The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) (14 page)

“Any chance of that?” She asked, her little gun speaking and sending another zombie away forever and ever.

“Well…” The .45 bucked in his hand again, and the single shot sent one more zombie to Hell. “I really don’t think so. We’d better make it to my place or we’re dead,” he admitted.

“Then let’s do it right.” She dropped the empty cartridge in the bag at her waist, reloaded, and another shot bought them another second of freedom in the direction they needed to go.

Slamming a fresh clip into his gun, Cutter felt at the pockets on his right thigh and was reassured to feel three more full clips. If they were careful, didn’t fall or trip or breathe wrong
,
then they might make it.

Together, their guns either roaring or peeping at the monsters, they moved as a team down the street, toward safety.

**

It took both of them shoving with all of their strength to get the steel door closed. When the heavy door settled securely in its frame
,
Cutter produced the key, his shoulder to the straining barrier, and he shot the lock home. Only at that point did he take a moment to breathe.

“Goddamn,” he said.

“Yes,” the woman agreed. Her face was streaked with
sweat, dirt,
and the grease of too many miles on a very difficult road.

“If someday things ever get back to normal, I’ll hang out with others who lived through this shit and we’ll compare horror stories. I’ll be fucked if anyone will beat that one,” he said, breathing out and feeling every muscle in his body begin to shiver with fatigue. He wanted to just slump to the floor of the stairwell and rest, if not actually fall into a deep sleep. But he couldn’t do that. Especially not now. Especially with a stranger at the door of his home.

“Help me with these iron bolts,” he said, pointing to the woman’s left. “Just hand them over and I’ll set them home. You can never have a door too secure.” They could hear the dead pounding on the steel door, trying to get in. Hell—they could hear them slamming on the thick concrete walls in a vain effort to knock it down. At street level
,
the building’s foundation was six feet thick and no amount of walking dead were going to push their way through.
So
far his door had withheld the onslaught of a couple of herds not much different from this one.
However,
this was the most he’d ever seen. The stories
he had
been hearing were true: the shamblers were coming out of the countryside and into the city.

When all five iron bars were in place, reinforcing the doorway, Cutter turned to the woman. He hoped that he didn’t smell as bad as she did, but he figured that he did. For the first time
,
he tried to look into her face, but her skin was filthy, caked with dirt and grime and running with perspiration. All he could tell was that she was young, and that the few words he
had
heard out of her
,
marked her as a native southerner. Before he could say anything to her or broach the subject that they both knew was coming, she held her hand out. Her pistol was in it and she was handing it over, butt-first.

Cutter took the weapon from her
,
and for the first time got a good look at it, seeing the oiled surface and realizing he’d never seen anything quite like it. “What the hell?”  He asked.

“My dad made it,” the woman said. “He was a machinist. A gun enthusiast. He made it for me when I was ten years old. For target practice. It was my first gun, and it was always my favorite gun,” she added. “The name’s Jean. She stuck out her other gloved hand and Cutter took the small fingers beneath his own much larger mitt. “Jean Crump. I’m from Brevard,” she added.

“
Ron
Cutter,” he said. “From right here in
Charlotte
. Home of the Panthers and the Bobcats and…well, not much else, actually.” Staring at the gun in his
hand,
he had to ask her. “Your dad made this?” He turned the gun over
-
, admiring it. “I guess he taught you how to shoot.” His eyes met hers, and he realized they were green. There was something keen and bright in those eyes.

“Oh, yeah,” Jean admitted. “He had me on the firing range by the time I was eight. I guess I’m pretty good,” she told him, not bothering to mention the walls of ribbons and trophies
she had
won from her days in grade school until the shit had hit the fan in her senior year at NC State. She also didn’t bother to tell him that she’d almost made the Olympic Women’s shooting team in 2008. Pistol and trap, she thought, recalling the competitions.

Cutter wanted to ask her where her dad was, but he decided to wait
until
later. Maybe
she would
tell him on her own. “Well, let’s go up the stairs,” he said. “Those bastards can probably still smell us and they won’t calm down until they forget we’re here.” He didn’t have to tell her to go first, and she turned and began walking up the stairwell. “All the way up,” he said. “We’ll open the door at the top and come out on the roof.
Twelve
floors. Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she said, her voice for the first time calm and fluid. He liked her voice. It was feminine
,
but even, almost deep. In fact, it was a very pleasant voice.

On the way up, they were both so exhausted that neither of them said much. At the seventh
floor,
Cutter paused as he heard a deader thumping on the door that led to the hallway there. One of his insurance policies. Colonel Dale had told him that was a bad idea, and Cutter was at the point where he had to agree. “I have a few unwanted guests in the building,” Cutter told Miss Crump. Well, at least he assumed she was a
Miss
. She didn’t seem old enough to have been married, but you never knew with those mountain girls. “I just haven’t had the time to take care of them,” he lied.

Finally,
breathless
, they reached the door at the top. Once more
,
Cutter produced a key and freed the lock. It slid easily, newly oiled, and he let Jean push the door open. Bright, blinding sun met them as Cutter for the first time took the lead
,
and
with
his gun in hand
;
he stepped out on the rooftop, carefully surveying the expanse. He looked at the
pale-pebbled
roof, the blockhouse where he lived, the big cisterns where he collected every drop of rainwater that he could. So
far,
he’d always had more than enough water.
Charlotte
’s 47 inches of rainfall the past year had been good to him.

“I once had a zombie get up here,” he said. “Crawled up the ventilation shaft over there,” he pointed at it. “I had to cover it and weld it shut.” He blinked the sweat from his eyes. “The damned thing must have spent a week dragging itself through there. Didn’t have a square inch of skin left on it. Hell. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.” Cutter hadn’t bothered wasting a bullet on the thing.
He had
merely walked up to
it, shoved it over the ledge,
and watched it splatter on the street below.

Locking the door behind them, he let the woman lead the way. He liked that he hadn’t had to tell her to give up her gun or to walk ahead of him. She was either very smart
,
very polite, or both. Either way, she was proving
not
to be a pain in the ass about the situation. Watching her walk carefully in front of him, he started to wonder if she was as fat as he’d figured her to be. Those thick, baggy clothes hid her completely, (and protected her body from bites of course).

Still and all, he was going to have to ask her disrobe. He hoped she would understand without too much trouble. She couldn’t expect him to allow a stranger into his home, not one who had possibly been infected and was a ticking time bomb of murder.

At last, they were at the big door to his converted
blockhouse
and he once more inserted the key into a well-oiled lock and was able to push the door open. Cutter nodded at the opened doorway and she walked in.

“It’s cool in here,” she said, genuine surprise in her voice.

There were fans on in vents in the ceiling and high on the walls and almost at floor level. Each of the higher fans drew the warm air out
,
while the ones below pulled up cool air from ducts that fed all the way down to basement level. “I went to a lot of trouble to rig this up,” he admitted, without going into detail. “It’s not as good as air conditioning, but almost.” He was proud of the setup. Cutter had figured it out after reading of a similar contraption in one of the how-to books in his growing practical library. Jean was looking directly at the far wall of the big room even as he thought of the library. So
far,
he had roughly 3,000 books.
He had
carried the growing library up, piecemeal. The information there was invaluable now. If you couldn’t fix something yourself these days, you were screwed.

“I’ll get us some water,” he told Jean. He opened one of the insulated chests in his makeshift kitchen and produced a bottle for her. “I filter and decontaminate the water myself,” he said. “It might have a slight chlorine taste, but it’s better than getting giardia.”

He could tell that Jean wanted to say something, but instead
,
she all but snatched the bottle from his hand and twisted off the cap. She turned it up and guzzled it down, a solid quart of cool, clear water vanishing down her throat.  Finally, the hood had slipped from her head and Cutter watched her drink, and saw for the first time that Jean was not fat, but was probably slim under the layers of clothing. Her throat was lean and long; there was no
double chin
indicating that she was at all overweight.

“You want another one?” he asked. She nodded and he handed her a second as he took one himself. They both stood and drank.

For a moment
,
neither of them spoke.

“I have to ask you to do something,” he said.

Jean Crump looked down at the floor, seeing the many patterns of the dozen carpets he’d found on lower floors and dragged up to his home to cover the drab concrete surface in it. It was a patchwork, almost a rainbow. Yellow and red bars met with blue spots against gray backgrounds encountered purple paisley that faced orange zigzags marching toward black squares atop green stars. “You need to see if I’ve been bitten. I know. You don’t have to elaborate. Your house and your rules. That’s okay.” She seemed to steal a gulp of water and
she
would not meet his gaze.

“It’s just for safety,” he insisted. “I won’t…no grabbing. I’ll be as much a gentleman about it as I can,” he told her. He tossed his head toward one of two doors in the building that did not lead out to the roof. “I have a shower
in
there. I even have hot water. I set up a solar heating system on the roof and one of the east-facing walls. The sun heats water in loops of garden hoses. Gets hot as hell, so you’ll have to watch yourself. Don’t just use the hot tap—mix it up good or you’ll get scalded.

“When you’re done.” He was quiet for a second. “I’ll check you out and make sure there’s nothing for me to worry about.”

Jean handed him the bottle of water. “You have hot water?” She almost couldn’t believe it. “Soap?”

“Yeah, there’s soap in there, too.” He smiled at her. “And shampoo. Use what you need.” He cleared his throat, not wanting to tell her what she had to do.

He
didn’t have to say anything.
First,
she pulled the canvas bag of .22 shells from her neck and put it down. No, Cutter thought, she’s definitely not fat. Then she pulled the huge and potent sweatshirt over her head, tossing the sweat-damp fabric on the back of a chair. She was standing there in a thin red flannel shirt and those awful green pants and boots which she unlaced and peeled off, revealing a pair of khaki socks riven with holes. “No more guns” she said. “No hidden knife. No razor. Just me.”

Cutter wasn’t sure, but she might be pretty under all that grime. It was probable.

With that, she went to the door and opened it, seeing a toilet, the shower stall, the towels, the soap and shampoos, bottles of rubbing alcohol, aspirin, cotton swabs, (toilet paper!) and more. “Damn,” he heard Jean say as she walked in and shut the door behind her. In a minute or
so,
he could hear the water running. As she showered, Cutter went to the big sink in the kitchen and peeled his own jacket and shirt off, leaning his rifle in the corner and putting the pistols on the counter. He ran water for
himself, lathered a rag with soap,
and began to scrub the sweat and dirt from his arms and chest and face.

Lowering his head beneath the tap, he allowed cool water to run over him as he massaged his scalp and cleaned out the grime. He leaned there for several long minutes, letting the water run over him, lowering his body temperature and washing the sweat away until he felt human again. As he stood and began to towel himself dry, the door to the bathroom opened and Jean Crump stepped out.