leather sofa. Their eyes were glued to the television.

Megan couldn’t help but look. The screen was divided into four quadrants. The top left displayed an empty news anchor desk while the other three showed remote camera views of various city streets. Wandering aimlessly, figures lurched across the screen. Signs of destruction abounded. Cars sat with their doors open, dead bodies littered the streets, fires blazed in the distance.

Katy tore her gaze from the television. “Megan!” she exclaimed.

Megan gulped like a fish, trying to catch her breath. “I need help! Sam’s in trouble! In my trailer!”

“Have you seen this?” Melissa asked, gesturing at the screen.

Megan nodded. “Yeah, but that’s not important right now. Something’s wrong with Sam!”

Katy unfolded herself from the couch and crossed the room while keeping one eye on the television the entire way. Megan felt like she was about to scream.
What the hell is going on here?

“I’m sorry, Megs,” Katy said, finally tearing her attention from the screen. “What’s wrong with her?”

Leaving Melissa behind, Megan grabbed Katy’s hand and yanked her down the hall and out the back door.

She filled Katy in as they ran to her trailer. “We were talking, and she just collapsed. I - I couldn’t find a pulse…I tried…” The trailer door was wide open, swinging in a soft breeze.

As soon as they stepped inside, Megan was assaulted by a fetid tsunami of human shit and rancid body odors. It triggered her gag reflex, almost making her throw up.

“Ew! What
is
that
smell
?” Katy asked, holding her nose.

Megan gagged again and put her hand over her mouth. “I don’t know.” Sam was gone.

“She was right there,” Megan insisted, pointing at the floor. “I swear!”

Katy poked her head into the small bathroom. “She’s not in here either.”

A horrible image flashed through Megan’s mind: Sam struggling to her feet, leaving the trailer, wandering into the desert, and dying under the blistering sun. She felt sick. She should have stayed with her.

Someone outside screamed. It went on and on, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

“What was that?” Megan whispered. Katy shrugged, wide-eyed. They abandoned the stench to race outside and back to the brothel.

Megan tore the back door of the brothel open and pushed inside with Katy in tow. She called out, “Melissa? Are you okay?” Then she listened.

A wave of relief coursed through her as she recognized Sam’s form at the far end of the hall, outside the television room.
She must have gone around to the front…

Megan’s relief was shattered a moment later as her eyes finally adjusted to the gloomy interior. Sam, who only minutes before had been lying on her trailer floor with no pulse, was hunched over Melissa, tearing chunks of flesh from her face and wolfing them down like a starving mutt. Melissa fought for her life, pummeling Sam, trying to dislodge her. Blood coated the hallway, enormous abstract splashes on both walls and a pool fanning out on the laminate floor. The house smelled of copper and feces.

Sam growled and tore a chunk from Melissa’s neck. A high-pressure stream of arterial blood spurted forth, coating Sam’s face, seeming to drive her into an even greater frenzy. Melissa stopped struggling and went limp. Katy screamed, and Sam’s head snapped in their direction.  
Shit!

Pressing down on Melissa’s corpse for leverage, Sam struggled to her feet. She moaned, and a thick chunk of Melissa’s neck escaped her mouth and tumbled to the floor with a juicy
plop
. Her tongue skittered over her lips licking hungrily at the torrent of gore cascading from her open maw.

She started walking toward Megan and Katy. Quickly gaining speed, Sam charged down the shotgun-style hall with her bare feet slapping wildly. Megan was frozen in place. She felt like she was watching an instant replay on television. Sam’s eyes bored into her with an inhuman determination. She had to move.
Right now
.

Fingers wrapped around her wrist. It was Katy, tugging her back through the door. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something that shook her to her very core: Melissa rolling over, climbing to her feet. She spun on her heels and followed in a blind panic.

“Close the door!” Katy yelled once they were outside. Megan turned around and yanked the door shut. They raced back across the graveled area that passed for her front yard. Inside her trailer, Megan slammed the door closed behind them and set the deadbolt with a
clunk
.

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. This isn’t happening!” Katy sobbed, pacing around the trailer.

Megan went to the window and pulled the curtain back. “Oh, shit!” She dropped the curtain. “Here she comes!”

Katy stood in the middle of the room hugging herself and quaking. The window in the center of the door shattered, sending shards of glass spraying across the room. A pair of arms plunged through the window, waving around, seeking purchase. Sam roared in frustration.

Megan looked at Katy. “We have to go.” Katy didn’t argue. Grabbing her purse, Megan turned it upside down and dumped it on the bed. “Keys…” Her cell phone, a lipstick, and a pack of cigarettes left over from a long weekend in Vegas tumbled out. And then she spotted her keys.

She snatched them from the bed, but her hands were shaking so badly she almost dropped them.

“How?” Katy asked.

Megan pointed toward the other end of the trailer. “The bathroom window. My car’s right outside.”

“What if they…?”

The door shook and bulged with a brutal impact. The lock wouldn’t hold much longer.

Megan shook her head emphatically and gestured at the front door. “We don’t have a choice.”

“Okay.”

The girls squeezed into the tiny bathroom and slid the thin pocket-door closed. It would offer even less of a barrier than the front door, a few seconds at most. As Megan twisted the thumb-lock, the front door exploded open, and Sam roared.
She’s inside!
Her insides turned into water.

She raised the bathroom window and stuck her head out. There was no sign of Melissa… yet. Climbing onto the toilet, she began to shimmy through the gap, gouging her ribcage on the sill in the process. With a final push, she tumbled out and landed on the ground beside her car.

She leaped to her feet and reached up, ready to help Katy.

It was too late. Katy was halfway through the window when she was yanked back with a scream. Megan shrieked. “Katy!”

She hopped in the air, trying to see through the window, but it was no use. She was too short. She searched for something to stand on, but couldn’t find anything.

From inside the trailer, she heard muffled cries from Katy as Sam was probably tearing her limb from limb. The crying stopped a moment later, replaced by a sound that reminded her of her childhood dog—a Great Dane named Max—when he ate wet dog food.

“Katy! Come on, Katy.”

Sam appeared at the window with a maniacal smile plastered across her face. When she leaned out, blood dripped from her face and hands down the side of the trailer. She started to wriggle her blood-soaked torso through the window.

Katy was dead, Megan realized. She dashed for her car. Her fire-red Volkswagen Electric was her pride and joy, purchased after a particularly busy month last year. She dropped her keys on the floor twice before she got it started. For a terrifying moment, she thought it wasn’t working. Then she saw the light on the dash. In her rearview mirror, she saw Sam tumble to the ground behind her.

Megan didn’t wait to find out what would happen next. Throwing the car into drive, she mashed down on the accelerator and shot off in a spray of gravel.

Thirteen

Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean

United States Navy Commander Betty Hollister accepted a Diet Coke from her warrant officer and turned her attention back to her display. At thirty-nine years old, she was the first woman in her family to make it out of her ancestral home in Mobile, Alabama, and the first woman to ever command a ballistic nuclear missile submarine for the Navy.

The USS Wyoming had been steaming north-northwest for seven days since leaving their new home base of Pearl Harbor, and they were making good time. All mission parameters were within acceptable ranges except for an intermittent vibration in the screw at eleven knots. If all went according to schedule, the sub would arrive at its duty station in the Bering Sea in the next forty-eight hours. The plan was to patrol for thirty days before moving on to their next duty station, the location of which had yet to be revealed. Commander Hollister took a sip of her drink and placed it in the gimbaled holder beside her right hand. The drink holder was designed to allow her drink to remain level as the sub moved around it.

Life as the first female commander of a boomer exceeded her wildest expectations. When she had first put in her papers to transfer from the carrier service to the submarine forces, her commanding officer, a grizzled veteran of the first Gulf War had given her a quizzical look and raised an eyebrow. “You know the trailblazer takes all the arrows, don’t you?”

Her response had been simple. “I don’t have a choice, sir.” The Navy was all she knew, and like every other aspect of her life, she found she could only move forward, taking on ever-increasing responsibility in an unrelenting quest to remake herself, to leave her past behind.

Hollister’s initial enlistment in the Navy had been a calculated move to avoid suspicion related to the accidental death of a classmate during her senior year of high school.

Only she knew the death was not accidental.  Far from it. It had all started the summer between her junior and senior years when her best friend since elementary school, Susan Crawford, had stolen her boyfriend, humiliating her and destroying what had seemed like the perfect relationship with the perfect boy. Hollister was devastated, unable to accept the betrayal. Something shifted deep inside of her, some fundamental piece of her psyche she neither understood nor controlled. With a resolve and cunning that would serve her well in her future naval career, she suppressed her rage and acted as if she accepted the betrayal, even going so far as to offer her congratulations to the new couple, assuring them she bore them no ill will. And then, she waited. Four months later, on the night of homecoming, she made her move.