The Dead Hunger Series: Books 1 through 5 (5 page)

While I can’t say it was steady, my
gun was pointed directly at them, and I stared.  I didn’t fire.  It was a morbid fascination.   In the back of my mind, I thought:
How sweet.  They’re sharing
.

I’m not entirely sure why,
because there were other bodies around, and each could have had their own.  So why this one?  What was especially attractive about this flesh?  It appeared to have been a white man, but there wasn’t enough of him left to determine age.  His clothes looked blue collar, and there’s a certain diet associated with middle vs. upper class, possibly more meat and fried foods as you made your way down the food chain – which was a strange choice of words, I admit – from elitist wealthy to dirt-poor.    Could it be his diet just gave him a more irresistible fragrance?

All of this took place in a split-second in my head.  
I made a mental note of this sharing behavior.  Something I might mention to the CDC personnel when we got up there, if anyone was there to meet us who might want the information.

My eyes
sharply focused on the three diners, I stepped slowly backward until I was out of the aisle, then cut over by three rows, reaching the body of the man attached to the foot I’d seen from outside the store.  In his open palm, partially on the floor, lay a gun.  It was a 9mm Glock.  I reached down and picked it up, and from my new angle, I discovered how he had died. 

With the Glock.  He had taken his own life at the sight of the creatures eating his customers.
An efficient single bullet to the temple.  His name, according to his nametag, was Tony.

Thanks for the gun, Tony. 

I looked behind and in front of me, then in both directions over the top of the aisles.  No immediate danger.  I leaned the rifle against one of the aisle-long merchandise racks and popped the clip.  It was a 17-round clip and it was missing three.  One in the chamber, so he’d fired only twice.  So fifteen rounds at ready.  I shoved the pistol into the front waistband of my pants and fed the Uzi’s strap back over my shoulder, holding it in firing position as I made my way down the aisle again.  The pharmacy wasn’t necessarily what I needed.  Just half a Benadryl allergy pill would put Trina out long enough for us to get her away from the scary stuff, and
that
included our scary conversations about the scary stuff.  Jamie had mentioned to me some months earlier that she’d used this amount for Trina’s allergies in the past, and she tolerated it well, though it did pretty much send her to la-la land. 

As I scanned the ceiling-hung signs to find
the location of allergy medications, I heard it and froze.

Shuffling sounds came
seemingly from all directions, and all at once.  I looked behind me at Tony’s body, sprawled on the floor at the entrance to my aisle, and realized there was no time to get back there.  I knelt down and aimed the weapon.

And
then they appeared.  At the opposite end of the aisle.  Five of them.  Two females and three males.  Meat and gore stained the front of their clothes, and I recognized a couple of them as the ones who had been dining in the far aisle.  Onward to fresh meat, and I suppose that was me.

As though confirming this,
they stared at me.  Gnashing.  Just like Jamie.  And her neighbor.  It was as if their lips would no longer cover their teeth, maybe like the skin had been purged of all moisture, and the now parched lips just dried out and pulled back.  No matter, the teeth just showed, and it added to the visual horror of the presentation.  And to make matters worse, their black, dead tongues flitted in and out intermittently as the gnashing went on.  This group was moving steadily toward me, and not as slowly as I would have liked.  A fast shuffle.  Textbook zombie lore, but just a bit faster.  The difference between watching INDY racing on television and in real life.  You just can’t get a feel for how fast the fuckers really go.

I turned to
make a break toward the front of the store, but stopped short.  Two more stood by that end of the aisle, and they, too, stared at me.  Were they operating like a wolf pack?  Working together to trap me?  They may not give me much credit, but had I been faced with this crap without a gun, I’d have leapt over the top of the merchandise rack and into the next aisle on adrenaline alone, and would’ve still had enough energy left over to run the Walgreens floor polisher for an hour or two. 

The two new zombies
didn’t seem to care about Tony’s body.  They ignored it and started moving up the aisle toward me.  Having had only one encounter with these things before, and believing in my mind that Jamie
did
hear me, no matter about her lack of response, I tried an appeal.

I held the gun up, my finger on the trigger, and I talked loud. 
“Look.  I want out of here, and I don’t need to fuck anyone up in the process,” I looked for signs of understanding, acknowledgement.  It didn’t appear that was going to be the case.  As I stood dead center, the seven infected shuffled toward me, their pace neither slower nor faster, and not one of them attempting any negotiations with me. 

“Stop the fuck right there!” I screamed at the two coming up on my rear, but they kept sliding toward me, gnashing, flitting, and looking very hungry.

I sprayed the Uzi’s 600 round-per-minute blast at them for a split second, aiming low.  The rounds tore through their midsections, and nearly cut them in half.  They flew backward and dropped to the floor.

Two down,
I thought.

And
as I watched in amazement, these zombie things began crawling with their arms and hands, dragging their destroyed bodies toward me, resuming their even slower, but no less determined progress up the aisle in my direction.

I looked back at the five, who were now within fourteen feet of me.  I didn’t know how much ammo was in Gem’s
gun, and I didn’t have time to check now, but I now figured that head shots were my best option.  To test my theory, I pulled out the Glock, turned toward the two crawlers, took four steps toward them so I wouldn’t miss, and put a bullet in each of their skulls.  A reddish-black fluid leaked out, and they lay motionless, gnashless.

Then I turned, slung the rifle around
to rest against my back, and with my shopping bags dangling from my belt and the Glock in my hand, I walked determinedly toward the five zombies walking toward me, and I stopped six feet in front of them.

“Last fuckin’ chance,” I said.

Two more shuffles and I’d had it.  Five taps, five bullets in five brains.  I had a pile of five zombies in front of me.

I could have stood there for a long time, looking
at that pile of dead bodies.  But the longer I stood there looking at them, the more they just looked like people.  Like I’d just murdered five human beings right there in the Walgreens.

B
ut they weren’t that, were they?  Not by the time I got to them – or when they almost got to me.  They weren’t
people
anymore at all.

They were cr
eatures.  Damned TV zombies, only real.  I wanted to know stuff, like did they have heartbeats, audible skills, any vocal skills.  I’d heard Jamie moaning, but these had been quiet or unintelligible. 

Jamie.  Jamie the zombie. 

My mind suddenly snapped to the present and I realized if there were seven in here, there could be more.  I ran down each aisle, the Glock ready.  Eight rounds left, plus what remained in the machine gun.  I found nobody else, but I did find the Benadryl.  I put three bottles in my bag, then ran to the food aisle and put several cans of pop-top canned chili, some canned tamales, two six-packs of water, and two boxes of Cheerios under my arm.

Heart healthy.
  To balance out the chili and tamales.

I ran from the store to the truck, all my goodies bouncing
on my belt.  Gem had flung the door open and slid to the passenger side again before I got there.  Focusing on the open door, I tripped on something and nearly fell into the cab.  Two bodies lay outside the passenger door, stacked almost on top of one another.

“What the fuck, Gem!” I said, slamming the door.

Her face was calm.  “They came up on the driver’s side, and Trina saw them.  I pushed her back down, got out the other door, walked around to your side and put two bullets in their heads.”

I stared at her.

“Flex, they were fucking with Trina.  With this baby girl who’s had her share of being fucked with.  I did what I had to do.”

“No apology expected or deserved, baby.  Thank you.”

“We fired at exactly the same time,” she said.  “I heard your gun discharge at the same time I shot these two.  You’re lucky I could restrain myself from going inside, but I have a good sixth sense, and I knew you were okay.”

“So I guess we’re through keeping the scary talk in hushed tones?  Trini?  You okay, baby?”

Gem shook her head.  “She fainted, Flex.  The poor thing fainted when she saw those lipless fucks outside the door.”

I tossed all the stuff into the back
seat.  “We’ll talk about what happened inside later.  I think we’d better start taking some notes.   For now, I think you should wake her up and make her take half of one of these.”  I pulled the Benadryl out of the bag and gave the bottle to her.   Gem lifted Trina from the floor and bounced her in her lap gently.  Trina moaned. 

“Are there any m
ore of those things in there?” Gem asked.

“
None . . .
moving
anymore.  But I can tell you, there were more of them in there than us.  And all the ones like us were – ”

I looked at Trina, who
was stirring awake from Gem’s bouncing.  I just ran my finger across my neck in a slashing motion.

“I get it,” she said.

I nodded.  “Oh, and I got us a new gun.”  I spun the tires and headed north.  “It works pretty good.”

Gem put ‘Police Stations’ in the Points of Interest in the GPS and we pulled out.

“Want some chili?” I asked.

She hit the “GO” button, and the GPS routed it.

“It says we’ll be there in ten minutes,” she said.  “I’m pretty sure I
can eat a can of chili in ten minutes.”

CHAPTER FOUR

We turned the headlights off as we rolled into the area where the police station was located.  It was a somewhat residential street, East 7
th
Avenue.  The police station was on the corner of that road and Officer Ponce Avenue, and a sign indicating PARKING featured an arrow pointing down the latter. 

It was now almost 2:30 in the morning, and neither of us was familiar with
Tallahassee.  We had put the radio on and heard static on too many stations.  There was a news radio station out of Orlando that was still broadcasting, and they had a pretty strong signal, because it was still coming in. 

They were calling it a virus, and they said it
started as a migraine-like head pain, then attacked the temporal lobe of the brain first, and quickly.  This was, they reported, the portion of the brain that held memory.  Destroying that first made the victims forget who they or their loved ones were. 

This worried me, because it was the logical first step in making anyone fair game.  No sensitivities or emotions, no soft spot for anyone.  Husband.  Wife.  Child.  All just food.  As for what exactly made them hunger for flesh, it wasn’t really being talked about – not openly.  It was inferred
but not specifically mentioned, because it was essentially cannibalism, and people frowned on that shit even if you were in a plane crash in the mountains in the snow and had to eat your pilot.

The next thing destroyed by the virus was the hypothalamus
portion of the brain, where hunger and thirst were controlled.  Only it did not destroy it, per se, rather it ramped it up to the extreme.  This portion of the brain, according to the reporter, who seemed to have learned a ton of brain info in the last several hours, also controlled the heart, lungs, and other involuntary actions we humans so easily perform.

But it stopped these.  Again, not so much
spoken, but implied by the talking heads.  So the virus killed off your memory, shut down your involuntary bodily functions, and made you ravenous.

Sorry, but
sound the buzzer please.  BZZZZZZZZT!  Symptom number two should kill you dead, and nobody seemed to have an answer for why the fuck you could continue to walk around without breathing and with no heartbeat.  And I swear, from my confrontation with them in the store, I saw their nostrils flaring as they held their eyes on me, so they could smell.  They
can
smell.

And did this
disease affect the actual dead?  And if the answer was yes, did they reanimate?  What happened if you just died naturally?  Did this act like a safety net?

N
ot so fast, partner.  Heaven can wait, ‘cause I gotcha.  Now get out there and eat, because you’re starving!

If it did affect the dead, did
it only do this prior to embalming?  There were too many questions running around in my head, and to be honest, the fucking radio was freaking me out a bit.  I had enough just looking at some of these victims on the side of the road.  Gem had a death grip on the butt of that 9mm, and I had the .38 between my legs.

Lights still out, I turned left on
Officer Ponce Way, and the parking lot entrance was about 100 yards down on the left.  I stopped at the pivoting barrier and realized in seconds that the power was out, and pulling the parking card was not going to get me anywhere.  I gunned the engine and slammed through the flimsy pressboard arm with the stop sign painted on it, and flew into the parking lot, the trailer bouncing over the speed bump behind me.  I cringed, remembering Jamie on that trailer.

No cars moved
in the lot and nobody crept around that we could see.  The parking lot served three buildings, and snaked between them.

“We’ll need more ammo for the Uzi,” said Gem.  “Maybe at the station.”

“If we can get in,” I said.  “The three of us are okay, so maybe some of them are, too.”

Gem nodded agreement.  “But it doesn’t mean they won’t help us, either.  If things are as bad as we believe, they may welcome the assist
ance of any . . . well, normals out there. They must realize there’s nothing to do but kill –”

Gem stopped talking suddenly, and looked ashamed.  I touched her hand.  “Look.  I said when we left Jamie’s, I had hope.  I still hold onto some of it.  Hell, I’ve got this fantasy that I unwrap her from that pool cover shit, and she’s back to normal, like I made her some sort of cocoon or something, but I know in my heart . . . well, I don’t even want to vocalize it.”

“I don’t blame you for not wanting to give up yet, Flex.  I love her, too.”

“Okay.   I know you
do, Gem.  Now, the game plan.  This is it.”

The building on the left was large and concrete.  There were several police cars parked in front
.  No activity.  No fewer than eight dead bodies lay on the stone steps leading inside.  All had massive head wounds but three of them.   Those three had no heads at all.

Gem pointed.  “There’s an alley.  Turn
in there.”

I did, an
d it was even darker here.  But it did curve around and run behind the main building.  There were three open spaces in a row, and I pulled the Suburban and trailer combo into them and threw it into park. 

Gem had installed batteries in the flashes and the walkies while I drove.  Twice along the way I’d had to run the truck/trailer combo off the road to get around stopped vehicles, and the flashlights came in very handy to see just where an open path was.

I clipped a radio on my belt.  We’d already chosen channel 19 and tested them.  Range was advertised to be over twenty miles, but I doubted it.  Besides that, I didn’t plan on ever being that far away from Gem again.

“Let me go,” Gem said.

“I don’t think so.”  I reached for her arm as she leaned Trina against me and opened the door.  She wasn’t smiling.

“You can’t stop me
, babe.  You’ve got Trina to consider and I made it all the way from Miami to Gainesville on my own.  That’s quite a story, and when we finally do stop and sit and have a nice cup of coffee, I’ll share with you some of the shit I saw and dealt with on my way to find your ass, including where this innocent little girl of yours got this kickass gun.”

She got out and held the door, the rifle slung over her shoulder and the Glock in her other hand.
  “So pardon my rant, but if you think you’ve got some advantage on me mentally, I’ll remind you that you don’t.  As for physically, you are nicely built, but pound for pound, I am quite powerful myself.”

She
shut the door and before she could walk away I waved at her to open it again.  She did.

“What?”

“You’ll need this.”  I unclipped the walkie from my belt and handed it to her.  Then I unclipped the other one off the visor.  “Won’t do you too much good if I’m talkin’ to myself, will it?”

“Smartass,” she said, slamming the door and throwing
me a sarcastic salute as she headed into the station building.

I
watched her walk away.  I was worried, but I smiled.  Damn, I loved that woman.  It was good to have her back.

*****

She was gone five minutes before I spoke to her.  “Update, babe.  You in?”

Gem came right on.  The signal was perfect, and she was crystal clear.  “Not yet.  I’ve been keeping against the walls, and the back entrances are all secured.  I’m going around to the front.”

I shook my head.  With each step she was farther away, and the more nervous I got.  I couldn’t lose her again.  “If you get in, then find your way to the back and unlock those doors.  If you get in trouble, I have to get in fast.”

“
When
I get in, babe, I’ll do that.  Want me to stay on, give you live updates?”

“As long as you don’t alert anyone of your presence, sure.  Keep an eye.”

There was silence for the next ten minutes.  I sunk down low in the seat.  The Benadryl had done its job, and Trina was out like a light.  As I scanned the street, I absently stroked her blonde hair, and found myself saying a silent prayer for her future.  I included myself and Gem – and threw in the rest of humanity just for good measure.

The radio crackled to life.   “Babe, I’m in.  Remember all the dead people on the front steps?”

“It hasn’t slipped my mind, Gem.”

“They
probably fled from here.  It looks like a slaughterhouse.  Cops dead everywhere, guns in hand.  Looks like they got knocked out or something, then they were attacked.  Weird.  Almost like they were gassed, then eaten.”

“
Really?  I’d expect cops to shoot center mass like they’re trained, but none of this would’ve happened that fast.  They should have had time to fire again and try a head shot I’d think.”

“I don’t know, Flex,” Gem said.  “Looks like they  just passed out and then got eaten.”

“Jesus,” I said.  “Gem, hurry and get out of there.”

It was quiet for too long.  “Gem,” I said.  “You there?”

“Yeah, Flex.  I am.  I hear some noises coming from the back of the building.  Closer to you.”

“I want you to get this back door unlocked.  Do you think you can find these doors and avoid whoever’s making the noise?”

“I sounds like someone yelling for help,” she said.  “I should help them, Flex.”

“I agree, baby.  But get that door open first.  And when you do
, use your flashlight to signal to me it’s unlocked.  You might need to prop it so it doesn’t auto-lock.”

Gem knew her shit, so there was no reason for me to worry.  I expect
ed within ten minutes I’d see the signal flashes, but I kept asking myself how many rounds I’d fired from the Uzi inside the Walgreens.

At 10 rounds per second, you could empty the entire 32 round magazine in 3.2 seconds.  Had I cut down the two zombies at the drugstore in the .2 seconds?  A full half second?  Time flies when you’re firing a sub machine gun.  I had no idea.  I hoped she checked the clip and I hoped it was full when I first saw the gun.  She had the Glock, but I knew she only had limited rounds left in it.  Then it struck me.  She was in a fucking police station.  There would be guns on every downed officer.  I
let out a sigh of relief.  There it was again.  Blessed relief.

I rolled my window down an inch so I could hear noise from outside.  The a
rea, as far as the eye could see, was eerily quiet and motionless.  I was glad.  I heard a sudden click.

I looked left at the building, and two quick flashes of light shone from the
doors.  More relief.  I clicked on.  “Beautiful, baby.  Thanks.  Did you find out who was yelling?”

“It’s right around the corner.  I’ve
got the walkie turned way down.  Trina still down?”

“Like a has-bee
n fighter in his comeback bout.  Did you grab any more guns?”

Despite her being quiet, I heard a low laugh over the radio.  “Do I look like an octopus?  I got a couple Berettas.  It looks clear from here – think you can carry Trina over here real quick and take this stuff from me?”

I looked around. “Sure.  Hold on.  I reached an arm beneath the sleeping girl and pulled her onto my chest, her head tucking in beside mine.  I pulled the .38 off the dash and hooked my finger around the handle and opened the door of the Suburban.  Closing the door only lightly, I ran toward the building, Trina bouncing in my arms. 

“Probably not the smartest thing we’ve done,” I said.  Give ‘em here.”

She pulled my pants away from my waist and tucked one, then the second gun inside my waistband.  “You’re a regular man of steel,” she said.  “Okay.   You’re loaded for bear.  Get back to the truck.”

I looked at her.  “Sure you don’t want to trade?  You’ve done good, babe.  Let me go finish up?”

“I’ve already got the layout, Flex.  I’ll just –”

“Help!  Help me, somebody help me!
  Can you hear me?”  The voice echoed through the police building.

“Jesus, Flex!  Get back to the truck!”

“Bullshit,” I said, pushing her inside and pulling the door shut behind me.

“Trina is with you, Flex. 
Trina
!”

“Yes, and you’re with me, too.  And you’re protective of this little girl,
and you know as well as I do that she’ll never be safer than when she’s near you and you’re armed.  So
move
.”

Gem glared at me again, and headed down the brick-lined hallway, painted in a glossy white.  At the end of the hallway there was a door to the left.  She unhooked a key ring from her belt and unlocked it.

“Is that a police belt?”

“A sergeant was wearing it, and he had the key.  Skeleton key.  Opens every door in the place.”

“Damn, you’re good,” I said.  And I meant it.