Waiting to Die ~ A Zombie Novel (28 page)

“Where’d he go?” Johnny asks,
glaring through the heat.

A cadaver pops up from behind
the pickup near the tailgate and exposes itself for only a moment before diving
down again.

“Shit!” Johnny stammers.

Before anyone can react, Emma
squeezes from behind the front seat and levels her rifle. The cadaver creeps
over the lip of the bed again with a section of meat hanging from its maw and
Emma takes her shot. It looks unaffected by the hit, still staring off into
space the way the dead often do. But with a slight twitch of its decaying
mouth, the creature sinks slowly behind the truck and vanishes from sight.

“Oh no,” Scarlet says in a faint
yammer.

“Stay here,” Johnny says and
begins to sprint toward the truck.

The heat of the day hits dry
across his face, working at his beard, creating tingles beneath. His pulse
quickens as he approaches the line of abandoned vehicles and sidesteps between
each one, grazing his pants on dust covered bumpers before he can get through.

His gaze descends upon the
corpse that is sprawled out on top of Greg. Its burnt skin wafts up an aroma of
cooked meat, sent higher by the heat rising from the asphalt.

“A little help here,” Greg says,
trying to push the corpse off.

Johnny mouths the words, but his
voice is lost. “Greg…” he says as he squints away the hot wind, “I’m sorry.”

Greg gives a small shake of his
head. “No,” he says and blinks in shock.

“You’re going to become one of
them,” Johnny says, leaning down over the corpse that pins Greg to the ground.
He shakes his head as his eyes moisten. “I’m so sorry,” he repeats as he stares
down with unfeeling eyes.

“What are you doing?” Greg asks,
confusion spreading across his face. “I wasn’t bitten.”

“Yes you were” he says, eyeing
the wound.

Johnny stands and stares at Greg
before his eyes divert to the bag that lies at his side.

“No, you can’t,” Greg mumbles.

 Johnny pulls out a tire iron and
grips the end tight, reflecting for only a moment before Greg howls. “No,
don’t…” Greg shouts and tries to pull free from the body, but his voice is lost
on the wind, and he’s not strong enough to stop the impending assault. The
acrid sounds penetrate the air as Johnny brings the weapon down hard. With a
faint pop, the sound is gone and all that is left is the sand gently caressing
the roadway, stained red, and sent by wind that promises change.

He wipes away the blood with the
tarp from the pickup and places the tire iron back into the bag. He lowers his
head as he walks away, letting his feet drag across the asphalt. There’s a
stirring in his heart as he looks at the others. He wonders how long it will be
before they change too.

Scarlet is there with tears in
her eyes, all too aware of what it means when someone has been infected. She
remains quiet as Johnny leans down beside the truck and starts to remove the
lugs on the tire.

Passively, he glances to her and
says, “There’s food and water in the pickup. We can get it when I’m done here.”

She nods as she places her hand
over her mouth to keep herself from screaming. The taste of her tears are
bitter as she swallows them down, as she fights the urge to collapse and let
the world rape away the last bits of her soul. She lets the tears flow as she
watches Johnny do the same.

“Don’t look at him,” Johnny
instructs. “You don’t want to remember him that way.” He lifts a box of canned
food and places it on top of another, balancing the weight of the two beneath
his stomach.

“Okay,” Scarlet replies and
stops in her tracks and turns, placing her hand over her mouth again to keep
the tears at bay. She moves to the side of the truck and lifts one of the
crates of water and hoists it up to her shoulder. She can see Greg’s leg from
the other side of the truck and quickly looks away, following Johnny back to
the pickup. “What are we going to do?” she asks.

“About?” Johnny asks.

“About all of this,” she says.
“We never did come up with a real plan.”

“I thought we were just going to
head toward Colorado, find a secluded spot and wait this thing out.”

“But what if it isn’t a matter
of waiting it out? What if those things never go away? Then what?” she asks.

 “Then we keep doing what we’re
doing,” he says. “We live every day and try to survive.”

“And wait around until what
happened to Greg happens to us?”

“We don’t have much choice.” He
places the boxes in the back of the pickup and turns to help Scarlet with the
water. “I don’t believe in ‘good’ plans anymore. There’s no way around it, we’re
fucked any way we go. No matter where we go or how safe we think we are, those
god damned things will always be around to fuck it up.” The anger rises in his
voice. “There’s no government, no order, no fucking hope.”

“I can’t believe that,” she
says. “I have to have something to hang on to. I don’t want to die that way.”
She looks over her shoulder at the other truck and the faint hint of bodies
beyond. “I can’t die that way. It scares the hell out of me.”

Johnny rests his hands on the
bed of the truck and lowers his head. “I don’t know what else to do. The little
girl is right. If we go far enough out into the wild where the population
wasn’t so dense, we might have a chance.

Sure, it won’t be perfect, but
at least we’ll have an actual chance at some type of normalcy.” He wonders if
they’ll make it that far before someone else looks at him the way Greg did. He
looks at the children in the back of the truck as their faces jerk and spasm
into snarls before returning to normal. “It’s only a matter of time,” he says.

“I hope you’re right,” she says.

“I do too,” he replies. “But
until then, I suggest we watch each other’s backs and get back on those tracks.
It’s going to be night soon and I want to get past Vegas before dark.”

Johnny drives the truck back
onto the tracks and lowers the wheels. With a clank, the steel makes contact
with the track and slides into place.

“What happened to Greg? Why
isn’t he coming with us?” Billy asks.

“He turned,” Emma replies,
staring out the window.

“Oh…” he says in a whisper.

In the dimming light of day,
they can see Las Vegas over the horizon, pale and lifeless. The former glory of
the city has faded into the oblivious scourge of death.

Scarlet holds the map outright,
resting it on the dashboard and follows the lines with her finger. She folds it
in half when she finds the section she’s looking for. “If we take the next set
of tracks, we should be able to bypass the city entirely,” she says, pointing
the way on the half folded map.

“That’s perfect,” Johnny
replies, resting his hand on the wheel.

“Where’re we going to sleep?”
Billy asks.

Scarlet turns to the boy with a
smile. “You can nap right now,” she says. “I think we’re going to take turns
driving so we can get some rest on the way.”

“Okay,” he says and sinks down
into the backseat with heavy eyes.

Emma continues to stare out the
window as she recalls images of what she knew of Greg. She can still see, with
vivid detail, the dead man she shot to try to save him. She didn’t do it out of
fear; she did it out of necessity. It was like all the other times with her
grandfather back at the beach house. She saw something that needed to be done
and threw herself into action. The dead have become like the trees or the sky,
they have become just another part of the scenery. She can’t be afraid of them
any more than the rocks or the shrubbery they pass along on the track. They are
as simple and mindless as those things – they are just another part of life.

Like most children, she sees
things in black and white, good and bad. She hasn’t become jaded yet to the
fact that the creatures aren’t natural or that there is some other type of
reality which she should exist. She doesn’t hate them or wish them to go away –
she merely knows that there are times when they need to be taken care of and
times when she needs to run from them.

In her mind, it is the simplest
of things, an instinctual knowledge. When there are too many, she runs, when there
are only a few, she fights.

She has become numb to the
people falling around her, complacent to the death that inevitably takes them
away. Even through the hurt of losing another, she can’t bring herself to cry
for them. It is just another curve in the circle of life.

“Don’t eat me,” Billy screams in
his sleep. “No, no, don’t!”

“It’s okay,” Emma says. “You’re
safe. Everything is all right.” She pats him on the back as he begins to stir.
“It’s just a bad dream.”

“They were everywhere,” he says.

“You’re alright,” Scarlet says,
turning in the front seat, brushing the hair out of his eyes.

Tears streak the boy’s face,
rubbing away the grime that has collected. He lets out a sigh when he sees
everyone around him and begins to relax.

“They were trying to get us,” he
says. “We were surrounded and there was nowhere to go.”

“You’re okay now,” Emma says,
trying to smile, but knowing she’s had the same dreams. “My grandpa used to say
it’s just your imagination playing tricks. There’s really nothing to be afraid
of.”

“It was so
real
,” he
whimpers and curls back up, his eyes too heavy to resist falling back to sleep.

Johnny watches the sun drift
behind the horizon, becoming a hint of light, long and thin as it spreads out
across the desert.
Another day
, he thinks,
another day gone to the
hands of Hell
. He looks over at Scarlet, asleep in the passenger’s seat,
facing away from him with her head lying gently on the window. He can see a
hint of April there as the woman breathes softly. She almost looks peaceful
before her face contorts and whips back at him.

Her screams awaken the children
as she launches herself at Johnny, her mouth snapping at his face as he
struggles to keep her away.

“Kill her!” he yells. “Fucking
kill
her!”

His pleas go unnoticed as the
children’s eyes flash bloodshot red. Their little mouths gnash out as Johnny
presses against the side window, fending off the attacks.

The hate in their eyes
gravitates toward his neck as he kicks out at Scarlet, sending her backwards
into the window. He grabs Emma by the back of her neck and pulls her over the
seat, slamming her head into the dashboard with a loud crack. The child’s body
quivers and twitches as her neck is bent at an awkward angle between the front
seats.

Scarlet flails forward over the
girl’s body and lashes out at Johnny. He jerks away at the last possible moment
as Billy comes over the seat. Johnny places his leg between the boy’s chest and
himself; keeping him at bay as Scarlet tries to rip at him from around the child’s
thrashing strikes.

He uses the boy as a weapon, grabbing
him by the throat and whipping him around to face Scarlet as he slams the
child’s head into her, sending up splatters of blood as he grips the boy by the
hair at the back of his head. Over and over, he beats at Scarlet with Billy
until he can finally hear the child’s skull crack.

Johnny pushes hard on the brakes
and slams the shifter into park, sending Scarlet into the windshield. Her body
impacts hard and a spider web of cracks appear across the glass, gathered in
the center where she hit.

“My god, what have I done?!” he
says as he awakens fully.

Scarlet moans, holding her arm
on the floorboard of the truck. Her eyes squint in pain and moves back to the
seat, still cradling her arm.

“Are you okay?” Johnny asks.

“What happened?” Emma asks from
the back, her eyes still groggy from sleep.

“I think I fell asleep,” he
replies.

“I’ll be fine,” Scarlet says
rotating her shoulder.

“You hit pretty hard, are you
sure?” Johnny says, placing the truck back into drive.

Just outside of Las Vegas, they
come across a small town complete with its own casino, promising ‘a less
crowded gambling experience’. The sun has begun to amble up over the skyline
and teeters as if it were stretching before it begins to ascend. As everywhere
else they’ve been, the streets are deserted, save for a handful of crows
feeding on the remnants of garbage that has been left behind.

Johnny can make out most of the
dust covered town from the train tracks and stops for a better look.

“Do you think it’s safe?”
Scarlet asks, keeping her voice down as to not wake the children.

Johnny shrugs his shoulders.
“There’s no way to tell without going in.”

He releases the hydraulics and
lifts the steel wheels from the tracks with a whining purr. Nudging the truck
away from the gravel, he hops the curb line onto the street, keeping his speed
at an idle.