Decay (Book 2): Humanity (17 page)

More shrieks, this time from the parking garage entrance, filled the large concrete room. Roger counted eight fiends, and each one was already at a dead run in his direction. Turning on his heel, Roger took off toward the truck but stopped abruptly. Two more fiends had stopped fighting their way into the hotel and ran toward him, blocking his path to the truck. With no other options, Roger ran across the path and behind the cars. Running along the wall, he hoped to lead the fiends around until he could make a clearing around the truck.

Deacon leaned into the push bar of the fire escape door and pushed it open. It was a heavy steel door that opened up to the red steel stairs of the fire escape. There was no breeze in the alley blowing in fresh air. The rotting stench of flesh and garbage was almost overwhelming. His mind raced as he tried to focus on each possibility for escaping the undead horde that came for their living bodies. It was certainly a long way down. Luckily the stairs went all the way down, ending in a ladder that was currently raised off the ground. No sign of Roger in the alley made Deacon’s heart beat a little faster.

Mark walked down the stairs to the third floor emergency exit. Listening through the door he heard nothing. If Roger was still on the third floor there would surely be some commotion. The fire exit had no way of opening from the outside, so Mark climbed over the railing and peered through the window. He could just make out the fiends moving up the stairs.

Waving for Sophia and the twins, Deacon watched as they ran toward him. The twins were scared, yet they’ve always done a great job of keeping that fear contained. He could never tell if they were just used to the fear, they didn’t understand how afraid they should be, or if they knew how to place that fear in a tiny box and bury it deep in their minds. Regardless of what they did with the fear, the twins trudged on, accepting the world they were thrust into.

Glass shattered in the hallway behind them as they ran. The fiends had busted through and were climbing over the couches that Deacon and Sophia placed in front of the door leading to the stairwell. The glass shards cracked and popped under their feet. A barefoot fiend left a trail of thick black blood behind as she ran up the carpeted hallway toward Deacon and the others. The glass in her feet drove in further with each step.

Sophia screamed as she saw the undead fill the hallway.

“Hurry up!” yelled Deacon. He shut the door behind Sophia as she stepped out onto the metal stairs. A few seconds later the fiends hit the door, rocking it on its heavy hinges. An explosion of glass erupted just to their left as fiends shot through the large window. They poured out, just missing the fire escape a few feet to their right and falling the four floors to the alley bellow.

“Where’s Roger?” asked Sophia. Her voice cracked slightly. She looked down at the fiends that had fallen to the alley. Most of them were back on their feet and clawing at the wall in an attempt to climb to them.
There is no way out of this. I couldn’t keep the twins alive. God I hope their deaths are quick.

Deacon had both feet on the hand rails and his back pressed firmly against the door when Mark came back up the stairs. Neither man was ready to admit defeat just yet, but they really only came with the one plan. Deacon’s knees were aching, but he held himself in place. The only thing between them and the fiends was that door, and he would hold it closed for the rest of his life.

Sophia held the twins close to her. “Everything is going to be fine,” she whispered. She embraced them. She loved them as if they were her own children, and she knew if they couldn’t live forever then she wanted their deaths to be quick. Looking down over the railing she tried to prepare herself mentally to jump.

The roar of the Ramcharger echoed loudly up the walls of the alley. The massive Mickey Thompsons were inches from rubbing the walls on each side, rolling easily over the fiends. Blood and entrails clung to the front and spattered the windshield. A fiend hung from the front bumper right in front of the tire, her arm snagged. Her lower body had been crushed and shed away. Most of the flesh on her upper body had been peeled off in a sheet, leaving nothing but muscle.

“You get the twins down there. I’ll hold the door until your safe,” Deacon yelled.
Someone has to stay behind.

“You go with them,” Mark ordered. He wedged himself in between the door and railing without waiting for a Deacon’s argument. “GO!”

Deacon looked at Mark and stepped off the railing. “I’ll be right back for you,” he said. “I’ll get them to the truck and be right back.”

Sophia was already halfway down the stairs with the twins. She could hear the fiends beating on the door overhead, and a few continued to fall from the window and hit the concrete just behind the parked SUV. Deacon caught up just as they hit the last platform. He helped her lower the ladder down, holding it just above the Ramcharger as the twins descended and dropped down into the open sunroof.

“I’m right behind you,” he said to Sophia as she hesitated to climb down without him.

“Hurry.”

As Sophia vanished through the top of the truck Deacon looked up at Mark. He could just make him out through the layers of metal grating that separated them. He watched as Mark removed one foot from the railing and placed it firmly on the ground. Shit, Deacon thought. He looked around frantically for some way to help his friend, but found nothing.

“You need to go, Deacon,” shouted Mark.

Deacon did. He didn’t want to, but he dropped down onto the truck and watched for his friend.
He can survive the fall. He can survive.

Mark place the other foot on the grating and the door burst open behind him. Moving as fast as he could, Mark stepped onto the railing and jumped off. Instead of falling, he stopped. The hands grabbed ahold of his shirt and jeans. He could feel the rotting flesh and rough, boney fingers squeeze his ankles. They pulled him up and he watched–but not heard–Deacon scream for him. The shrieks and groans were deafening.

As his leg was lifted over the railing, a dead woman bit down into the soft flesh. Mark didn’t feel any pain, but he heard the pain in the scream. He looked up to see Roger pushing the fiends back, blood trickling from the bite on his right wrist.

“Grab the rail!” Roger ordered. He dropped Mark as soon as he saw the man had a firm grasp on the fire escape.

“Hurry up!” Mark yelled up to the man who had just saved his life.

Roger continued to kick and push as the fiends fought to barge out through the door.

Mark could see that he needed to leave, despite his not wanting too. Roger saved him, and he knew he couldn’t return the favor. He dropped down to the third floor, than the second. A loud crack came from up above, and he looked up just in time to duck as the railing came down. He hopped into the second floor fire escape, and reached out just in time to grab Roger as he fell past. Mark couldn’t catch him, but he slowed the man’s fall.

Roger, along with a number of fiends bounced off the top of the large SUV.

Deacon grabbed ahold of him, and Sophia hit the gas. The Ramcharger jumped backward causing the fiends to roll off of the top, landing in front of the truck. She drove forward, crushing their bodies under the massive tires. She drove forward and backward several times as new fiends rained down from the fire escape. Finally, with a short gap she drove forward far enough for Mark to jump down.

Mark dropped down and dove feet first through the sunroof. “Holy shit!” he said as he grabbed Roger’s wrist and examined the bite. “There has to be something we can do.”

Sophia backed out of the alley and took off down the street.

“You need to let me out,” Roger ordered. “I’m only a risk to you. I’m done for. I served my purpose here.”

“I don’t accept that,” Deacon said. “Pull over!”

Without question, Sophia pulled the truck onto the sidewalk.

Deacon jumped out, followed by Mark. After checking that the fiends were out of sight, the two men pulled Roger from the truck.

“What are you doing?” Roger asked in an annoyed tone.

“Sorry about this, mate,” Deacon said and pulled out the shotgun he had grabbed from the hotel.

“I know I don’t deserve an honorable death, but that’s a bit messy don’t you think?” Roger asked as he began to turn around, ready for his execution.

“Yeah, but it will get the job done,” Deacon said as he pulled the trigger.

The blast echoed off the buildings, but it was dwarfed by the screams. Roger grabbed his right arm, just above the shredded flesh that hung down just below his elbow. The lower half of his arm lay shredded on the street. Roger screamed until he couldn’t anymore. He watched the blood pour out, and then he closed his eyes.

Chapter 22

The hands tore at his coat and pulled his hair. Jonathan swung his arms and kicked, trying to break free. Just when he felt that all hope was lost, a monstrous roar bellowed from beyond the dead circle that surrounded him. Soon, that monster barked. It was Dog. He barked and snarled and those barks were followed by a burning smell. Then gunshots. Not loud gunshots, gunshots from a small caliber handgun.

Then the hands grabbed at him again lifting him up. Jonathan fought them. He still had to stop all of this. He couldn’t die here. So he fought.

“Will you stop hitting me, asshole!” Mad Man Rob said. He supported Jonathan with one arm while defending them with the brass torch he held in the other.

“We got you, Jonathan,” Michael stated. “We have Guillermo in the truck. We have to go now.”

Jonathan nodded, still shook up from hitting his head in the car.

As Michael walked Jonathan past an Orbit Orange car he realized where the roar came from. The Judge sat there, still running. Even at idle he could feel the Pontiac GTO powerhouse shaking the ground as they walked by. And then Jonathan saw the chrome grille of the Semi. It was grinning at him in a way so sinister that he knew it had to be alive. That grille was so clean and perfect, yet it seemed to bend in a wicked snarl.

“In you go,” Michael said. He pushed Jonathan up the steps with one hand on the small of his brother’s back and the other just under his ass.

Jonathan climbed in, groggy but aware. He saw the bed in the back of the cab, Guillermo sitting on the edge of it behind the driver’s seat, and made his way back. His eyes were shut before his head hit the pillow. He was sure that Guillermo had told him he needed to stay awake. That he had bumped his head pretty good and couldn’t sleep right now. Jonathan didn’t care. He slept.

The gunshots died down as the survivors arranged to retreat, but the explosions only grew louder. More and more of the massive wall tumbled down. Mad Man Rob had the large gates opened in the driveway and prepared to lead the survivors through.

“How is he?” Mad Man Rob asked as he climbed into the massive semi after lifting Dog in. Fiends beat on both doors.

“He’s out,” Guillermo said in a panic.

“May will look at him when we get to the park.” Mad Man Rob started the large diesel engine. It knocked for a second before smoothing out into a devilish purr. He drove it slowly toward the opening. A black trailer was pulled behind the cab, and a string of cars followed behind that.

The Judge in front followed by a Plum Crazy Purple Dodge Challenger with a large chrome blower jutting from the hood. An orange Mustang, a yellow Road Runner, a black Yenko Camaro, and finally a Dodge Little Red Express pickup with its chrome exhaust stacks standing behind the cab. They looked more like a car cruise on a Saturday night then a group of survivors in a world occupied by the undead. The noise from these classic beasts would certainly draw attention.

The semi turned out onto the street in front of the wall. Thick smoke rolled from the exhaust stacks. One of the Humvees swerved to avoid being plowed into by the much larger truck and ran over one of their own men. Blood sprayed from the man’s face as his head collided with the hood of the Humvee. The driver hit the brakes, not realizing that the front tire came to rest on the man’s chest, shattering his ribs and sending bone fragments into his heart.

Mad Man Rob paid them no attention as he worked the long gear shifter. He felt a bit like an apocalyptic Smokey and the Bandit with a trail of muscle cars behind his rig. Michael pressed a button on the dash that retracted a hydraulic piston. That piston opened a door on the side of the semi’s trailer. Once open, a dozen fiends spilled out and landed in the ditch between the street and the field where the attacking army was. This was Mad Man Rob’s idea of slowing down their attackers. Kind of like a sadistic version of a spy movie oil slick.

The line of American muscle behind the semi lit up the concrete with a roar of V-8 power. The big block power plants came to life with gasoline pumping hard and fast through their monstrous veins. The Road Runner, driven by Rick, and Camaro, which was driven by a teen named Aaron, whose father owned the car before the bone bags tore his limbs off last year, dropped out of the convoy and flew with ease to the front of the line.

The semi gradually picked up speed as it barreled down the street. Mad Man Rob avoided the stop at the intersection by cutting through the gravel lot of the fire station and shot up onto the road. The large trailer wobbled but stayed on all of its tires. Guillermo held onto Jonathan the best he could, hoping his friend didn’t bounce around and cause any more damage. Dog assisted by laying across the young man’s legs.

Bill sat in the passenger seat of one of the Humvees that was taken from the National Guard Armory just outside of town. He watched with morbid delight as the wall started to crumble. His pale, empty eyes scanned the smoky field. Bodies lay strewn about, most missing limbs. He felt nothing for his dead friends. Those who followed him into this battle meant nothing to him.

Before the deadies came, he was a regular man. He worked hard as a construction worker, paving roads for miles in the heat of the day. Finishing early one afternoon, he drove home to find his wife, Janet, in bed with his best friend, Corey. Neither of them heard him until it was too late.

The twenty pound sledge hammer dropped down onto the small of Corey’s back. The man’s spine shattered, rupturing his bladder and both kidneys, and causing blood to run from both the orifices below his waist. His eyes bulged and became bloodshot. The pain was so much that he couldn’t scream.

Bill’s wife, however, screamed enough for both of them. She rolled the paralyzed man off of her and began begging for her life as she slid onto the floor. Globs of Corey’s blood running from between her legs.

“We didn’t plan for this to happen,” she cried. “It only happened this one time and I’m so sorry, baby. Please forgive me.” Her fingers interlocked in a prayer as she begged. Her naked body glistened with lover’s sweat.

Bill didn’t say a word to her. He half-smiled, and then drove the large hammer down onto her right foot. All twenty-six bones shattered. Arteries and veins burst. The skin instantly turned black.

While she screamed in pain, Bill turned to look at the man on the bed. Corey was his oldest friend. Something about the way his broken back arched made Bill chuckle. The busted man looked like a fish flopping out of water. The sheets that covered his lower body were soaked with blood.

Bill drove the hammer down onto his friend’s head. Even cushioned by the bed, the force was too much. His already bulging eyes broke free of their sockets, gray matter oozed from his ears. There was no more flopping. His dead body was perfectly still except for the occasional twitch.

“Please don’t,” his wife begged. Her tear streaked face showed terror, sadness, and heart-ache.

She was beautiful to him. Even like this. He didn’t want her to die, but it had to be done. The hammer collided with the top of her head, shattering her neck and forcing her skull down between her shoulders. The crying stopped.

Bill was going to spend life in prison, and he was fine with that. The other inmates treated him alright. He enjoyed talking to the guards as much as they enjoyed talking to him. Then everything went to hell. The deadies came, causing a riot. He escaped with a few others, and the only reason he left was to survive.

And then he was offered the chance to rebuild his life and be a new man. All he had to do was sit back and stay alive.

Now it was his job to take out this group of murderers that hid behind their wall. But Bill knew that there weren’t murderers behind those walls. He was the murderer. His misled people would be the murders. And Randy–that old bastard–was going to let the boy to cut him again. Randy would find himself at the end of a rope soon enough, but for now the boy would die.

The ground shook violently as the big explosion took the first part of the wall down. It caused his heart to pump that boiling blood even faster. Despite the awful shrieks in the smoke, Bill was pleased with how this was going. Casualties happen in every war, after all. He looked at Darren, a thirty-something with a scraggly beard that didn’t grow in evenly. Darren sat in the driver’s seat, his knuckles white from gripping the wheel with crushing force.

Darren and a fat kid that sat in the back seat of the Humvee climbed out and fired rounds at the last of the deadies that found their way through the smoke that covered most of the massive, dead field. Bill felt bad for the fat kid, that’s why he didn’t want to know his name. Just a boy in a dying world with little food, yet he managed to stay well over two-hundred pounds standing just over five feet. He was an appalling thing, really.

But Bill watched the fat kid wriggle his pudgy fingers around the trigger of a nine millimeter handgun and fire hopelessly. He managed to take down one dead man, but couldn’t hit the other. Luckily for him, Darren put a round in the deadie’s skull, and the fat kid climbed back in the rear seat of the Humvee. The smell of piss accompanied him.

That’s when Bill watched the black semi cut through the thinning smoke, followed by an entourage of cars. The wall was still crumbling around their small town. Michael made it out, Bill knew. That snaky little shit always made it out. The temptation to strangle the fat kid was held off, for now. It wasn’t his fault, but Bill wanted so badly to wrap his fingers around someone’s neck. He doubted he could wrap his fingers around that thick neck, anyway. It’s no wonder the boy’s mother is so skinny.

He picked up the handset to the radio in the Humvee, pressed the push-to-talk button and screamed, “Someone better bring me the head of every one of those bastards!”

Mad Man Rob had heard this, of course. A number of different radios were mounted under the dash of the big rig, and one of them luckily was tuned to the same frequency that Bill was using to communicate with his army. As a matter of fact, the Mad Man had been listening since the attacks started.

At the intersection where a Fast Break convenience store sat, Mad Man slowed down and turned left, past a junkyard, a set of railroad tracks, and a facility filled with railroad tankers. The hump in the middle of the next intersection, where Highway 61 met with what the locals used to call the bypass, was the only thing that slowed him down as they approached, and he still took it kind of fast. Michael watched as the handful of tools–sockets, a screwdriver, even a pink BIC lighter–drifted into the air where they hung suspended, as if the gravity in the cab had been turned off, for a solid second before crashing down in a metallic clatter.

“Take it easy, please,” Guillermo pleaded from the back.

“Sorry. But we need to move,” Mad Man Rob stated before pointing out the driver’s side window down the highway they had just crossed. All he could make out in the brief glimpse he caught was a blob of sand that he knew was the Humvees driven by Bill and his so-called army.

The muscle cars went airborne as they crossed the intersection, going quite a bit faster and being much lighter than the semi. A man known only as Canon almost lost control of the Mustang. He punched the throttle down, just for fun, right before hitting the hump, causing the rear end to slide just enough to cause the car to land crooked. He shot into the other lane and down into the ditch where he regained control and drove out of the parking lot of a body shop that he was certain he came close to needing.

With everyone back together, the Road Runner and Camaro sped off ahead once again as if in a race. The young Aaron handled the Chevy much better than Rick handled the big block Mopar. Aaron’s father was a gear head who loved to race and had Aaron in the driver’s seat as soon as he could reach the pedals (despite his wife’s disapproval).

Even over the roar of the big diesel, Michael could hear the dull pangs of lead hitting the thick aluminum of the cab. The other cars in the convoy darted ahead of the semi, seeking cover. The semi had steadily climbed to sixty miles-per-hour by the time it rumbled past a large shop, the home of a construction company that had, after the attacks, loaned Mad Man Rob some of their heavy equipment.

One of the Humvees pulled beside the semi and worked its way up to the cab. The passenger rolled his window down and aimed a handgun toward Mad Man Rob. Who in turn smiled a big smile and waved a big wave before slowly turning the back of his hand toward the Humvee and curling all of his fingers but the middle one. The passenger fired a single shot at the window and watched in amazement as Mad Man Rob feigned being hit by the slug that was deflected by the bullet proof glass. Imaginary blood sprayed from the side of his neck, where he kept his hand held tight for a second.

Without warning the semi swerved into the side of the Humvee, launching it over the median. The SUV landed on all fours, wobbled, and hit the median from the other side. The driver overcorrected and the Humvee lifted up on the two driver’s side tires. It rode like that for a few yards before tipping the rest of the way over and spraying sparks as it slid steadily on its side. Two of the Humvees were ahead of it while the other was showered in the sparks.

Mad Man Rob felt the heavy semi slowing down as they drove up a steep hill. He downshifted and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The other three Humvees sped on up the hill where they could cross over into the other lane cleanly. The muscle cars that surrounded the semi slowed down, wanting to keep the mobile bulletproof barricade between them and the Humvees.