Black Tide Rising - eARC (3 page)

“Still a tight fit,” said Pedro.

Jerry Haywood shrugged. His expression no longer seemed worried, just resigned to the inevitable. “Yeah, it’ll be tight—sitting room only, and some of us will probably have to stand. But thunderstorms don’t come around all that often and they don’t last long when they do. It’s better than being fried by a lightning bolt coming down a tent pole.”

There was a sudden commotion that drew everyone’s attention back to the TV screen. They’d been showing images of jammed-up highways from a helicopter, but now the scene was jumping around wildly.

“
Get them off of me! Get ’em—aaaah!”
The camera swung around and they got a glimpse of the pilot. He was writhing in his seat and was apparently trying to tear his clothes off. A hand appeared from the side, holding a pistol. There was a shot to the back of the pilot’s head that splattered blood and brains all over the cockpit window.

An amazingly calm voice now spoke—presumably belonging to whoever had fired the shot. “
He turned. I hope one of you knows how to fly this thing.
”

“
You idiot!”
shouted another voice. The image on the TV screen now flittered every which way, for a few seconds, before it went blank.

A moment later, the image of the two announcers returned. Both of them were still sitting behind their desk.

“Apparently we lost the chopper,” said Karen Wakefield, shakily.

Her partner Bob Lubrano rose abruptly from his chair. It turned out he was wearing blue jeans beneath the suit jacket. “To hell with this,” he said. “I’m out of here.”

A moment later he was gone. Wakefield stared after him for a short time and then brought her eyes back to the camera. “What about you, Ken?” she asked.

A voice came from somewhere—presumably belonging to whoever was operating the video equipment. “Where else is there to go? I figure we may as well keep working. But it’s your call, Karen. If you leave there’s no point in me staying.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. Then, nodded firmly.

“We’ll stay, then. The show must go on and all that.” She even managed to smile at the audience.

Andy picked up the remote and turned off the TV. “Let’s get moving, people. Tom, we got everything we need? The U-Haul’s already loaded and so’s Freddy’s truck. But we still got some room in the pickups and the van.”

Her husband tugged at his beard. “Well…we outfitted for camping, not perching on top of a storage tank. So…yeah, I can think of some things we could use.”

“Where are we going to get them?” asked Luis. “If it’s anything from Cabela’s or Home Depot or Lowe’s, forget it. Those places were already madhouses a week ago when we did our shopping. Today…”

Tom shook his head. He’d come to the same conclusion. “Yeah, I know. The Wal-Mart and all the supermarkets will be impossible too. What we need are places that nobody’ll be thinking to stock up from—or loot, by now, probably—so we can get in and out.”

“What about cops?” asked Latoya. “Seeing as how—don’t lie about it!—you’re talking about us looting too.”

Tom scowled at her. “Damn it, Latoya, I’d be happy to pay anyone who asks for money. But nobody’s going to be tending any stores today, you know it as well as I do. What choice do we have except to break in? Speaking of which—” He eyed Freddy.

“Typical white guy,” said Freddy, grinning. “Wants the Puerto Rican to do the breaking and entering.” He pointed a thumb at Jerry Haywood. “Why not get the Negro to do it?”

Haywood grinned too. “Me? I’ve never been arrested once in my life. My cousin James says I’m a discredit to the race. Well, would say, except he’s serving time himself. I’d feel sorry for him if he weren’t such an asshole, because good luck surviving a zombie apocalypse in Miami Correctional Facility.”

Latoya was scowling at all of them. She had a lighter complexion than her husband, but at the moment her expression made her seem very dark indeed. “My husband is
not
breaking into anyone else’s private property.”

Tom shrugged again. “He’s going to have to help break into something, Latoya. The tank farm will be chained and locked up too, y’know. So take your pick.”

Freddy stood up. “I got more room in my van that Jerry does in his SUV, so I’ll go on the shopping spree. Unless it’ll take a cutting torch to get into the tank farm?”

“It’ll just be a chain and padlock,” said Tom. “The bolt cutter should handle it fine. Who you going to take with you?”

“How much heavy lifting will be involved?”

Tom mused on the problem for a moment. “Might be…quite a bit, actually. You better take our grandson. And you’ll need someone as a lookout—and he better have a gun, too. Zombies are starting—”

He broke off, hearing the sound of a motorcycle coming down the street. “Is that Eddie?”

Pedro was already looking out the window. “Yeah, it’s Eddie—and Ceyonne’s riding behind him.”

Tom nodded. “Good. We can send both of them with Freddy.”

Latoya now focused her scowl on Kaminski. “Why you want to send my son out to break the law?” she demanded.

“I don’t want him so much as I do his girlfriend,” said Tom. “I’m willing to bet she’s carrying—and she knows how to use a gun. There are advantages to having a cop for a father even if”—he smiled up at her slyly—“it probably makes your little boy nervous now and then.”

Latoya started to say something but her husband put a hand on her shoulder. “Let it go, hon. He’s right and you know it. There won’t be any way to get anything legally today—and so what? Ceyonne’s dad is the only cop I know pig-headed enough to still be on duty. Which I’m willing to bet is why he sent her along with Eddie.”

His son confirmed that guess less than a minute later, when he came into the house.

“Yeah, that’s what happened. Ceyonne’s dad—”

“The stupid fuck!” his girlfriend snarled.

“—says he’s got to stay on the job. Now more than ever, he says.”

“The stupid fuck!” she repeated.

Eddie Haywood shrugged. “That’s what he’s like. Anyway, he told me to bring Ceyonne over here. He figures she’ll be safer with us than anywhere else.”

“Stupid—stupid—stupid!”

Ceyonne Bennett was a big girl, five feet nine inches tall, with a rather heavy build. She was normally attractive, in a round cheery-faced sort of way, but right now she just looked furious.

“He’s the only cop in East Chicago still on the job!” she said, half-wailing. “What the hell good does he think he can do on his own?”

Andy was inclined to agree with her. But there was no point in pursuing the matter so she got right down to business.

“We need you and Eddie to help Freddy and Jack go—ah—shopping. You got a gun on you?”

Ceyonne sniffed. “You mean go break into someplace and steal stuff. Yeah, I got a gun. Two of them, actually.” She moved her jacket to the side showing a small pistol in a holster in her waistband. “This isn’t exactly legal, since I’m not old enough for a concealed carry license. But my dad’s not totally crazy about minding the law. He’s the one got me the holster as well as the gun.”

She jerked her head backward. “And I got my nine millimeter in the saddlebag on Eddie’s bike. That’s got seventeen rounds to go with the six”—she patted the gun at her waist—“in this little .380. Ought to be enough, no matter what we run into.”

Jack Kaminski grinned at her. Andy’s grandson liked Ceyonne a lot. Andy thought he probably had a crush on her, but given that Ceyonne already had a boyfriend and was a year and a half older than he was—a big deal for teenagers—he’d never acted on it.

“Zombie
apocalypse,
remember?” he said to her.

Ceyonne blew a raspberry at him. “Zombies, my ass. They ain’t dead yet, I’ll make ’em so. When are we leaving?”

“Right now,” said Freddy.

“Better take one of the walkie-talkies,” urged his father. “Cell phones are still working, but who knows how long that’ll last?”

Freddy nodded. “I got one in the van already. You figured out where we’re going yet, Tom?”

Kaminski nodded. “The Office Depot down on Indianapolis Blvd. If things are too crazy there because it’s pretty close to Meijer’s, then try the OfficeMax across the street. I can’t think of anything over there that’d be drawing much attention right now.”

“
Office
supplies?” said their grandson, looking startled.

Tom chuckled. “Yeah, who’d ever think of looting
that
in a zombie apocalypse?”

“So what are we looking for there?” asked Freddy.

“First of all—these will be heavy and a bitch to load, but we need them—are cases of paper. Each one will hold ten reams and they’re about eighteen by twelve by twelve inches. We want…”

Tom’s eyes got unfocussed again as he calculated. “At least forty cases. Fifty would be better.”

Freddy’s eyes were wide. “
That
many? What the hell for? You’re talking about the better part of a ton.”

“Sound proofing.”

“
What?
”

“Think it through, Freddy. We’re bringing two generators with us because whatever else we need electricity and when the grid goes down—which it’s bound to sooner or later—the only way to get it is with portable gas generators. They don’t make a whole lot of noise but they do make some, and one thing that’s been established about these zombies is that light and noise attracts them. So we need a way to deaden the sound.”

Freddy scratched his jaw. “Okay. But…can’t we use something like, I don’t know…”

“The only way to really deaden noise is with mass, Freddy. The best thing would probably be sheets of dry wall with insulation between them, but we’ve already agreed there’s no way we’ll get into a Lowe’s or Home Depot. The one thing that will do a good job in an office products store is cases of paper. We’ll use them to build a hut for the generators. Then cover it with plastic sheets to keep the rain off. Which is one of the reasons you also need to grab as much bubble wrap as you can find. Big garbage bags, too.”

Freddy sighed. “Fine. What else?”

“You know those clear plastic mats they sell to put under a chair so as to protect floors and carpets? Grab as many of those as they’ve got. They’re vinyl and while they probably aren’t as good as rubber mats—”

“Insulation, I got it. In case of lightning strikes. What else?”

“Bubble wrap, like I said, all you can find. And tape. We already got a lot of duct tape but we’re going to need more. We weren’t figuring on living on top of a steel floor fifty feet in the air. I don’t know if they’ll have duct tape but for sure they’ll have shipping tape, which is pretty damn good stuff.”

Jack piped up. “I saw an episode on
Mythbusters
where the two guys got out of being stranded in a desert just using duct tape and bubble wrap. They made insulated clothes out of it—even made a boat.”

Tom nodded. “Duct tape is the best evidence there is that God really exists.” He waved his hand. “But you need to get going, Freddy—and so do the rest of us. We’ll meet you down at the tank farm. If the cell phones go out, switch to the walkie-talkies.”

Freddy left, with her grandson Jack in tow along with Eddie Haywood and Ceyonne Bennett. Andy turned to the people still in the house.

“Okay, let’s get moving. By now, I think most everything’s already packed except the rubber matting we got downstairs in the exercise room. We’ll need to pull all that up.”

“On it,” said Latoya, heading for the door to the basement. “Give me a hand, Jayden.” Her daughter followed her. So did Freddy’s wife Victoria.

Andy looked around. “Is there anything else we’re overlooking?” She waited a few seconds. “No? Okay, then, we’ll leave as soon as we’ve got the mats loaded.”

2

They hadn’t gotten four blocks when Andy saw someone she recognized walking down the street ahead. It was one of the waitresses at a nearby diner. When the girl turned her head to look at them Andy saw she’d been crying.

Andy pulled the truck over. Tom, riding next to her, already had the window down.

“What’s wrong, Sam?” he asked.

Samantha Crane was short, a bit stocky—and about as pretty as any nineteen-year-old girl Andy had ever met, in a cute streaky-blonde sort of way.

“My mother,” Sam said. She wiped her runny nose with the back of her hand. “She…she tried to
kill
me.”

Andy hissed in a breath. She liked Sam—but if she’d been bitten by a zombie…

“Did she bite you? Even get close to you?” asked Tom.

Sam shook her head. “No. I was coming home from work—Rochelle shut the restaurant down, since there wasn’t any business anyway—when Mom came charging out of the house. She was
naked.
And screeching like you wouldn’t believe. I took off running and she followed me for a couple of blocks before something distracted her.”

The girl pointed down the street. “I’m heading for the diner. Rochelle’s planning to just stay there even though it’s closed because…well, she’s got nowhere else to go. I figured I’d join her. Don’t know what else to do.”

Sam and her mother lived alone. The truth is, the two of them didn’t get along that well, which Andy thought was part of the reason the girl worked so many hours on her job. Rochelle Lewis, the restaurant’s manager, had become something of a surrogate mother for her.

Andy glanced at Tom. He had that mulish look on his face that she’d come to know very well, having been married to him for damn near half a century.

She sighed. She had her doubts, because the more people they added the greater the chances became that someone had been infected by the zombie virus. But…

She pointed with her thumb over her shoulder, indicating the short line of vehicles that had come to a stop behind her. “Come with us. Get in Pedro’s truck. He’s only got his mother with him so there’s room. If need be, put her on your lap. Yarelis doesn’t weigh more than ninety pounds.”

Sam looked at the pickup. Then, shook her head. “Thanks, Andy. But I can’t leave Rochelle alone. She’s got nobody either since her mom died and she threw out that asshole husband of hers.”

Tom cleared his throat. “Rochelle’s good people,” he said. “And we got too damn many old farts. Need some more young folks.”