DEAD: Confrontation (10 page)

Gemma was grousing about one thing or another and Vix was about to pull her hair out.
As the rain came harder and became so loud that she couldn’t hear the girl anymore, she became lost in thought. When Gemma screamed, Vix fell off the table that she been perched on so long that her legs had actually partially fallen asleep. That is why she ended up on the ground. The pins-and-needles sensation caught her by surprise and her knees buckled.

“What on earth—” Vix started, but the words died in her throat or simply evaporated along with every bit of moisture.

They had taken refuge in what oddly enough turned out to be a special effects shop. There were a lot of small offices, but she’d had no desire to go poking around. She’d figured that it would be just her luck that she would think some zombie was just a creation of this shop…until it bit her.

Apparently a side door had blown open allowing at least twenty of the walking dead to come stumbling in. The noise of the wind howling and the rain coming down so hard that it
sounded like pebbles being thrown on the roof had masked their entrance.

One of them had gotten close enough to Gemma that it managed to grab her by the hair.
She had jerked away so hard that a handful of her dirty-blonde strands were ripped out by the roots. When Vix turned, all she saw was a zombie with a handful of hair and a bunch of blood running down the side of Gemma’s face.

She’d been lulled into being complacent. There had been no check around, or even a confirmation that the other doors that accessed outside were secure. And because of this, Vix was ce
rtain that she’d just cost the young lady her life.

Her spike-tipped pole slipped into her hands, feeling like a natural extension of her body.
She was about to charge in and save Gemma when a handful of zombies came stumbling in from the front entrance. They were trapped.

Had to wish for this, didn’t you!
Vix scolded herself. She could do nothing for Gemma now and moved to confront the dripping wet undead that were all reaching for her in unison. For just a second her mind flashed an image of a group of shoppers scrambling for the last children’s toy on the shelf on Christmas Eve.

As she plunged her spear into the closest zombie, she caught a glimpse of her face in a dirty mirror on the wall. She was gri
nning like a lunatic. Could she really be enjoying this? More likely she was going mad. The combination of a zombie apocalypse and days on the road with a girl who asked five questions for every one you managed to answer had finally sent her over the edge.

A pair of zombies moved in and she saw the perfect oppo
rtunity to take them both down. With a sidestep, she brought her poker in and skewered them both! Her victory was short lived as the pair toppled and ripped the weapon from her hands.

She
went to her belt and fumbled for the machete as a hand clutched at her ankle. It pulled just enough to cause her to lose her balance and fall. She hit the ground at the same time that she heard Gemma scream again. It sounded like a shriek of pain and terror.

“Vix!” Gemma’s voice was high and thick with fear.

Rolling to one side, she brought the blade down hard on the back of the head of the creeper that had caused her fall. Scrambling to her knees, she saw Gemma retreat into a dark hallway. Several undead were turning to follow.

After taking
down the last that had come in from her side, Vix took off after Gemma. It wasn’t hard to follow the girl with all the screaming and crying. In fact, as she turned a corner and mounted the stairs, she worried that they might become trapped in this place if there happened to be any more in the area. Despite how loud the storm howled outside, Gemma seemed determined to out-shriek it.

A door at the top of the stairs emptied into a narrow hallway that was almost pitch black with the exception of three doorways that  were open and a
llowed what little gloomy light there was from the storm-darkened sky to cast its faint glow. A cluster of shadows at the far end gave away Gemma’s location.

Even without the light, Vix could tell that something was wrong. The screaming stopped suddenly and the
mob went to the floor. She knew what she would find, and for a moment, she considered running. After all…what could she do for the poor girl now?

Standing in a rectangle of ambient light, Vix felt the adren
aline leaving her. With it…her desire to fight these things. She took a tentative step back. If she got out of this building, there were plenty others to hide in. And being by herself, she could crawl into any space she could find and wait out the storm in relative silence.

She took another step back. Her mind warred with the idea of running. Could she leave Gemma to become one of those things? In all her books and movies
, anytime somebody had been bitten by one of the undead, they always made their companions promise to put them down…to not let them come back as one of those things. Still, that would mean rushing into take down the small group that remained
and then
taking down Gemma. Seemed pretty risky considering the girl would never actually know…

“Are you just going to stand there?” a voice called from the end of the hallway where the zombies were clustered.

“Gemma?” Vix blurted. This caused a few of the zombies to turn her way.

“Oi! Shut up…I have their attention, you silly git!”

“Hey!” Vix shot back.

“Down here you big, slimy bag of stench!” Gemma screamed. “Now get in and finish them off. I am covered in muck and I think something is crawling on my back!”

Vix moved in and dispatched the remaining zombies with relative ease. When she finished, she was able to look down. Crawling from a floor vent was her young companion. She looked like she had dumped a vacuum cleaner bag over her head. To make it worse, she was wet enough that it had turned to a murky slurry that would be impossible to simply wipe off.

“How did you…what were you…?” Vix didn’t know where to begin.

“I knew that if I could get them to chase me, you could finish them off. A lot of them were following me as I backed up, but some were starting to turn back towards you. When you fell, I knew you just needed a minute to get yourself together.”

“Wait…so you were screaming like an idiot for no other reason than to—”

“Get them to chase me. We are a team, yes? And you have been doing it all so far. I decided that I needed to start doing my bit. That’s what friends do, right?”

“Friends…” Vix let the word hang. She was at a loss.

“Besides, it all worked out. You came, you took them down. And we are fine…except for all this.” She waved her hands down the length of her body.

“But how did you know about the vent? You came up here into a place with no escape…except maybe to jump out one of the windows. You should never run someplace blindly—” She closed her mouth with a snap as she felt herself about to scold. Later she could give the girl some pointers about being more cautious, but right now, she needed to simply be thankful. That, and find a way to deal with the guilt creeping in over how close she’d come to abandoning the girl.

“Oh…that vent? It is right outside my uncle’s office,” Gemma said with a shrug.

“What?”

“Yeah, I have an uncle that worked here. He was a bit of a twit, but when Artem hired him, the whole family got invited on a tour.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Vix
tried not to sound angry, but she was baffled.

“I didn’t really like my uncle,” Gemma said with a shrug like that answered the question perfectly.

***

“What is wrong with people?” Danny said with a sigh.

As they reached the overpass, the foursome came to a stop. Hanging from nooses were a dozen bodies. None of them were undead.

“Looks like they’ve been there a while,” Jody observed. That didn’t stop him from looking around in every direction as if he expected a horde of
Road Warrior
wannabes to come pouring out from every bush, tree, and shadow.

“Notice a theme?” Selina asked.

“All males, all stripped naked?” Danny paced the length of the group of dead men. “Hardly a fair way to judge…everybody who has ever watched an episode of
Seinfeld
knows that cold causes shrinkage.”

Selina’s hands stopped in mid-sign. Kat tugged at her sleeve, urging her to finish. Jody simply shook his head.

“In any case,” Jody started walking, keeping vigilant without trying to look like he was nervous, “we need to move. This could be anything, and no matter what it is, I don’t want to stick around and find out if this was an isolated instance or a regular occurrence.”

“Not much for having any hope for your fellow man, are ya?” Selina quipped.

“After all I’ve seen the past few months?”

“And what’s the deal with the hangings?” Danny tried to pull off a
Seinfeld
impersonation, but just came across sounding like a guy with a thick Boston accent making fun of a New Yorker.

When everybody looked at him, he raised his eyebrows at Jody like he expected some sort of support. “You remember Livius and Robb don’tcha?
Klllkgh
!” He mimed yanking on a hangman’s noose and cocked his head sideways with his tongue lolling out.

“
Like I said,” Jody continued after directing a withering glance Danny’s direction, “we need to keep moving. Last night I saw a glow to the northeast. Since there is no pillar of black smoke today, I am thinking that there is some sort of community or outpost in that direction.”

“Do you want to go see, or are you suggesting that we veer away from it?” Selina’s hands flew, keeping Kat up to speed with the conversation as he spoke.

“I think it is up to the group to decide,” Jody answered with a shrug. “Show of hands…who wants to head northeast and check out the possibility of an outpost or community?”

After a brief pause, some uncertain faces, and no hands, Kat signed to Selina who spoke for the girl. “Jody, you are the lea
der. All of us trust you and your judgment. If you say we should stay away from people, fine. And if you think we should try to join another group, that is okay. We trust you.”

Jody felt his gut twist just slightly.
This was exactly what he didn’t want…responsibility of everybody else. That would mean that the moment things went wrong, the fault would rest on one set of shoulders: his. Even worse, Danny was nodding along.

“She’s got a point,” Danny agreed. “After all, you were the one that they promoted to sergeant. You were the right man for the job…and you still are. We could do much worse than having you in charge.”

“I don’t want to be in charge of anybody!” Jody snapped. “The moment something goes wrong—”

“The dead are walking, dude!” Danny cut him off. “It can’t get much more wrong than that. Look…I hear what you are sa
ying, and I may have been all loose with the rules and maybe not the best soldier, but here is the cold fact…I’m a screw up. You let me call the shots and we are stomping into the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world just so I can piss on home plate in Yankee Stadium. I can’t keep my own shit straight half the time. I sure as hell shouldn’t be the one calling the shots or making the plans.”

“And I don’t have the slightest idea what to do besides run,” Selina piped up. “All I know is that I don’t want to get eaten alive. As for where to go or what to do…if you remember, it was me being so noisy—”

“And me,” Danny chimed in.

“And him,” Selina smacked him for emphasis, “that were carrying on like it was no big deal after
you kept warning us to be quiet. It almost got us killed because we weren’t listening to you. Like it or not, we need somebody to make the tough decisions.”

Jody stood there scowling. He didn’t want any of this, but he understood the need. One thing that kept
the military strong was its sense of discipline and a chain of command. He’d seen enough work evolutions in his day where there were “too many chefs stirring the pot” and it always turned into a mess. The reality was that there did need to be somebody making the call when things got hairy.

Jody was about to speak when what sounded like an air raid siren shattered the relative
quiet that the entire world now seemed to exist in. It took a few seconds to orient on the direction of the shrill noise, but once he did, Jody was prepared to make his first “command” decision.

“This way!” he barked, and took off at a run into a huge field that ran along the highway with no apparent end in sight.

Whatever had been growing here had long since succumbed to the combination of not being cared for and the onset of winter. They reached a barbed wire fence, and Jody ushered each of them through before ducking under the strands and joining them.

Across the giant field to the east looked like a thickly woo
ded area. That was where he headed at a steady jog. Sprinting was a good way to twist an ankle in such unsure ground and he also did not want to rush full-tilt into the unknown.

Glancing over his shoulder, he thought he saw something emerge from some heavy brush that had run along the far side of the highway, but whatever it was—if there was really anything there at all—vanished. If it was after them, it would have dropped down into the half-pipe-shaped median that ran between the north- and southbound lanes. He decided that was a good time to alter their course slightly.