The Living Dead Series (Book 3): Dead Coast (18 page)

We had just dumped the last corpse when we heard Sara screaming. Mom ran back to the driveway but she forgot the shotgun and-”

Moshe lowered his head and spoke in a choked voice, “Before Mom could get to her,
they
got my sister. They pulled her to pieces. She was so small it didn’t take long. I picked up the gun and ran but it was too late. Mom had a really bad bite on her hand. After she shot them she stomped their heads into shards. Then she fell down in the driveway and just screamed.”

His voice was low and fading but he continued, “The next morning, Mom was really sick and throwing up. The wound on her hand turned black and stank even though she kept cleaning it and changing the bandage. She packed everything she could into my pack and made me practice loading and unloading the guns and dry-firing them. Then she made me tie her hands together and lock her in the attic and told me to go find my dad. She made me promise not to stay in the house.”

He finished, “I stayed. I couldn’t tell her I was pretty sure Dad was dead. She was so cold; I gave her all the blankets but she couldn’t stop shivering. I heard her in the attic, moving around a little then everything was quiet. I was sitting at the bottom of the attic stairs and I guess I fell asleep. When I woke up, I heard scratching on the door and then the sounds started. It sounded like she was in so much pain. I almost opened the door before I remembered.”

Everyone was silent. Virginia ached at the look of loss and despair on his face. No child should look like that.

Mei asked gently, “How did you get to the camp?”

“After a few days, I left to try to get downtown just in case my dad was still alive. I mean, I didn’t know for sure that he was- one of
them
. Cam was out on a raid and he found me.”

“Nearly shot the little bloke. I broke into a chemist’s shop and I was in back, loading up on all the meds and supplies I could find, when this one comes in and starts stuffing his pockets full of sweets and vitamin tablets!” Cam said.

Moshe looked abashed. “I hate vegetables and I love candy, so…” He trailed off.

“It makes sense to me,” said Virginia, thinking of what it must have been like trapped in a house with your infected, dead mother. She put an arm around Moshe briefly before standing.

“I’m taking first watch.  Get as much rest as you can. Mei, I’ll wake you around midnight?”

They claimed their spots for the night and settled in after placing their weapons within easy reach. A growing number of dead continued to patrol the area near the doors. They weren’t focused on the building or anything really, as far as anyone could tell but their mere presence was sinister and unsettling.

Nevertheless, most of the party soon found themselves in the peaceful, twilight world between dozing and actual sleep. Virginia perched on the arm of a deep, club chair and pulled her knife from her boot, balancing it on her palm and looking out at the night.

Then the electricity came back on.

G
reat, crystal chandeliers blazed to life, blinding them momentarily and bringing them to their feet, fumbling for their weapons. Alarms blared, agonizing peals of sound echoing all around them. They had no idea how to shut it all off.

Worst of all, the ponderous brass-framed, revolving glass doors began to turn automatically. Each revolution disgorged clumps of stinking, shambling dead into the room.

The alarms excited them. A hugely fat man, shaved head covered in tattoos, pushed a slower ghoul to the ground and waddled forward eagerly. Virginia waited, standing on the arms of the chair until he was close, then jumped on his back and sank her knife into his rotten skull. It was like cracking the shell on a soft-boiled egg. He teetered and fell. She rode him to the floor, banging her knees, and then sprang back up in time to drive the knife up into the soft, rotten flesh under the chin of the dead woman following him.

Cam buried his cleaver between the eyes of a teenaged girl wearing a stained blouse, pleated skirt and knee socks.  She was so decayed the cleaver sliced down through her head, neck and collarbone, only stopping at her sternum. She collapsed to the ground in a black, wet heap of flesh.

They were all so decomposed that it took very little to bring them down. Even so, they kept growing in number as more and more emerged from the endlessly revolving doors. The group had to retreat.

The fire exit door sign glowed red just beyond a cluster of desks and they ran for it only to find it chained and locked. Someone must have tried to barricade themselves in here previously. Virginia cursed mentally that she hadn’t checked it before.

David must have had a similar thought though his cursing wasn’t just mental. “Back out the way we came, ladies and gentlemen. Follow me.”

They fought their way back through the ever increasing throng. They kept the boys in the middle and ran, Cam swinging his cleaver and slicing off reaching, dead hands.

Gaining the staircase they closed the door behind them and made their way back to the hallway through which they had entered. The exit door was still ajar but, blinded by the bright light in the hallway, they couldn’t see anything in the darker parking garage. Virginia located a panel of switches on the wall and pressed and flipped them at random until the lights went out. She felt her way back to the exit door and they stood waiting for their eyes to adjust again to the darkness. Down the hallway they heard a bell chime. It was a familiar tone but it still took a few seconds to identify it.

An elevator. They heard a slight metallic squeak and rumble as the doors opened. Dark shapes staggered out. The smell roiling down the hallway was suffocating.

“They must have been trapped in there for days, poor bastards,” Cam whispered.

“And I let them out. Sorry, everyone, but it’s time to go,” Virginia said quietly, already shepherding the boys toward the door. They made it out and down the stairs before the dead reached the door. They heard a dull thud of bodies falling down the steps behind them and they walked faster.

They entered an eerie landscape. Lights illuminated some streets while others remained dark. Traffic lights blinked a yellow warning. A few stores were lit but most were not.

Cam said, “Okay, mates, we have no idea how long the lights will be on so we’d best make the most of it.”

“This time I say we go up a street then try to find the bike trails. The only thing is, I don’t know how to find south in the dark,” Mei said.

“I can’t see the stars at the moment but let’s get away from the street lights and maybe I can figure it out,” said Cam.

They eventually arrived at the same construction sight they turned back from before but this time they trudged on past the barrels and turned the corner. In the midst of an area littered with concrete barriers and stacks of rebar, they found a construction trailer.  David called for a halt.

“I’m breaking into that trailer. We still need explosives,” he said. His voice was tired but determined.

“David, do you really think they would have left explosives inside a trailer?” Mei was a little skeptical.

“Circumstances being what they are, it’s worth a try.”

Halogen lights attached to utility poles lit the site almost as brightly as daylight. Inside that zone they would be blind to whatever might come along in the dark so only David approached the trailer while the rest of the team kept watch in the shadows. He used Cam’s cleaver and made short work of the flimsy door frame, then disappeared inside. A light came on and they saw him moving around, searching.

Virginia thought she saw movement on the overpass above. She stared hard at the guard rails but decided it was probably the myrtles planted alongside the road when she was startled by a heavy thud. She turned and saw a struggling body impaled on the rebar. Arms and legs waved frantically trying to get up. Another body hit the ground, a few feet away from Brian and dragged itself toward him. Brian stomped the skull only to have another land on top of the one he just killed.

Corpses plummeted all around them; some so rotten they were virtually exploding bags of pus and rot. Those still mobile attacked immediately, dragging their broken, decaying bodies along with claw-like hands. The team was overwhelmed.

Cam shouted, “David!” There was no response.

“David! Get out. Now!”

David appeared at the door of the trailer, his rifle over one shoulder.

“Go! I’ll catch up!” David shouted over the noise of the infected.

As soon as he spoke, the dead turned, closing in on him at the steps leading down from the trailer. Using the butt of his rifle he brained two of them and ran, stumbling and almost falling over a body. Out of the lighted area he was temporarily blind. A hand closed on his leg and another on his arm. A gun cracked somewhere in the darkness and the dead woman holding his arm dropped off. He stomped the dead creature on the ground until he heard bones crack and the hand fell away. He felt a hand on his arm and raised his rifle again, only just recognizing Brian in time.

“This way.”

He let Brian lead him until his eyes adjusted to the night. They regrouped on a sidewalk next to a steep embankment.

“Everything ok? Good. I’m thinking up is the best direction for us. Maybe we can get our bearings if we can see a little more,” Cam said.

The embankment above was sandy and landscaped with little mesquite bushes and painfully prickly barberry plants. The dead followed and they could only hope they were too clumsy or stupid to climb the bank.

Scrambling up the steeply sloping hillside, losing their footing and grasping the thorny shrubs to keep from sliding back down to the creatures now mobbing the sidewalk, they struggled on. Cam took the lead and Virginia brought up the rear, closing her eyes and mouth against the grit kicked loose above her. She began to slide backwards and grabbed a bush, gasping with pain as the thorns pierced her flesh. Pulling herself slowly upward buried the thorns even deeper. Finally she reached the top. A warm hand came over the side and Cam pulled her up the rest of the way. Her hands throbbed.

They were in a parking lot, dimly lit and deserted. Leaning against one of the lamp poles, Virginia extracted thorns from her palms with her teeth while looking out over the valley below.

Lights glittered everywhere like a fairy land. She had forgotten how beautiful a night skyline could be. The enormous bridge looked star-spangled and almost magically bright.

Mei stood beside her, looking down with her newly-acquired NVGs. She made a low sound in her throat and handed them over to Virginia.

Creatures indifferent to the light swarmed the bridge, moving amongst the abandoned traffic. There were more in the water below, thrashing about and then sinking. She turned round slowly, scanning 360 degrees, hoping to recognize something,
anything
that would point them toward the camp.

A deep hum in the distance made them all freeze, looking for the source of the sound. The beating blades of a helicopter grew louder in the night air. The low-flying bird, lights searching the ground, flew over the beach then approached an area in the far distance to their left. It circled once before landing.

“That’s it!” David exclaimed. “I can see it. Let’s try to make it back before the power goes out again.”

~

David woke to the sound of a child’s laughter. It sounded strangely out of place even before he remembered where he was. The air was fresh, early morning fresh and the sun beating against his still-closed eyelids was just light, not yet heat. Light footsteps on the ground faded as the child ran by on her way to who knows where.

Something was wrong with his back. A dull ache radiated out from a spot near the base of his spine and he groaned and rolled over. The pain ceased. He opened his eyes now and sitting up he picked up the rock he had apparently lain on all night and flung it over the fence.

Very late last night they arrived at the compound gates, unhurt, but having failed to secure the explosives. They were admitted but had to pass by the dogs and then spend the night on the ground in quarantine, outside now as the former quarantine space had been destroyed in the last barrage of mortar fire from the ship.

Brian and Moshe were asleep on the ground a couple of yards away. Cam, Mei, and Virginia were nowhere in sight. It was still so early that a light mist hovered a couple of feet above the ground, giving a dream-like appearance to the entire camp.

He stood and folded up the blanket the guard had given him last night and went to look for something to eat.

Cam and Mei were assembling the communal breakfast table, talking in low voices. David helped them wrestle the heavy planks onto the saw horses. Wonderful smells were coming from what he assumed was the kitchen. He sniffed and thought he detected pancakes possibly accompanied by maple syrup. He looked at Mei who shrugged and grinned.

“The electricity is still on. We’re getting a real breakfast today.”

The line for breakfast formed early and it was a while before everyone was served but David never got a chance to enjoy the “real” breakfast. He was summoned for an early morning meeting with Colonel Hamilton. Ian was there, along with the two officers who arrived last night by helicopter. They exchanged information gleaned from various sources about the confirmed fall of the government and the threat from hostiles outside the nation. For the most part, the rest of the world was too busy dealing with their own disasters to bother with plans of conquest. Eventually they got around to discussing their own situations.

“The landscape has changed. We think we’re dealing with just the one ship now and this makes it easier to handle,” Colonel Hamilton said.

David asked, “Has anyone been able to monitor their communications?”

“Again, it’s more what we’re
not
hearing. We have known for several days that one of the ships carries infected crew, now we’ve had no communication between
any
of the ships for at least two days. We can’t tell yet which one has fallen but we are reasonably sure that at least one more has,” said Ian.

Colonel Hamilton ran a hand through a buzz cut of gray hair. “As you know we’ve made every effort to secure some way to destroy the ship but we have been unsuccessful. Of course, now that we’ve reestablished communications with Midwest we expect you have far greater resources than we have been able to secure. We have tried but we’ve been unable to contact any of the Pacific Fleet. If just one ship could come in we could conceivably be gone before the expected hostiles get here and live to fight another day. We’re trying to survive but we’re close to the stone-age in resources now.”

The older officer barked a short, incredulous laugh, “You think
we
have resources? We came here to see what you could send
our
way. We haven’t heard from any of our fleet for days.”

“Could they be running silent?”

“Some are but I don’t think that’s what happened to all of them. Immediately after the first quake we flew victims directly to our carriers that in turn sent them to other ships or land hospitals. We lost contact with all of them less than 48 hours later. If we have anything left it would be subs or battle ships and they are under direct orders not to dock.”

He paused then continued, “Midwest Command is under siege, gentlemen. We have over 200 people left in our camp since the typhoid fever outbreak. We have limited food, almost no medicine, and no way to evacuate more than a few. All we can do is hope to survive until the dead are no longer a threat. Flying over we spotted roving bands of dead, faster than any we’ve seen before, spreading out from the southwest and some appeared to be heading our way. This chopper ride was our last. We are out of fuel.

Eastern Command has been quiet for several days and we have no idea what is going on there. All of our carriers were called home several days ago but as I said before we have no contact with them. They could stay out a long time if they wanted to wait and see if the infection burned out.

I pray that there are other pockets of survivors here and worldwide but we may never know. We’re a balkanized country now. We won’t recover from this in our lifetime, if at all.”