The Mortis Desolation (Book 1): Mortis (7 page)

T
he sun’s
warm morning rays filtered through the blinds of the general manager’s office of the car lot, waking me from me sleep. I sat up in the chair I slept in that was sitting in front of the office door, and reached for my assault rifle, making sure it was still there.

I looked around and saw that everybody else was already awake and packing, save for the injured. Julia lay on the couch, still asleep. Her color was beginning to return, and Rachel said it probably wouldn’t get infected. Thankfully the bullet had a clean entry and exit wound, so there was no bullet inside of her. The wound on my leg was a clear example of that.

I pulled up my pants’ leg and inspected the gauze and bandage that wrapped around my calf. A mixture of browns and reds had soaked through the bandage and dried. I would need a clean wrapping before we left, as long as there was enough left over once Julia’s bandages were taken care of. I rolled my pants’ leg back down and stood up.

Peter was the first person I made eye contact with. He smiled at me, his face glazed over. “Morning,” he mumbled.

I chuckled. “Morning, Peter.”

Peter chuckled to himself, and then returned to his own little world.

Rachel walked up beside me and laughed. “He’s so out of it.”

I nodded my head. “You give him some of the painkillers?”

“Yeah, I figured it might be a bumpy ride, so without the meds he’d be in a lot of pain.”

I looked at the splint that Rachel made for his arm. She broke some office chairs and then taped them around his arm so he’d keep it straight. Then, using one of the extra T-shirts Daniel brought, she’d made a sling for him to put his arm in. I was impressed with Rachel’s ingenuity.

“Is everybody almost ready?” I asked.

Daniel put his backpack on and nodded his head, while John was putting the last of his things away.

“My Range Rover is out back,” Mila said as she put her bag over her shoulder. “We should be able to fit everybody in there.”

I quickly grabbed my bags and made sure my assault rifle was loaded and ready, just in case we ran into any problems. “Okay,” I said once I was ready.

“Let’s go,” Mila said before I could get the chance to. She walked past me, moved my chair out of the way, opened the door, and disappeared out the hallway.

I rolled my eyes. “Let’s go,” I said, somewhat defeated.

T
he car bumped
up and down as we drove over some of the many potholes that littered the highway on the way toward Brinn.

“The roads are better the closer we get to Brinn. We do our best to keep those maintained, we just don’t have supplies to take care of all these roads,” Mila said.

I sat in the front seat, gripping the handle that sat above the window. My seatbelt stretched tight across me, keeping me from bumping up and down. I said nothing in response to Mila, I just kept my gaze straight ahead, trying to ignore the painful headache that racked my brain. Each bump sent another jolt of pain shooting through my head like an arrow.

We drove by a pack of zombies that congregated around the corpse of a dead deer, tearing its flesh apart. Some of them turned to look at us as we went by, but turned back to their meal.

“You get many zombies around here?” I asked.

“There’s been an uptick recently, but not usually, no. It’s nothing we can’t handle,” Mila responded, her face staying as stone cold as her voice.

“What do you do to keep them away? Shoot them?” John asked.

I winced.
Bad question, John,
I thought to myself.

“Well,” she began, venom injecting into her voice. “We
would
if we had enough ammunition. However, since our neighbors are hoarders, we have to get creative. Besides, we have two fences surrounding us.”

I rolled my eyes and turned my head to look out the window. I ignored her passive-aggressive jabs, as they were pointless. If Brinn had the most weapons and ammunitions, they’d want to keep it to themselves too. She couldn’t blame us. Besides, Jefferson Memorial was much closer to Dallas then Brinn, which meant more zombies. Of course, I didn’t argue with her, though. It would’ve been pointless, as I wouldn’t be able to change her mind, and thanks to my headache I didn’t feel like talking, much less arguing.

We continued driving, and the roads did get smoother like Mila said they would. I noticed more and more zombies wandering around the sides of the road, walking in the direction we were driving.

“Looks like they’re headed the same place we are,” Daniel said.

Mila took her eyes off the road, and looked at the zombies that we passed. She returned her attention to in front of her. She tightened her grip on the wheel. “It’s fine,” she said. Her eyes darted around the road. “It’s nothing we can’t handle.”

There were about twenty behind us who began to follow our car. I could see a couple every few hundred feet until I couldn’t see past the curve of the road.

“It looks as if their numbers are getting thicker,” Daniel said as he leaned into the front seat and pointed.

Mila said nothing. She pulled up the center console of the Range Rover and retrieved a large black walkie-talkie. “We should be in range by now,” she said as she took her hands off the wheel for a split second to turn it on. “Come in, Brinn Base, come in. This is M-Squared, copy, over.”

Static.

“Come in, Brinn Base, this is M-Squared, over,” she said again.

More static.

“Brinn Base, come in, over.” Fear crept into her voice.

“Are you sure we’re in range?” I asked, praying she’d say yes.

She nodded. “I’m sure, but Sean might not have his walkie on. He’s a bit all over the place,” she said with a nervous chuckle.

“Typical Sean,” John said with a sarcastic tone and an exaggerated eye roll. I appreciated his attempt at lightening the mood, but it didn’t do much.

We continued our drive in silence, everyone’s eyes peeled to the road, watching as the zombies numbers grew.

Mila turned on the radio again, and pushed the button to talk. “Brinn Base, this is M-Squared, please come in, over.”

Static.

And then it stopped. Someone on the other side pressed the button.

“He-hello?” the voice of a young boy said in a whisper so full of fear, it made me go cold.

Mila pressed the button. “Hello?!” she shouted. “Hello? Who is this? What’s going on?”

“Is this Mila?” the voice asked in a whisper.

“Paulo? Paulo, is that you?” Mila’s voice shook. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the steering wheel tighter. She had just as bad of a feeling about this as I did.

“Mila,” Paulo said as quiet as he could be. He began to cry, but tried doing so without being heard. “I think they heard you.”

Static.

“Paulo?” Mila shouted. “PAULO!” She screamed as loud as she could.

Julia screamed from the backseat, Mila’s shouting having woken her. I turned in my seat to look at her. She had been sitting in the middle of the middle row.

“Guys?” she said, her voice groggy from having been so suddenly woken from her painkiller slumber. She raised her right hand and pointed out the windshield. “That’s a shit-ton of zombies.”

The car slammed to a halt, the tires screeching. I turned around quickly to see what was going on. About a mile away, I could see Brinn and its bunched-up buildings that once were the town-square of the small town of Horst.

And about a hundred zombies spread out that had brought down the first layer of their chain-link fence, and were working on the second.

“
T
here’s
a back entrance through an old newspaper building we can go through, but we’re going to have to be quiet,” Mila said.

“No shit,” I mumbled under my breath. She shot me a look, but I ignored it.

We sat in the vehicle, a little ways off the road, away from the zombies. The ones meandering down the road were too focused on the congregation building around Brinn to worry about a Range Rover sitting in an old church parking lot, watching the commotion.

“What about us?” Peter mumbled, but he sounded a little more sober than earlier. The mass of zombies caused him to come to his senses little by little, the pain meds wearing off.

I turned and look at Rachel. “You alright with staying here with Pete and Julia?”

“Leave me a gun and the keys in the ignition, and I will be,” she said.

“Of course,” I told her.

Mila inspected her pistol, making sure it was loaded. “Alright, we’ll get out and walk to the back. We just have to go up two blocks, then down three. There’s an old newspaper building that’s sealed up, but once we get in we’ll just have to walk out the front door and we’ll be inside Brinn.”

I nodded my head in recognition. I inspect my assault rifle, making sure its silencer was on tight. I turned to Daniel and John. “You two ready?”

Daniel nodded his head, and ran his fingers through his blond hair. “Ready.”

“Let’s do this,” John said.

I turned to Mila. “Lead the way, Captain.”

Mila ignored my comment and got out of the car. I did the same, being sure to shut the door as quietly as I could.

John got out and stood next to me. Rachel climbed into the driver’s seat, and Daniel leaned up to give her a kiss before he got out and joined us.

A pang of jealousy rushed through me, but I forced myself to ignore them.
Now’s not the time,
I told myself. But still, my mind couldn’t help but wander to Ashley.

We walked up the street, the warm summer wind kicking up leaves as it blew against our faces. The street was empty of cars, and the buildings lining it that were once quaint Mom and Pop stores or laundromats or other things such as that, were now boarded-up structures, nothing more than four walls and a roof.

We stayed close to the building, and walked in a bunched-up group. I could hear the zombies moaning and the fence rattling in the distance, but there were none in sight. I could definitely smell them, though. The stench of hot, rotting flesh filled my nostrils. It was a smell that I was very familiar with, but never could quite get used to it. The worst part about it probably wasn’t the smell itself, but just knowing where it was coming from. The fact that creatures that were once everyday human beings were now the source of such an awful stench made me feel nauseous more than anything.

When we reached the end of one of the blocks, Mila turned left down an alleyway almost wide enough to be its own street. We continued sneaking; I tightened the grip on my gun as the zombie moans seemed to get louder.

We passed by gap in the two buildings that had a long alleyway that led to the part of the town that was re-purposed as Brinn. I looked through the double chain-link fence that sat bolted to the buildings on either side in the middle of the alleyway, and to the fence on the far side, where the zombies stood. A few of them pushed on it, determined to get in. Most of them wandered around the alley between the two fences, however, searching for any sign of a human to devour.

After a bit more walking, Mila stopped at a tall trash dumpster that sat in front of a three-story brown brick building that I assumed was the old newspaper headquarters. The cement between the bricks were cracked, and the windows spread throughout the outside were all boarded up.

“Help me push this,” Mila said barely above a whisper.

John, Daniel, and myself all got next to Mila and together we pushed the dumpster with ease. It made a large scraping noise as we pushed it across the concrete. I winced at how heavy? it was. I looked over my shoulder, making sure nothing heard it, but the alleyway was empty, save for us and the twisting leaves.

Once the dumpster was out of the way, I could see that it had been concealing a green wooden door. Mila reached into her pocket and pulled out a set of keys with slight shaking hands. After missing the keyhole a couple of times, she finally got the key in there, turned it, and twisted the knob, pushing the squeaking door open.

We entered the building. I closed the door behind me when I came in, as I was last. The room was small and dark, and Mila was already exiting it through a door to her left. She turned to the right, down the hallway, and we all followed. We walked down a short hallway, and into a large open room that I figured once housed many desks behind which reporters would write their stories.

Now, however, the room was empty. The sunlight that filtered through the large windows in the front reflected off the thick, black pools of liquid that covered most of the cement floor.

“What is that?” I asked Mila, hoping this was some sort of trap that her people had set up.

She didn’t respond. Her mouth hung open, a reply dangling from her tongue, but she couldn’t speak. I took that as a
I have no idea.

She took a step forward, but jumped back when her foot stepped on something. I looked to see what it was, and saw that it was a broken walkie-talkie, identical to the one she’d used earlier.

She bent down to pick it up, the strange black substance sticking to the device.

“Be careful,” I told her. If she didn’t know what the black stuff was, it was probably best to not be handling it without any protection.

She inspected the walkie-talkie. “Danny,” she said.

“Who?”

“Danny.” She walked over to me and showed me the name
Danny
engraved into the side of the walkie-talkie. “This is his.”

“Okay,” I began. “So where is he then?”

“Yeah, where is everybody? Are they hiding in some other buildings?”

Mila looked around for a sign of anybody. “I-I don’t know. They should all be in here. If there’s ever a lot of zombies, we’re supposed to hide in here out of sight, and they’ll usually leave after a while. That away if something were to happen, they can escape out the back door if we get overwhelmed.”

“So maybe that’s what happened,” Daniel said. “Maybe they’ll all got out.”

“Maybe,” Mila said. Her eyes looked upon the floor. “But the dumpster was blocking the door, and the window next to it was still boarded. Someone would’ve had to climb out and unblock the door if everybody were to escape.”

“So what are you trying to say?” I asked.

“That we need to find someone and figure out what’s going on. I have a bad feeling about all of this.” Mila put Danny’s walkie-talkie in her pants, next to her own. “Come on, let’s go search some of the other buildings before the zombies get in.” She began to walk across the floor, stepping into the black, sticky substance that coated it.

I cautiously took a step forward. The black stuff felt sticky beneath my boots, but didn’t melt through them or anything, so it seemed to be harmless. I took another step, and then another, until finally, I was on the other side.

I turned and saw Daniel and John crossing it with ease, although they had the same worried look on their faces that I imagined I had on my own.

I turned to face Mila, who pushed opened the front door to the building. The sounds of moaning zombies and rattling fences filled my ears, and the stench of death bombarded my nose.

“Try not to draw any attention to yourself,” Mila said. “Don’t want to agitate the zombies.”

“Yeah, I know. This isn’t my first rodeo,” I said, taking slight offense.

Mila rolled her eyes and exited the building. I followed close behind and stepped onto the streets of Brinn.