The Coalition: Part II The Lord Of The Living (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 2) (9 page)

Ron’s hand went to his belt and he had his ever-present hammer in his fist. Without thinking at all, he strode across the cramped room and began to swing the tool at the monster
who was doing its best to sink its gnashing teeth into Oliver’s exposed face. He smashed the thing’s greasy skull again and again until it fell limp, sliding to the side to lay inert on the floor.

Turning then to Jean, he saw that she had jammed her fist into her attacker’s mouth. Only her thick leather gloves protected her from what would be a lingering death if those filthy fangs penetrated the fabric. She was doing her best not to scream, thinking of course about the six-ton animals just on the opposite side of what could be, to it, a very flimsy barrier.

Instead of striking out at the thing, and perhaps causing it to bite down with even more pressure, he put his left arm under its drooling chin in a choke-hold. Pulling back with all of his strength, he peeled it free of his lover.

“Jesus,” she said.

He saw her stand to her full height, draw a knife from its sheath on her thigh, and without wasting another split second, she jammed the eight-inch blade into the rotten brain that animated the goddamned thing. It went limp in Ron’s grasp and he allowed it to drop to the floor in a wet heap.

Gasping for breath in the close quarters with the stench of the dead things all around them, the family stood weakly. Ron glanced at each, one after the other.
“Are you bitten?” he finally asked.

Oliver shook his head.

Jean pulled her right glove off and examined her fingers and knuckles, turning her hand over and looking closely at the skin. Even a slight nick, she knew, would mean death. “I’m okay,” she said. He could hear the relief in her voice. And without word, he suddenly had his arms around the both of them, the ball peen hammer clattering to the hard, concrete floor that was stained with the bloody, stinking excretions from the pair of dead things.

Only Oliver’s coughing brought him out of the sense of euphoria that was coursing through him
, with the realization that his new family was safe. It was the stench of the deaders, he knew, and not some other toxin in the safe house. For the first time, he looked down at the things, seeing them for what they were.

“I recognize this one,” Ron said, pointing at the one who had been gnawing on Jean’s gloved hand. “His name was Daniel Weller.” His eyes drifted to the one whose head he had caved in. It had been a teenaged girl, her jeans gone from blue to a tacky black, what was left of her yellow shirt hanging in wet tatters like the petals of a wilted flower around her waist. “I didn’t know her,” he said.

“They must have come in here to escape from the deaders,” Oliver said, now that he had caught his breath and could speak. “They used your combination to get in, but they…well, they must have been bitten and died in here.”

Jean was nodding in agreement. “We’ll have to get them out of here. I can hardly breathe. Is there a way to dump them out without opening the door?” she asked.

Ron pointed to the open doorway that led to an even smaller room in his safe house. “Yeah,” he told her. “There’s a bolted window in there. I can open it and push them out. It leads into a little loading dock on the other side.” He snorted, trying to get the smell out of his nose. “Fuck ‘em,” he said. And without hesitating, he pointed to the feet of the man he’d known as Weller. “Get his ankles. I’ll take his shoulders. Let’s get them the hell out of here before we get sick.”

In a few minutes they had dragged them into the other room. Opening the steel-shuttered window, Ron and Jean pushed the dead weight of the two corpses out into the shadowed, damp space that had once been the loading dock Ron had described. Zombies at the far side of the space out there saw the activity and moved toward them. But before they could take more than a few steps
, they had finished their work and the dead things were left with nothing but a pile of rotted and infected meat at which to stare, perhaps to contemplate a similar fate in days to come.

Inside, Ron was already busy. He hauled out a jug of mild disinfectant from a closet. It was something lemon-scented and not filled with either ammonia or chlorine. In a few minutes
, he had mopped up the worst of the gore and the rooms now smelled more of citrus than of rotted meat. Only then, did he and the others pause to sit. Ron dragged a chair to the center of the main room and unfolded two lawn chairs for the others. For the first time since leaving the spot across from the Trust Building, they felt able to breathe easy.

“What was this place?” Jean asked. She sat, leaning back in the chair, exhausted both physically and emotionally. Raising one arm, she examined the dark stains left on her jacket where the flesh of a dead man’s reanimated corpse had peeled off on the fabric.

“It was a shipping office,” Ron told her. “Used to be full of phone banks and bills of lading, clip boards, that kind of thing. They didn’t store anything here but temporary paperwork. That’s why the little loading dock is out back. Truck would pull in and pick up the records a couple times a week. The warehouse was somewhere else. Don’t know where it was or what the fuck they were selling. I don’t fucking care.” Ron stopped talking, his face a scowl. He looked at Jean and Oliver.

“I’m sorry,” he told them. “Didn’t mean to…” He stopped trying to get a handle on what was going through his mind. “I’m just trying to
cope,” he said.

Jean finally sat up and leaned forward. Then she was on her knees beside him, her arms around Ron as she pulled herself close to him. “That’s okay,” she told him. “We’re okay. We’re going to be okay. All we have to do is lay low for a little while.” She turned her head, surveying the space in which she’d found herself. She realized that the lighting was coming from above, a skylight in the ceiling that allowed sun to filter in through a thick,
dirty lens of Plexiglas set in an aluminum frame.

“You’ve got provisions here, right?” She blinked those green eyes. “If not, we carried in enough food and water in our packs to last a couple of days.
More if we have to get serious about conserving our stuff and laying low.”

“Yeah.”
Oliver felt the need to add to the conversation. Ron grinned as he saw the boy smiling, still a kid even after the horror they’d just experienced. “We don’t have to be scared of anything in here.”

“Oliver’s right,” Ron agreed. He reluctantly disengaged himself from Jean’s welcome embrace. Standing, he walked across the room to a cupboard made of particle board and overlaid with cheap tiles. Opening the cupboard doors, he examined the contents. There were five-gallon water jugs stored inside, all of them still filled, the water sparkling through plastic walls. Drawing another pair of doors open
, he revealed a stack of boxes, one of which he dragged out on the floor and opened. Inside were various other containers that revealed its contents to be military meals-ready-to-eat, boxes of crackers, and various other emergency supplies. He nodded at the box and then to his family. “We’ll be just fine,” he told them.

But in fact
, he just wasn’t sure.

For the first time in over a year
, he didn’t know where he stood with the world.

**

The sun finally began to set. Ron had opened the various vents in the little safe house and had turned on the fans powered by the minor solar array on the roof. There was even battery power for use, the batteries fed and charged by the trickle system he’d taken the time to assemble months before. He had installed LED lights that were wired to the corners of the rooms. Once they’d finished cleaning the gore from the floors and wiped away the stains from where the muck had spattered the walls, they were breathing relatively fresh air. They could breathe easily, and they had eaten, filling their bellies with the MREs stacked neatly in boxes. The toilet in the tiny bathroom still worked if you primed it with a gallon or two of water from the stored jugs. They took turns using the facility and ridding themselves of the waste.

Oliver had succumbed to fatigue first, and they had prepared an air mattress for him and rolled out a light sleeping bag. His two guardians then watched over him until he fell into a deep sleep. They left him in the smaller of the two rooms, away from the metal entrance, and made up their own sleeping pallets, whispering as they worked.

“What do you think happened? With our guests?” She was talking about the zombies who had been in the safe house when they’d entered it.

“Who knows?” Ron said. “That guy…Weller. He was an OK fellow. Watched out for himself, but I saw him help out other people when they needed a hand. Once I saw…” he shrugged. “Hell, it doesn’t matter what I saw anymore. He’s dead.

“If I had to guess, I’d say he needed some refuge, knew about this place, and used the combination to get in. And I think the girl was already in here and already dead. She looked riper than he did. They were both covered in bites, if you noticed. I figure she came in already bitten, died, and when Weller needed to use the place, he let his guard down and wasn’t expecting a deader to be in here. Hell…she could have been sitting in the other room, or in the head. Who fucking knows?” He lay back on his pallet, letting the tension go out of his body for the first time that day. “It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s dead. The girl—whoever she was—she’s dead, too. They’re both lying out there on the loading dock where they’ll rot and go to dust.”

Joining him, Jean reclined on her side of the makeshift bed. She was quiet. Oliver’s even breathing came to her from the adjoining space.

“He’s fast asleep,” she whispered to Ron. “If we’re quiet, we won’t wake him.”

Ron made no reply and when he realized that she was taking her pants down
, he helped her pull them off. Carefully, he kicked off his boots and unzipped his own jeans, tugging them down as quickly as he could. He almost groaned when she reached out and gripped his already erect shaft.

“Hush,” she whispered, and pulled him toward her, guiding him into her where he began to quietly and carefully thrust. She was already wet and there was no need at all for the foreplay in which they customarily engaged.

“I need this,” she groaned under her breath. His reply was only to continue stroking away, giving her more of what she needed.

Through one of the vents
, they could hear the casual shuffling of dead feet as the shamblers slowly tired of waiting for them at the door and, one by one, wandered off into the darkening night. When they could no longer hear the undead at their door, they gave up all but the sounds of their passion, Ron thrusting into Jean’s vagina, his woman’s legs forcing her pelvis up to meet those thrusts.

“I’m
cuming,” she said, breaking the silence, just barely, her lips at his ear. “Cum with me baby,” she groaned.

As he spent into her, Ron held back his own calls of pleasure which died in his chest. Collapsing, he lay beside her, his breath labored, but still quiet, his attention on the even and almost silent snoring of Oliver. “Jesus,” he whispered.

“We’d better get our pants and boots back on,” Jean said, rolling to a sitting position to gather the clothing to her.

Ron nodded, realizing that of course she couldn’t see him in the darkness that had enclosed them, but he did as she suggested. You could never take any chances in this world. Not anymore. He drew his pants on and then laced his boots. “You go on and sleep,” he told her. “I’ll take the first watch.”

“You sure?” she asked.

He nodded again, realized what he was doing, and replied.
“Yeah. I’ll be fine. Sex is a mighty fine sleeping pill and all that, but you go ahead. I’ll just sleep all the better when you’re up.”

“Wake me in a bit,” was all she said. Hardly had she pulled the edge of a light blanket over her than she was out, her own breathing matching that of the boy lying so near to them.

Ron turned his chair to face the door, put a flashlight in his lap and, with his .45 unbuckled at his hip, he did first watch. The night was mainly silent, but a few times, he thought that he could sense the vibrations of the great elephants moving back and forth along the city blocks, searching for the one who had killed the calf. He hoped that if they found the man, they’d be satisfied with killing him and leave the rest of the people alone. Ron had heard that elephants had very long memories, indeed.

He would speak to Colonel Dale about that and other such things the next time they faced one another.

**

Two days passed before the pachyderms moved on. Now and again
, Ron would edge one of the armored windows open and use a makeshift periscope to look out into the streets. Jean had assembled it from some cardboard tubing and some bits of mirror they’d found in one of the cupboards. Even if he’d thought of such a thing, he wouldn’t have known how to make it.

“My dad used to make them for me when I was a little girl,” she’d said, smiling, her gorgeous face beaming at the thought of the man who’d raised her.

“The more I hear about that guy, the more I’m impressed,” Ron had told her.

At that, she’d kissed him lightly on the lips. “You do remind me of him.
Even if you don’t know how to make periscopes out of old toilet paper rolls.” And then she’d laughed.

“I want to look through it, too,” Oliver had told them.

“Of course you can!” And Jean had snatched the fragile thing gently from Ron’s gloved hands and passed it over to Oliver.