Medora: A Zombie Novel (26 page)

“Yes, it’s okay.”

“Okay
, I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Stark brought the nozzle of the metal canister to her mouth and squeezed the trigger, releasing pressurized air with a colorless gas. Eli breathed deeply as Stark held the canister open. She looked straight up at him with her mouth open. Slowly, her eyelids closed and she fell asleep. He took the syringe and gently placed it in her arm. Pausing for a moment, he looked at her sleeping eyes and pressed down the plunger. Placing two fingers on her neck, he felt her pulse rise rapidly and then sink down until it was gone.

It was difficult through his blurred vision to see what she had written on the pap
er. After he wiped his eyes, he finally read: “My life is as it were a rose; fleeting with life but eternal with beauty.”

Fluffy, orange turrets of smoke billowed up into the twilight sky while screeching jets continued to pummel the surrounding area with thunder and metal. Keith and Ellen stood motionless, watching the crowds below. They both knew what they were looking for without communicating it. They were watching for patterns. Patterns in the flow of movement of the horde that drifted back and forth across the now muddied school grounds. There would be tiny eddies of movement in response to a nearby missile that was dropped, but it would quickly fill in again as the crowd was drawn to another explosion in the opposite direction. The randomness of the flow was like leaves in river water where some might flow in between a group of rocks and another would go around it without any particular cause.

They waited for the perfect pattern to
align, but so far, there wasn’t a single large enough distraction that would leave a vacuum of space in the field for the two of them to escape through. Too many opposing distant bombs and too many explosions created enough randomness in their movements that prevented a single path out.

“How do we do this
? How do we do this, how do we do this…” Keith repeated under his breath as he focused his eyes on every movement of the horde below.

“See that truck?” Ellen pointed to a dark truck that was parked in the middle of the field. It was bur
ied inside the crowd of the infected.

“Yes
,” Keith nodded.

“I think that’s our winner.”

“Maybe. Maybe…” He squinted his eyes. “What’s our back-up if there aren’t any keys?”

“I think just beyond it there,” she pointed again. “See?”

“Oh, yeah, looks like a little Honda or something. Yeah, that could be our plan B.”

“And did you look down
there on the side? Two dumpsters are right up against the wall. It’s still quite a drop but I really think we could just land right on top of them without getting hurt.”

“Yeah, it’s really the only way down on this side of the roof.”

Behind them, the crowd of teachers was yelling and squirming around the roof door, attempting to keep it shut against the horde. Keith knew he needed to go help but his mind was taken over by a small calculating machine that was sifting through the different flows of movement beneath him.

Ellen touched Keith’s crossed arms
. “Keith, what’re we going to do? We’ve got to make a move.”

“I know.”

“Let’s go help secure the door.”

“You’re right. Wait, you stay here and watch for an opening and I’ll go help.”

Keith turned towards the huddled people and heard a long sustained squeak as the door leaned outward, breaking from the hinges. He wondered how many of them had to be pushing on the door to make it snap free of steel hinges. It must have been a hallway full of condensed human parts with an ever-increasing tail of the sick coming into the school from the street. One after another, adding their weight to a long snake of pressurized body mass leading up to a single door.

“It’s broken!” One of the teachers yelled out.

Keith paused, unsure whether he wanted to be involved in the brunt of the flow of the infected as they were probably about to breach the rooftop.

“Keith!” Ellen cried out.

He looked back and recognized the same worried expression he had seen many times on her. As he turned to head back to the door, his body was lifted into the air and thrown forward into the gravel rooftop towards Ellen. Opening his eyes, he saw a glowing orange color reflecting from the ground. Quickly, he ran his hands from the top of his chest down to his knees, examining any possible damage. Feeling intact, he looked behind him and saw a towering cloud of smoke that had erupted at the opposite end of the rooftop. The teachers had been scattered across the roof along with several of the sick that had blown through the doorway from the pressure of the explosion beneath.

Getting to his feet
, he ran to Ellen who had been pushed back against the knee-high wall that lined the edge of the roof.

“Hey, hey, are you okay? That one was right next to the school.” He kneeled down and touched her shoulder.

She lifted her head and nodded. “We need to get out of here.”

“I know, I know, what
…” he stopped talking as he looked out at the crowd below. The pattern was finally there.

“Hey! I think there’s a clearing that’s showing up out there.” Keith helped Ellen to her feet.

Looking out, she saw a swift movement of the sea of heads as they separated into two large bodies. One force began pushing its way around one side of the building while the other half was heading towards the opposite side, creating an empty space in the middle of the school grounds.

“The explosion!
They’re all attracted to it and are trying to get around to the other side of the school,” Keith said, walking along the side of the roof.

“Keith!” Ellen yelled at him.

He looked over at the door and saw them coming out. Slowly and drunkenly they were stumbling out over their fallen comrades.

“Okay, I’m jumping down. You let yourself slowly down with your arms and I’ll catch you.”

“Go!” She yelled at him.

He grabbed the side of the building and peered over at the dumpster beneath. Swinging on leg over the
edge, he sat with the railing in between his legs and quickly brought his other leg out. He lowered himself until he was only holding on with his hands and his legs were swinging down as low as possible. Resisting the urge to look down to see how far the drop was, he let go. In what felt like a long second, he crashed, legs first, onto the plastic top of the dumpster. Nothing hurt, he thought.

Getting to his
feet, he looked up to yell at Ellen to jump but she was already hanging from the edge of the building with her bare feet swinging in the air. Keith was about to yell up at her, but she let go and her small frame came crashing into his chest, knocking them both backwards off the dumpster and down onto the asphalt.

Keith grabbed at his chest while struggling to
breathe, but Ellen was already on her feet, trying to lift him up by his shoulders.

“We have to run right now
. They are everywhere.”

Keith got to his feet
. His diaphragm was stunned and he began to stumble towards Ellen. Surrounding them was a wall of the infected that was slowly receding away as they struggled around to the other side of the school building, drawn by the explosion.

He produced a single cough and finally sucked in a long breath. Putting his arm over Ellen, he ducked his head and they started to move down a wide corridor of thick
mud, flanked by crowds of the infected. Their movements made sucking noises as they lifted their feet while running, but any sounds that came from them were overpowered by the constant, organic cacophony of decrepit human drones all around them.

They ran awkwardly, lifting their feet from the mud while keeping their eyes forward searching for any sign of a car but saw little else other than a long corridor of infected people like they were lined up for a presidential motorcade but facing the wrong direction. Keith felt Ellen fall next to him and stumble forward over a gigantic plastic gold fish rocking back and forth on a large steel spring. Lifting her to her feet, they continued forward as the crowd around them slowly stretched further away.

A flash of something embedded in the side of the horde caught Keith’s eye and he stopped Ellen.

“Hang on
. I think I see a wheel.” He stopped her by the shoulders and lowered her until they were both kneeling down in the grassy mud. “Wait,” he said.

A few dozen yards off, the metal rim and rubber of a car tire was showing through the crowd. The car was currently embedded into the mass of infected people. They swarmed around it, facing the direction opposite of Keith and Ellen, crawling and sluggishly jumping over one another.

“Keith,” Ellen whispered, “we have to run. One of them is going to see us and they will be around us in two seconds.”

“No, no, just wait a second. Look…” he pointed. “See? They’re moving away.”

Looking up, she saw that just in the time they were talking that over half of a small Honda civic had been exposed from the crowd.

Keith grabbed her by the shoulder
. “Let’s move up to the bumper.”

The
y stalked, step by step, until their backs were pressed up against the low clearance, front bumper of the car. Keith flattened on his belly and peered around the bumper. The edge of the crowd was backing away from the trunk of the car, their backs still turned to them. He crawled along the driver’s side of the car and looked into the window. A bright pink Energizer bunny was dangling from a set of keys that were left in the ignition. Looking back, he saw Ellen’s head peeking up over the hood. He gave her a thumbs-up and motioned over to the passenger side of the car.

A deep tension that had wound up in his stomach disappeared as he opened the handle of the car
door, but then he felt it seize in a cold panic as the car alarm immediately blared in his ears.

“Oh shit!” He looked over at Ellen who quickly stood to her feet. He rattled the door handle back and forth but it was locked.

Looking back over his shoulder, he saw the heads the dozens of the dead slowly turn towards him in unison. Keith stood to his feet and blindly ran at the leading edge of the crowd. Within a few steps, a muscular young man with no shirt was lurching towards him. Keith approached him, put his hands around his head and threw his body to the ground. The man stumbled down onto his knees and Keith then wrapped his fingers around his neck and started to drag him towards the car. The infected man was cocking his head back and forth, trying to bite at Keith’s hands, but they were placed just under his jaw, preventing any way for Keith to be bitten.

“Keith! What are you doing?” Ellen yelled at him as she came around to his side of the car.

Without responding, he dragged the man to the side of the driver’s side window. Squeezing his hands even tighter, he lifted him up by his neck allowing him to regain his footing. Keith let go of his neck and then placed both hands on the side of his head and slammed it down into the passenger’s side window, creating an explosion of glass. The window completely caved in.

Keith pushed Ellen back and the man’s body fell to the ground. “Get back to the other side,
and let’s get out of here!” He yelled at Ellen as he reached into the window and manually unlocked the car door and violently brought it open, pushing the infected man’s body out of the way.

They quickly got in the car and slammed the doors shut. Ellen felt a sharp pain in her thigh as she
sat; knowing it was glass but wasn’t currently interested in any new injuries that appeared as blemishes, considering what she had already been through that day.

Looking down at the
car’s beeper on the key chain, Keith managed to turn the alarm off and start the ignition as the crowd overtook the back of the car with several people crawling over the trunk. He slammed on the gas. The car spun in the mud for a brief instant, found traction and leapt forward, spewing the several bodies off into the mud. He turned the wheel, following the clearing out, but the other wall of the crowd was now moving into them, attracted by the sounds.

Angling the car to follow the closing space, he accelerated as they spe
d past row after row of the sick, as the gap in bodies got smaller ahead of them.

“They’re closing in up ahead, do you see?” Ellen pointed ahead at a few figures at the edge of the school grounds.

The car violently bumped up and down as it sped across the uneven surface of grass and mud. Keith’s calf muscle was beginning to cramp from holding the gas pedal completely flat against the floorboard. He tightened his grip on the wheel and headed straight for a small crowd of figures. Their eyes lit up with red reflection from the car’s headlights.

“Hold on
,” Keith calmly said to Ellen.

The
corner of the bumper hit the first body and it spun off to the side, but the car then struck two people head on. They rolled up the hood and slammed into the windshield, immediately breaking the glass creating a constellation of fractured light. The side windows were now streaked with whatever liquid contents their bodies were holding. One body rolled off, but the other came to rest on the windshield. Keith rolled down the window, leaned out and grabbed the person’s leg, yanking the body free from the car.

Maintaining his head out of the window to see, he yelled to Ellen, “Okay, where is the house?”

She rolled down her window and leaned out to see ahead. There were now less infected people in front of them and they had cleared the school grounds. The street ahead of them had transformed into a chaotic wasteland of overturned cars, scattered furniture, small fires and a multitude of lifeless bodies. Keith could only drive forward by zigzagging across lawns and parts of the road that were clear.

“What street is this? Is this… is this Crowley?” She asked.

“I don’t know. I barely have any idea where we are.” Keith looked up at a light post. “Oh wait, yes, yes, I see a street sign there. This is Crowley.”