The Dead Circle (21 page)

Chris rolls up with another shopping cart filled to the brim.

“What you got there?” Sarah calls out, not looking at him.

“Uh… Let’s call it arts and entertainment?”

Chris loads a box of video games for his Xbox, six cases of wine and liquor and a stack of pornography two feet high.

Sarah giggles but tries to put on a stern face. “Booze and porn?”

“It’s a long winter!”

Sarah rolls her eyes while strategically covering several cases of craft beer and a stack of romance novels.

“What else do we need? I got all the batteries at Kroger, were there any more at the Gamestop?”

Chris does not respond.

“Chris?”

He speaks in a quiet monotone. Not panicked, but deadly serious. “We need to go.”

“Why? Clouds?”

“No. A Fred. Look.”

On the far side of the parking lot, a male zombie lumbers slowly in their direction. Chris is shocked to see how much the body has deteriorated. It is a truly horrible sight.

“Shit. Is he coming towards us?”

Sarah looks over his shoulder. “This is not a time to be curious. This is a time to get the fuck out of here.”

“Right.”

They throw the last cases of food onto the back seat of the bus and close the emergency door.

“Keep your eyes on Fred. He’s getting closer.”

“I see him.”

Sarah climbs into the driver’s seat and Chris stands in the bus’s doorway looking warily at Fred. He hesitates for a second.

“He’s a long way from the herd. I wonder if he was trapped and finally escaped to head to the lot? It sure took him a long time to free himself.”

“I don’t know. He’s headed in the wrong direction. He’s headed for us. Get in. Let’s get out of here.”

The corpse closes in on the bus, now only about one hundred feet away. Chris makes an involuntary ‘huh?’ noise when Fred walks directly into a light post. The zombie staggers for a bit then continues in on their direction.

“I think he’s blind.”

Sarah starts the engine. She checks the gauges trying to figure out how much fuel they have. “What?”

“We should have thought of this already. Their eyes are rolled up, so of course they can’t see. He’s navigating by sound. As long as we stay-”

A hand closes on Chris’ shoulder and pulls him backwards off the bus and out of Sarah’s view. The sound of his scream sends blood rushing through her head so fast it makes the world seem like it’s in slow motion.

The universe is instantly quieter as if everything was muted except for the sound of Chris calling out. She’s up and out of her seat in less than a second. She grabs the baseball bat they stashed next to the door and runs out of the bus so fast she almost over-balances and falls. Almost. She catches herself and turns to face Chris who has been knocked to the ground and is pinned by three zombies.

“Chris!!”

Sarah’s brain is in emergency slow-motion mode so she has time to remember how annoyed she is by the long list of movies in which women are depicted as weak and ineffectual when swinging a bat. She always thought of the image of Shelley Duvall weakly holding the middle of her bat and pathetically swiping it back and forth trying to ward off a maniacal Jack Nicholson. The subtle sexism pissed Sarah off. It was as if a woman would automatically be too overcome by her vagina emotions to plant her feet, turn her hips and swing.

Now watching her husband in danger, she begins to understand the panic that creeps up the back of your neck and makes your hands numb and your feet seem to be stuck in quicksand. But Sarah does what her father taught her to do before her first middle school softball game. “
Take a deep breath. Bend your knees a bit. Grip the bat firmly but don’t squeeze it to death. Turn your hips and swing through your core not just with your arms. Commit your entire body’s energy into the fluid motion of the bat. It’s about transfer of energy, not just how hard you can swing.”

Sarah swings at the first zombie’s head with a ferocious but laser-focused intensity. She is startled, horrified even, but deep down in her animal brain, immensely satisfied when the head doesn’t just get knocked back, it explodes. The dried brittle skin and tissue fly off in every direction. The scull cracks into several pieces, detaches completely from its body and hits the side of the bus with a loud clang, spraying brain matter like a Jackson Pollack painting. The body is knocked back into the second zombie causing it to fall as well.

Chris seizes the opportunity and log-rolls to his left, knocking the third zombie down like a bowling pin. Panic coursing through his body, he leaps to his feet with the speed and agility that he had as a child before the growth spurt of puberty made him stiff, heavy and clumsy.

“Sarah! Look out!”

Fred, forgotten in all of the excitement, has advanced on them, now only a few feet away from Sarah’s back. He raises his arms to grab her, but Chris moves too quickly. He shoves Sarah back into the doorway of the bus, ducks under Fred’s arms and pushes him back into the two zombies who were getting up. Fred falls backwards into a tangled pile of limbs. It would be funny if their lives were not in danger. They looked like they were playing a drunken zombie version of naked Twister.

“CHRIS! Get in!”

From around the back of the bus come another half dozen Fred and Gingers. Chris hops in and Sarah uses the lever next to the driver’s seat to slam the folding door closed. She starts the engine as the attackers start to clump behind the glass.

“Go! Go!” Chris puts his weight against the door, attempting to prevent the zombies from pushing it open.

Sarah slams her foot down on the gas pedal and the bus lurches forward, knocking several bodies down to get sucked under the tires and be crushed. She pays no mind to this as she drives out of the shopping center at a breakneck speed. Chris can hear the tires start to whistle and feel the bus rock on its shocks as Sarah accelerates into the corner. They clip several parked cars and can hear scraping metal and glass breaking.

“Sarah! Slow down! We’re OK!”

“OK. OK. Fuck! Fuck! Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.”

Sarah sneaks a look at her husband. He is bleeding down the side of his right arm. Blood has started to collect on the band of his Timex before dripping onto the floor.

“You’re bleeding!”

Chris looks down and notices the blood for the first time. “Shit. I think he clawed me.”

“He didn’t bite you did he!?”

“What difference does that make? This isn’t ‘Day of the Dead.’” Chris is speaking with more bravado than he feels.

“How the fuck do you know? The parasite lives in liquid. His spit, his blood.”

“He didn’t bite me.”

Sarah relaxes, but only slightly. The street in front of them is blocked by a Toyota Prius that had been abandoned in the middle of the road. They would have been able to work their way around it in the van, but the sheer size of the bus makes it impossible to avoid. Fortunately, the massive weight of the large vehicle easily knocks the car out of the way. 

“There must have been at least ten of them. Fuck.”

“Sarah, you saved my life.” Chris speaks with a genuine reverence. “You were totally badass.”

“No worries. I got ya boo.” She blows off his compliment, but can’t contain a smirk as she changes the subject. “So, why did they leave the circle?”

“I think they were hungry.”

“What?”

“They were emaciated. If they stayed at the circle, they probably haven’t eaten for over a month.”

“But why now? They weren’t interested in food before.”

“Zombie dancing is hungry work.”

Sarah ignores the joke and focuses on the road. “How did they know where we were?”

“Noise. They heard us hit the SUV. They came to investigate.”

Another car blocks the intersection. “Hold on to something!” Having no other choice, Sarah grimaces and smashes her way through that one too. “We’re making a shit-ton of noise right now. We’re going to lead them straight back to the library.”

“We better slow down. Try not to hit anything.”

“What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do!? I don’t see a lot of other options.”

Chris frowns. “I know. Let’s at least try to avoid making any more noise than we have to.”

They creep their way through traffic, doing their best to do so quietly, but they know that the engine of the bus sounds like a jumbo jet in the relative silence of the powerless city. They eventually arrive at their block to discover zombies everywhere. They’re milling around the street and in front of the library. The closer ones look up at the sound of their engine.

“Holy shit. Ten, eleven… two more over there.” Sarah’s heart sinks. “We’ll never get to unload.”

“Circle around the block. Let’s see if we can get a sense of what we’re dealing with.”

The bus creeps down the street squeezing between a Toyota Camry and a UPS Truck. They hear a crunching noise as they run over a discarded pair of glasses. Two Gingers and a Fred look up from their meandering down the sidewalk. Grimly counting, Chris and Sarah spot several more walking down the alley that runs alongside the parking garage that connects to the library. Eventually Chris nods. He has a plan.

“We just need a distraction.”

“Distraction? It’s going to take us at least an hour to get everything off of the bus. What’s going to buy us that amount of time? We’ll be exposed.”

“Not if we can get into the garage.”

“With a bus??”

“It will be tight, but I think it might be possible.”

Sarah eyes the entrance to the parking garage warily. “Even if we could, what would be the point? We still can’t unload.”

“Trust me. I have a plan. But first we need to divert them away from the entrance. Ideas?”

“Yeah, actually I do. They respond to sound right? They’re curious or hungry?”

Sarah explains her idea to Chris.

Three minutes later, they make their move. A block and a half away, there is a row of cars that look like they were abandoned while waiting for the stoplight. Quietly, Chris hops off of the bus and walks between them looking into the car windows. He realizes how silly it is to be ducking down as if he were James Bond when he remembers the zombies are blind.

He finds what he is looking for when he comes across a late model Ford Mustang parked on a meter next to a White Castle. As quietly as he can, he slowly opens the door and picks the keys up from where they had been abandoned on the floor-mat. Double-checking that the keychain has a remote lock/unlock device, he closes the door and presses the lock button. The Mustang’s tail lights flash, acknowledging that the car is secure. 

While Chris works on his task, Sarah slowly pulls up to the entrance of the parking garage. She’s lined up the bus to get as straight a shot in as possible. She has her doubts about the height of the ceiling, but it looks like she might be able to squeeze in if she is willing to scrape some paint. She is.

The noise created by the bus’s movement has drawn a handful of curious Fred and Gingers who are pawing at the windows. Their hands and faces hit the glass with a series of muffled thuds. Sarah double-checks that the doors are locked and silently prays to a God she does not really believe in, that her crazy plan will work.

After nodding to Sarah from down the street, Chris takes a deep breath and gives the Mustang a swift kick.

The car alarm starts to wail, the hazard lights flash rhythmically and Chris starts to run towards the garage. Much like the engine of the bus, the car alarm seems deafening in the silence of the street. The siren bounces off the buildings and echoes in strange loops as the shriek makes its way through downtown.

The zombies investigating the bus immediately start working their way towards the Mustang, completely ignoring Chris as he races back to the bus and hops on.

He is relieved to be back with her. “Neat trick. How’d you think of that?”

“The Walking Dead. Little did they know they were making educational TV. Should have been on PBS.”

“Are you sure you can do this?”

“We’re about to find out.” Sarah presses on the gas pedal and the bus starts moving towards the entrance to the garage. She was right in thinking they would scrape some paint. In fact they rip the ‘Clearance: 8 Feet 8 Inches’ sign right off the ceiling as she breaks through the wooden traffic gate and makes the first turn into the parking area.

“Yikes. How much taller than eight-feet-eight do you think we are?” Chris says nervously.

“Probably at least a foot. But remember the posted clearance has to account for hanging lights and wires and cameras. We’ll probably redecorate the ceiling a bit, but I think we’ll fit.”

They do. And through an almost miraculous feat of driving, aided by the fact that the garage is almost empty because nobody wanted to park in this neighborhood after dark, Sarah is able to get the bus not only into the garage, but up to the third floor where Chris tells her to stop.

“Wow,” Chris says, stretching his neck. When he hears it cracking and popping, he realizes how much tension he is carrying. He lets a breath out with a hiss. “Nice driving babe. I’m impressed.”

“After driving my dad’s harvesters, I can parallel park a fucking ocean liner.”

“OK. Let’s see if there’s a way to block the entrance so they can’t get in.”

Carefully exiting the bus, Chris picks up his hockey stick and Sarah grabs her bat. They slowly start walking their way down the slanted concrete of the garage floor. They move together almost back to back, constantly on the lookout for movement.

“Why did you want me to get up to the third floor? You’re not thinking of transferring the supplies from the roof are you?”

“Nope. We’d be way too exposed to the weather. Besides, we’d never be able to get the generators through the trap door. But we can’t use our front door anymore with them out there.”

“Obviously. So we’re kinda fucked.”

“Don’t sweat it. I’ve got a better idea. We’re going to-”

“Shh!”

Chris raises his stick and looks around for trouble. “What is it?”

“I hear something. Over there. That car.”

They peer around the corner and see a green station wagon parked up against the far wall. The driver’s side door has been left open and a set of women’s clothing haphazardly litters the cement floor in front of it. A muffled sound escapes from inside the car. They can’t quite see it, but some instinctual voice in the back of their heads tells them there is the tiniest hint of movement in the back seat.