Time Clock Hero (17 page)

“We have it on good authority that they aren’t,” Alaia said.

More gunfire sounded, and the shouts of men rose above the din.  The door to the hall, the only other way out of the room, began to bend.  The Psyke-crazies now controlled the funeral home; and the Black Ops guys, though they probably had their hands full, controlled the outside.

“Into the caskets,” Phoenix said.  He saw Darkeem with a look of sheer terror glistening in his dark eyes, and we watched him raise the lid of a coffin.  “Get in, Darkeem!  You guys do the same – I’ll hold off whatever comes through the doors.”

Darkeem had chosen a coffin at the far end of the room, a coffin away from the aisle of travel between the two doors, and Phoenix told the others to follow suit.  Alaia took the casket next to Darkeem.  Phoenix helped her in.  He tossed her pack into the box at her feet and closed her inside.  Beth and her friend came next, and he quickly helped them into their coffins, carefully lowering the lids.  He hurried back towards the door leading to the hall and checked that his gun was ready. 

With everyone hidden away, all of them out of sight, maybe the infected would come for him and leave the others alone. He’d do a little dance, shout, maneuver enough in order to make a hole through the mob, and he’d lead them back through the funeral home towards the chapel.  In the event they didn’t take the bait, and if he couldn’t exit the room, he’d yell, and it would be every person for himself.

Phoenix startled when the exit door, the one to the outside, finally broke open, and he jumped nervously, raising his weapon in that direction.  No Black Ops.  Instead, four or five Psyke Crazies, all of them trying to squeeze through the opening, created a nice pile up at the entrance.  It bought him a few seconds. 

Phoenix, his eyes watching, his ears tuned in, listened to the sound of automatic gunfire, sporadic and distant; and he guessed that the Black Ops team had been pushed back for the moment.  He looked back towards the door leading into the hall and heard the infected standing just on the other side.  Time to let them in.  He grabbed the door handle and pulled, and two Psyke Crazies spilled forward onto the floor.  He backed up a few steps, calling for them to come to him, all the while keeping tabs on a pair of infected that had slipped in from the outside.  He moved slowly towards the caskets, taking down the infected as they neared. 

Ms. New Orleans had done a good job in the hall.  Or maybe the rest of the mob had turned around.  But Phoenix saw his opening and, without the slightest bit of deliberation, he took it.  He fired off three more rounds, dropping the Psykes with clean hits to the head, and he ran back into the hall.  More Psyke Crazies, up and down the halls, were zeroing in on him, so he chose to go left.  He emptied a clip, clearing a path, and ran for the opening, reloading as he sprinted past five sets of groping, trailing arms. 

Phoenix rounded a corner to the right, coming face to face with a solitary infected.  He put his right foot behind her right leg, tipped her over, and kept on at a steady pace.  He paused and turned, then he called out; and the bodies wobbled around the corner, hands outstretched, eyes blood red, and they came straight for him.  He made his way slowly up the hall and reached the chapel.

Gunfire sounded again.  Pistol shots this time, accentuated by the shouts of men and women.  A mass of seething, bloody flesh, ripe and redolent, began pouring into the chapel through the three main openings.  Phoenix backed up slowly towards the front of the chapel.  The room, once a place of singing, prayer, and eulogies, now sounded like a triage unit at a hospital full of dying men and women.  More funereal, he thought.  Death at its best.

Phoenix backed up, looking from side to side and from front to rear.   Bullets he had, and plenty of them; but between the firing and the reloading, the infected would have him.  More gun fire came from the left, from the kitchen side of the funeral home, and a single, solitary shot came from his right.

Phoenix started to raise the lid of the coffin.  No time to pour sweat over his fear of tiny places, or to fret about whether or not something grand and terrible could, in fact, ever hide beneath one’s bed at night, in the darkness, or to imagine that the dead, or deadish, could really come to life, which in fact was happening all around him at just this moment.

Without bothering to look, Phoenix threw back the lid to the casket, fired point-blank into the faces of two Psyked-out infected persons, and climbed into the occupied box.  He laid on top of something soft and squishy and room temperature, and he heard plastic crinkling and crackling, and he quickly wiggled down into the casket.  Just as he lowered the lid of the coffin, he felt something cold and wet touch his hand.  He pulled his arm into the coffin, grabbed the cloth on the underside of the lid, and pulled it down, holding it shut with every ounce of strength he could muster.

The sound of an explosion, probably a grenade, thundered through the room; and he could hear shrapnel click against the metal casket.  Loud blasts of gunfire shook his head, and the cries of men filled the room, voices calling out one to another.  Another explosion, and then another, and then more gunfire ripped through the chapel.

But the noise seemed to end as quickly as it had started. 

Phoenix heard someone yelling, and the voice sounded like it came from just a few feet away from where he had hidden.  The casket lid was jerked open and raised all the way back; and Phoenix, with his weapon in his hand, smiled awkwardly.  Two men and a woman, all of them clad in black and wearing black baseball-style caps, each with their guns pointed at him, stood over him.  These guys had ditched their gas masks.

One of the men jerked back when he looked inside the casket.  “Wow – I guess that’s why they call it ‘closed-casket’.  But that really doesn’t mean much today.  Hello, Phoenix Malone.”  The man turned to the woman standing beside him and said, “Take his gun, make some air holes for Detective Malone, and then button him up, will you?”  Then he walked away

The woman told Phoenix to close his eyes and cover his ears.  A loud burst of gunfire rang out as a rain of full metal jacket tore through the lid of the coffin, and Phoenix could feel debris, probably fragments of torn cloth and flying metal, falling softly on his face. 

The lid to the coffin was closed and sealed. 

Phoenix felt himself being lifted and carried away.

Phoenix didn’t dare turn his head: he felt afraid he’d end up meeting the limp, room-temperature lump of decaying, closed-casket piece of meat snuggling up against him.  Nothing but darkness and a few pinpoints of light in this casket, he thought – darkness, danger, and death.  He could feel the vehicle on the steep incline of the funeral home driveway, and he felt his body being jostled and jumbled and thrown to the left, along with the body of Mr. Death lying next to him.  The vehicle must have hit the main road and turned right.  He reached for his inhaler of Oblivium.

The bullet holes in the coffin, maybe twenty or so, allowed him only a tiny amount of light, barely enough for him to see his hands when he held them close to the lid.  Behind his head, in the direction of the front seat, he could hear voices – a man and woman.  He guessed he was probably in a hearse, and he knew the vehicle was speeding along the road heading north towards Nashville.  Phoenix needed to stay coherent and feel for the turns of the vehicle.  Unless it turned multiple circles in a parking lot, he’d be able to guess their location to within a few blocks.

The vehicle slowed down and came to a stop, probably in Little Acapulco on Nolensville Road, a place much worse than Acapulco had ever been.  The area was just as gang infested as the town of the same name south of the border, where drug cartels made a game out of seeing who could take the town and hold it the longest.

Scattered gunshots rang out, one here and a few over there, and Phoenix listened.  Maybe somebody had to clear the road of infected or, hopefully not, kill a few survivors looking for help.  The vehicle moved suddenly, jerked and then stop, then squealing its tires; and Phoenix could feel it picking up speed.

He felt around in his pocket for his phone.  He found it.  He was glad the Black Ops guys, unprofessional to say the least, rednecks to the last, hadn’t bothered to do a thorough search.  They did take his gun from him before they honeymooned him in the crate with Mr. Dead, but they hadn’t bothered to check him for any other weapons. 

After he found his phone, he lifted up his pelvis and found his combat knife squashed painfully up against his hip.  Hardly the assault weapon to use against armed soldiers, he thought.

He took out his phone and checked the battery charge.  Plenty of talk-time remained on the device; and as long as the electrical grid stayed alive, so would his phone.  He found Alaia’s number and called her.  She picked it up after the second ring.

Alaia sounded like she was still in her coffin.  “Phoenix?”  Her voice was high-pitched and frightened.

“I’m okay, for now,” Phoenix said.  “Where are you?”

“Right where you left me,” Alaia said.  “I can hear some scuffling in the room, though – but no gunfire.”

“The Black Ops guys have me in a coffin and we’re heading north.  If you were CDC, where would you hide out in Nashville?”

“Turn on your GPS and send it to me – you know how to do that, right?”

Phoenix felt like a fool.  “You’re the detail person – and that’s a detail.  I’ll turn it on in a second.  Can you and Darkeem get out of there?”

“Like when, right now?  I know you ain’t asking me jump up and see how many of those … those things are waiting for me.  What am I, stupid?”

“Just peek out, Alaia, I want you out of there, now,” Phoenix said.  “Just do what you have to do.  Those Black Ops guys did most of the work.  When you get out, take Ms. New Orleans’ car and go.”

Alaia didn’t say anything for a second or two; and the phone crackled in Phoenix’s ear.  She came back.  “I’ve got two infected people in the room.  I’ll deal with them.  Just turn on your GPS.  I gotta run and make sure Darkeem is okay.”

Phoenix ended the call.  He looked up at the holes in the coffin, berating himself for having allowed himself to be caught like this; and he would’ve turned his head to spit had there been a place for it too land.  How could he have had let this happen?  He’d been careless.  As a detective, he had always been on his toes, alert to anything and everything a suspect, however brilliant or bumbling, might think of doing next.  All he would have had to do, back at the funeral home, was set someone up to keep watch, and everyone could have taken turns keeping eyes on the place. 

He banged on the coffin lid in a rage, ripping and tearing away what remained of the tattered fabric, hoping to get some more light into his little death trap.  He reached for his knife out of anger and drove it into the nearest bullet hole, just above his face.  He turned to the right to keep metal from falling into his eyes, and he used the knife to cut through the coffin lid.  From bullet hole to bullet hole he cut, oblivious to the turns of the vehicle and, within a few minutes, he had cut out a small hole about twelve inches across.

He couldn’t help thinking about Alaia and Darkeem, and that surprised him.  He fumbled with his phone like a short-tempered Dad working to put together a kid’s bike and turned on the GPS.  The vehicle was heading north on Nolensville Road.  At just that moment, just as he started to set the phone down beside him, it rang.

“Sorry about all of this, Phoenix,” Mr. Krystal said with regret in his voice.  “I’d hoped to get you to Dr. Carson’s lab safely and soundly, but something’s come up.”

Phoenix flattened his lips and slowly shook his head.  Instead of responding, he remained silent.

“I know you’re listening, and I know you’re probably pissed off,” Mr. Krystal said.  “But I want you and your friends, the woman and the boy, to live.  You know, there’s a whole new world out there after this virus – but you’ve got to get to the cure first.”

“Now what?  In case you haven’t noticed, I’m separated from my friends and riding in a---”

“You are where you are because I called the people who just rescued you,” Mr. Krystal said.  “The place was crawling with those things the moment you went inside.”

Phoenix had an aversion to well-meaning people who did as they pleased when they pleased, oblivious to whether or not those they helped wanted helping.  Like somebody he knew who once threw away his Journey’s Greatest Hits record, one of the few vinyl ones left, and surprised him with a CD that not only sounded worse, but didn’t have the songs in the right order.  Phoenix just smiled when he’d been handed the new CD, swearing through his lily white teeth he’d find a way to make the gift-giver pay for his crime. 

Phoenix secretly cursed Mr. Krystal, even though he had saved his butt back there at the funeral home.  A call beforehand would’ve been a nice touch.

“Why didn’t you call me earlier?”

“To late for that.  Dr. Carson has been taken – underscore the word
taken
– to a temporary CDC site just southeast of Nashville.  You need to get him out of there and get him back to his lab.”

“And how am I supposed to do that?”

“Use your imagination, think synthetically,” Mr. Krystal said.  “And don’t worry about Alaia – I’m sending her a text as we speak.  She’ll know what to do when she gets to where you’re going.”

“And this virus can be stopped?”

“Absolutely – as long as you can get Dr. Carson---”

“I know, I know – back to the lab.”

“Just don’t get used to your little hiding place,” Mr. Krystal said.  “It’s going to be a long road to Franklin, and you’re really going to have to push it because the deadly stuff will be airborne soon.”

“What?”

“You heard me correctly, Phoenix.  You don’t have much time.  Anybody still left alive forty-eight hours from now, or thereabouts, will no longer have to worry about drinking water or being bitten by an infected person.  Death will be in the air.”

Mr. Krystal disappeared into silence.  Phoenix pressed End, and slipped the phone back into his front, right pocket.

Thirty minutes later, and after a few turns to the right and one to the left, the vehicle slowed down and turned right.  The car picked up speed, slowed down again, and rolled over a speed bump.  Phoenix checked his GPS.  He was somewhere just off Elm Hill Pike close to I-24.  He felt his body leaning to the right, and he knew the vehicle had turned left once more.  It came to a stop.  The engine was shut off, and he could hear the sound of doors opening and slamming.

After a few pops from somebody’s handgun, Phoenix listened.  Nothing.  Not another gunshot, not another voice.  A half minute later, he heard the doors at his feet click, like somebody grabbing a handle on a car door, and the hinges groaned, barely audible.  Somebody spoke, and Phoenix tried to make out what was being said.  He felt the casket being jerked unexpectedly and violently in the direction of the voices, and he felt his body shift suddenly towards the head of the casket.  His head bounced violently against the pillow a split second later, accompanied by a kidney-jolting thump. The casket must have been dropped.

A few minutes passed, and then nothing.  Not a voice, not a gunshot, not anything.  He sat in the box with the corpse, feeling the air around him getting warmer by the second, wondering if there was anything he could say that would get him out of his tiny box.  If not for a puff of cool air coming through the opening he’d cut into the lid, he probably would have started screaming like a banshee and pounding on the casket like a child stuck in an old clothes hamper.  Instead, he reached for his knife, slowly raised it into the hole he’d cut earlier, and started widening it.

“Will you get that guy out of the coffin – you moron?”  someone said.  “Please?  Just do what you’re told to do, okay?  Thanks.”

Phoenix removed his knife from the opening and tried his best to raise his head enough to see through the hole he’d cut.  Then he yelled, “Hey, get me out of here!”

“How are we going to get him out?” another man said.  “We left the crank back at the funeral home!”

For a second, Phoenix’s fear became so intense that he felt like he was about to black out, but all he did was brown out, the kind of thing you did when you thought you were dying but snapped back out of it just as you began to fade.  The idea that he was trapped irretrievably in a coffin with somebody – something? – that was technically considered to be aged meat, terrified him.  He grabbed his knife, stuck it out through the hole, and said, “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just get myself out.  And yes, you are morons.”  He went to work on the coffin lid, slicing into the thin metal on every forward stroke, much like someone would use a hacksaw blade.  A moment later, he heard the hum of a grinder, somebody cursing, and a loud, high-pitched whine as someone somewhere began cutting into something. 

A half hour later, now completely soaked in sweat, Phoenix emerged from the coffin.  His body ached, his joints were stiff, his head felt like a recently-used anvil.

The man with the grinder helped him out, and then the guy looked back into the coffin.  “Ooh, just look at that, will you?  They just threw you in there?  Just like that?”

Three men, all in black army gear – why was it always black? – approached Phoenix.  They each carried an open bottle of beer, chugging it as they came. 

When the men stopped in front of Phoenix, he looked at them and asked them to point out the man in charge.  The two men nodded towards the short, slightly chubby, balding guy standing in between them. 

Phoenix gave him the once-over and laughed.  Dark brown tufts of hair grew out from the side of his head on both sides, like saddle bags hanging off the side of a horse.  The very top of his head, smooth, slick, and as shiny as any piece of new leather Phoenix had ever seen, looked like something somebody had ridden across the Wild West.

“My name is Juan Martinez,” he said.  “And you are my---”

Phoenix looked over the man’s shoulder, not hard to do when somebody was about as tall as a water fountain, pointed across the way, and said, “You’d better hurry, because---”

Juan turned to look.

Phoenix, with his left hand cupped, and with every last ounce of traumatized strength he had left in his tired body, swung his arm and hand at the man’s right ear.   He connected perfectly.  The loud, angry pop, cupped-hand against vulnerable flesh and fragile hearing components, testified to the force of the blow he’d landed on Juan Martinez’s ear.

Phoenix stepped back.  “That’s for locking me in that coffin.”

Juan Martinez came towards him, his dark eyes wobbling in his head.  He staggered off to Phoenix’s right and then in the opposite direction.  He looked up into the sky once and collapsed onto the pavement.   The two other men, alarmed by the attack, but also apparently amused, backed up, drew their pistols, and aimed them at Phoenix.  One of the men, a younger guy, relieved him of his phone and his knife and cuffed him.