Vaccination (17 page)

Chapter-Thirty-Three

Josh swore before he climbed out of the car. “I’ll change it. Spare’s gotta be in the trunk.”

There was never a good time for a flat tire. This just seemed like the worst. Allison more than likely had a concussion. If we couldn’t manage the flat, we’d be walking again. She needed rest. Not to be walking. I needed the rest, too. I did not have a concussion, but no point in lying. I felt messed up. My muscles were sore already. I dreaded thinking about the pain my body would feel in the morning. Stiff neck, aching back for sure. The last few days has been nothing but car accidents. Injuries and accidents.

“I’ll help,” I said, and then realized I was right and I was right. The tire had blown. And it had been a gunshot. I realized it when Josh climbed out of the car. I heard it again. That distinct pop. Only, instead of a tire blowing, Josh crumbled to the pavement, his hands over his stomach.

Dave screamed. “Josh!”

“Hold on, Dave,” I said. I jumped up and grabbed his shoulder. He had been about to get out of the car. I held him back. “Someone is out there with a gun. If you get out, you get shot.”

“I gotta get Josh!”

“We’re gonna. Get on your belly. Lay across the front seat. I’m gonna do the same back here. We’ll open our doors and see who’s closer, and we’ll pull him back into the car. Stay low, okay?” I said.

Dave seemed to think over what I’d said. Took a bit longer than I expected. Then he nodded, and did as instructed.

“Stay low,” I reminded him. “You too, Allison.”

She was low. Hidden from view.

I squatted. I pushed open the back door.

I saw Josh’s legs. “I have his feet at my end,” I said.

And they were gone. “Josh,” Dave said.

I looked between the bucket seats.

“He was shot,” Dave said.

He was dead. The bullet must have hit him right in the heart. The pool of blood soaked his shirt, but was thickest, wettest, all around the left chest area. I sat back some, and looked out the window. “Some one’s out there with a gun.”

“We’re not safe just sitting here,” Allison said.

As if to punctuate her statement, another shot was fired. My side window spayed rounded pellets of shattered glass all over me. . . I was not cut. I brushed away the pellets. “You okay?”

“Yes,” Allison said.

“They killed my brother,” Dave said. His face pressed in the space between the front seats. “Josh is dead.”

“You need to drive the car, Dave.”

“We have a flat tire. We have a flat tire and Josh is dead. I’m going to kill those motherfuckers!”

I reached for Dave’s arm again, an attempt to stop him. It didn’t work. He shrugged my hand away.
He kicked open his door.

I heard a
gunshot. Dave dropped to the ground. I screamed, “No!”

The door was still open. “They didn’t get me,” Dave said.

“Get back in the car,” I said. “We need to get out of here!”

“How many of them are there?”

“I don’t know where they are,” I said, but suspected they were closing in on us. I had to assume there was more than one person out there. I also had to assume they did not have the best intentions. If they had, they wouldn’t be shooting at people passing by in cars. We obviously weren’t the infected, the diseased, the zombies. They didn’t want the BMW, or they wouldn’t have taken out a tire. They wanted us, or they wanted whatever it was they thought we had with us.

The car was expensive. Maybe they thought the occupants would be wealthy.

That was lame, because right now -- possible for a long while, money was not going to be worth shit as currency. Bottled water. Canned foods. Cartons of cigarettes. That’s where the gold would come from. Based on everything, I had no idea why someone would shoot at the car, kill Josh, and shoot at Dave, unless it was for bad intentions. I looked at Allison.

If they were men coming at us, she might be in serious trouble. Worse than death. “Dave, drive the car.”

“The tire is flat, Chase.”

“It doesn’t fucking matter. Get us out of here.”

“I’m going to kill them. They killed my brother.”

“They have guns, Dave. They will kill us all. We don’t know where they are. We don’t know how many of them there are. We do know they are dangerous and deadly. No
w stop thinking about yourself and drive the car,” I said.

Dave cursed at me, but he was motivated. He moved his brother’s body into the passenger seat. It took some doing, but he did it, and then he climbed over him and into the drive
r’s seat. “We’re not going to get very far with a flat tire.”

“We’ve got to get further away from
here
, at least,” I said.

Allison, at some point must have grabbed my hand. I realized it now as she squeezed it a little too tight. “I don’t like this,” she said.

Sign of the times, I wanted to say. I didn’t. It had not dawned on me until this point. I was worried about surviving the elements, not starving, getting somewhere zombie-free. Never had it crossed my mind, and it should have, holy fuck it should have, to fear other non-infected people.

There would be thieves and robbers, pirates and bandits, gangs and murderers . . . the streets would be dangerous night and day. From the living and the living dead. There would be no peace. No sanctuary from evil.

Evil would pulse like a heartbeat, thrive like its own virus. “Get us out of here, Dave.”

“I’m trying the best I can,” he said.

A bullet ricocheted off the trunk. “Try better,” I said.

Then the rear window exploded as a rain of bullets
ping
ed and
ba-chong
ed off the car.

Chapter Thirty-Four

The bullet that killed Josh had been a
chest shot. He must have died fast. I’d wager painless. I’d never been shot, and never died, so painless is relative.

Dave did the best he could. He drove all over the place, making lefts and rights. He managed to get the three of us out of there, out of harm’s way. We wound up on Ridge Road at Fetzner. A hotel to our left, a Five Guys on the right. The mall was further west, past the Five Guys. My apartment was to the left. East of the expressway.

I was anxious to get to my apartment. I knew my kids would be there. Waiting. Scared.

Charlene had a key. Cash did too. But I knew Charlene kept house keys on a Miami Dolphins lanyard, one I’d bought for her years ago. It was our team. Cash wasn’t big on football yet. He liked baseball though. His lanyard was a New York Yankees one. He loved it. But he lost it. Regularly.

Dave stopped in the Marriott parking lot. They called it the Airport Marriott. Airport wasn’t anywhere near Greece, or Ridge Road. It was miles south off Interstate 390, but whatever.

“Dave,” Allison said. I climbed out of the back seat. I opened the passenger door. Carefully I lifted Josh out, set him on the pavement and stared at
his lifeless eyes.

“Josh,” Dave said. I looked into the car. Dave had a white knuckle grip on the steering wheel. His head banged against the headrest, once, twice. The third time he slammed it back. “Get out of the car, Allison.”

“Dave, what are you doing?” I said.

“Watch my brother,” he said. “Don’t you dare leave his body here.”

“Dave,” I said.

“I’m going back. I’m going to kill those bastards.
Every one of them.”

“Dave, we don’t know where they were. We don’t know where they were shooting from.” I didn’t have a good feeling. I sensed it. What was coming.

“Allison, I said get out of the car, out!”

“Come on, Alley,” I said.

She moved slow. One hand on her head. She was not well. The car accident we’d been in had shaken her up. I knew we’d both be sore in the morning. No way around that.

“Dave, if you leave, you are leaving Josh. Because Allison and I, we’re not staying here. We’re not going to wait for you to get back,” I said.

“You can’t just leave his body here,” he said. “That’s my brother.”

“Your brother would not want you to do this, David. He’d not want you to go back there and get yourself killed.”

“He’d want me to kill those fuckers.”

“I’m sure he would,” I said
, “but not if he knew you’d die doing it. He wouldn’t want you to die, to get killed.”

“Put him back in the car. In the back,” Dave said.

There were a lot of cars in the hotel parking lot. This car had flat tires. Lots of cars also meant, lots of guests. Lots of guests meant the inside of the hotel had to be crawling with zombies. I didn’t want Dave getting so excited he made a lot of noise. Attracting attention was the last thing we needed.

“Dave, if you had been shot and killed--”

“I wasn’t shot and killed!”

“Just listen to me, all right? Hear what I’m saying. If you had been shot and killed
, would you want Josh to go back there and kill those guys for you, to avenge you?”

“Yes.”

I shook my head. “No you wouldn’t. You would know that if he went back, he’d get killed, too. You wouldn’t want that to happen. Him to get killed just to avenge your death in a no-win situation like this. Would you?”

“Would I what?” Dave said.

He might be confused. But he was listening. Meant a part of him was at least trying to rationalize what to do next. What would be the right next move.

“You wouldn’t want Josh going back there to die.”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” he said. “He’s my brother. I’d want him to be safe. If he went back there to kill them, he’d end up getting killed. Then we’d both be dead.”

I kept quiet. Dave was working this out in his head. I think it was all starting to make sense. He didn’t need me pushing and prodding his brain. He’d get there. He’d reach the conclusion I’d been attempting to draw for him.

Dave went silent. His head lowered so that his chin touched his chest. “What are we supposed to do now?”

Get my kids was what I wanted to say, to scream. “We find someplace special to place your brother
.”

The cemetery was just kiddy-corner to where we were, go figure. Ridge Road Cemetery. It was on Ridge and Latona. We had the tools.

I never liked funerals. Burials. Today I was burying two people. People who, in the short course of time, had become friends. It was the circumstances. In a million lifetimes, our paths might never have crossed. But for the last few days, Josh was more than just a guy.

“We’ll carry him over to the cemetery,” I said.

Dave looked where I pointed. “We could do that,” he said.

“Ah, Chase,” Allison said.

I stood up. I’d been right. The hotel had a zombie infestation. Or did. Looked like they were filing out of the hotel’s automated doors.

“Are you going to be okay to run?”

Allison nodded. “I will.”

“Dave, we need to get out of here. I’m going to put Josh back into the car.”
“We’ll drive to the cemetery,” Dave said.

No point arguing. I lifted Josh by under the arms. Grunting, I positioned him so that his head went into the car. “Got to help me, Dave,” I said.

Dave leaned over. Grabbed onto his brother and pulled as I worked to get his legs into the vehicle.

“Chase,” Allison said.

“Get back in the car,” I told her. It did not seem like a safe ride. If it still drove, it would get us away faster than running. Possibly.

“We need to go, again, Dave.”

He saw them then. “They are all coming out of there? The hotel.”

“Looks that way.”

Dave shifted the car into drive, and on two flats, we limped back onto Fetzner.

“Got to do me a favor, Dave, a huge favor.”

He didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes on the road. He kept his hands on the wheel.

“I need you to get me to my apartment. It’s less than a mile. It’s right past that plaza down there. Past the Toys R Us.”

“I know where Stone Road is,” he said, “and we’ll get there, after we bury my brother.”

Allison was on her knees. She stared out the back . . .
could not say window. There was no glass left. She watched as the zombies that had been converging on our car, now aimlessly milled about since we’d left.

None of them had been fast zombies. Had they of been, I don’t think this badly disabled wreck would have gotten us far before getting overpowered.

Rubber was off one of the tires completely. The sound of metal on asphalt was dangerously loud. We weren’t going to make it further than the intersection. And Dave was not making a left on Ridge. He was headed straight to where Fetzner turned into Latona.

“Dave, please.”

“Help me bury my brother,” he said. “Don’t make me do this alone. Don’t make me drive around with his body in the car. I can’t do that, man. I want to help you. I want to see you get back together with your kids. We’re going to Mexico, right? I’m in. I want to be a part of that. But, please, don’t let me bury my brother all by myself.”