Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse (13 page)

“Sounds like a plan,” I grunted. I slung the empty bag over my shoulder and followed after Jed and Walker.

We went to the kitchen first.

The first thing I did was
check the window, and I spent thirty seconds just standing still and watching the back yard through a crack in the curtains. Under a bright sunny sky the lawns looked much smaller than I had thought. Last night, when I had been staggering in the dark and rain from the garden shed to the garage, it had felt like they were on opposite sides of a football field.

I watched the trees, then ran my eyes along the line of the fence, looking for
telltale signs of movement. I saw nothing. Nothing at all, and finally relaxed enough to turn my back on the window and fix my attention on the task at hand.

“Jed, you start with the pantry,” I said. It was a big double-door thing. Last night we had fo
und cans of food and soda, and Jed had found the bottle of whisky. But the shelves looked well stocked and badly organized. Maybe there would be other useful items that would turn up with a thorough search.

Jed didn’t acknowledge me. He simply started pulling things from the shelves, holding each one up, turning it in his hand, and sorting the contents into useful – and useless.

I started on the kitchen drawers below the sink. Every house has these drawers. The top one holds the cutlery, and the other two or three are always crammed with the assorted junk that doesn’t belong anywhere else. I started on the bottom drawer and worked my way up.

Walker stood back in the middle of the room for a moment with his hands on his hips, his gaze thoughtful, his eyes narrowed. He made a face, and then went for the stove. There was a range hood built into the cupboards above the hotplates to draw away cooking smoke and odors. Walker pulled the range hood apart, and behind the mesh filters found almost a thousand dollars wrapped in plastic and bound with a rubber band.

Clever hiding place.

Even more clever of Colin Walker to think of it.

He held the money up triumphantly and counted it quickly. It wasn’t a lot of use – unless we needed to light a fire. I didn’t imagine money had much value in a world where food, fuel and alcohol would probably be the new currencies.

The nylon bag was open on the kitchen floor near where I was crouched. Walker threw the money in, and started on the row of cupboards above the kitchen bench top.

Despite ten minutes of patient searching, the results were meager. Jed had found more cans of food on an upper shelf – mainly condensed soups and spaghetti – but not much else. Walker’s search had been fruitless, and I had found a roll of duct tape and a blister pack of six fresh batteries for the flashlight.

I looked up at the others. “We’ll try the main bedroom next,” I said.

Strangely, when I pushed the door to the room open, I smelled nothing. It was as if the dead bodies of the man and the woman slumped across the mattress had no stench. I knew that wasn’t the reality. The reality was that we had become so accustomed to the thick rancid smell drifting through the house that we no longer noticed. That was a good thing.

There was an antique chest of drawers set against the left wall of the room. It was a beautiful piece of furniture with ornate iron handles on every drawer, and a large oval mirror set into the woodwork. The timber had been varnished and polished to bring out the natural grain
.

I started on the top drawers and worked my way down.

Jed slid open the doors of the wardrobe. We had been through the clothes racks the night before, snatching anything dry and tossing it on the floor outside the bathroom. Now he started looking more carefully, digging his hands into the pockets of coats that hung in the corners, and slinging any garments that looked practical over his shoulder for later inspection.

Walker dropped to his stomach and slid underneath the bed. I knew he would find the little revolver the couple had shot themselves with
, because I had seen it and decided to leave it when we first found the bodies. But I didn’t mention I knew the weapon was there. I waited and listened carefully as I searched.

And I wondered.

The top few drawers of the dresser were filled with cosmetics, nylon stockings and underwear. Lots of underwear, mainly of the flimsy, lacy type. One drawer held the family’s important papers. There were laminated certificates, something that looked like a wad of stock shares, and passports. I didn’t open them. I didn’t want to know the names of the people.

I slid open the bottom drawer and froze with a sudden sense of amusement and perverse voyeurism. The draw
er was filled with ‘marital aids’. Apart from a couple of battery-operated devices, there was a length of soft rope, a blindfold and a pair of handcuffs. The cuffs were silver, and there was a key on a small length of ribbon. The end of the key was decorated with an ornate love heart. I pulled everything from the drawer and set it on the bedroom floor. I wanted the batteries, and the rope and cuffs were the first really useful discovery we had made. Jed made the sound of a low whistle.

“Jesus,” he said, and his eyes were suddenly alive and
cunning. “Looks like someone read ‘Fifty Shades’ before they ate a bullet.

I nodded. “Maybe that’s what drove them to kill themselves,” I said wryly.

Walker wriggled back out from under the bed. He saw the array of items gathered around me but said nothing. I unwound the rope. It was about fifteen feet long. Useful indeed. I gave the handcuffs a quick test. They were toys. I had thought they were metal, but they were made of heavy plastic. Useless after all. I ripped the batteries from the adult toys. They weren’t the right size for the flashlight, but I felt they might still be useful. I threw them into the nylon bag, then looked up at Walker.

He had the little revolver in one hand, and a half-opened box of ammunition in the other.

I was secretly relieved he had passed the test.

“This was beside the bed,” he said. “It’s
the weapon they used. One shot each. There are four rounds left in the cylinder, and about twenty rounds left in the box. It was under the bed.”

“Is it any use to us?” I asked. The weapon looked tiny compare
d to my Glock, and the cannon that Walker carried.

He shrugged. “It will do the job,” he said abstractly. “It might come in handy.”

I shrugged my shoulders. Walker tossed the weapon and ammunition into the bag.

There were a couple of scented candles on top of the dresser. They were the kind of
decorative things that people lit to set the mood for a romantic evening. I got to my feet and swept them into the bag, then stopped quite suddenly.

“How fast are
the zombies, Walker?” I asked. “Could we outrun them – if we had to?”

Walker wrenched his mouth from side to side like he was considering the question. He shrugged. “Maybe,” he said, and then he took a long deep breath. “The ones I’ve seen move awkwardly,” he added. “I can’t really explain it except to compare them to folks who have maybe lost a leg in an accident and are learning to walk again with a prosthetic limb. Maybe that’s not a good explanation – but it’s the best I can come u
p with. The undead move, but it is awkward movement – like they don’t really have full control of their bodies.”

“Hey,” Jed said suddenly, and his head appeared from within the built-in wardrobe. “Some of those guys with artificial limbs are
fuckin’ fast. Ever heard of the Special Olympics?”

Walker’s expression didn’t change. He nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “And maybe some of the undead are just as fast. I really don’t know. All I know is what I’ve seen.”

I thought back to the night before and remembered the tall figure in the grassy field I had shot. I recalled his jerky, spasmodic gait.

“
You say you have seen them – up close? This isn’t just based on something you overheard, or heard on the news?” I asked.

“I know it,” Walker
said darkly, and the sound of his voice lowered and became pained. “I saw my wife die,” he said. “She got cornered in our living room. I couldn’t get to her. They came through the door – maybe six or seven of them. She couldn’t get away, and I couldn’t get to her…”

There was a long moment of silence, and Walker began to tear up. He cuffed a
t his eyes brusquely.

“And you say they’re like sharks, right?”

“Right.”

I shook my head. “But I don’t understand something.” I frowned. “If a zombie bites a person, they become infected with the virus, right?”

Walker nodded. “Right. Once bitten, a person will turn within about thirty seconds.”

“But they’re also driven to a frenzy by blood, right?”

“Right. Just like sharks.”

I screwed up my face and shook my head. “Then how do they survive long enough to turn in the first place?” I asked. “If a zombie bites a person, there is going to be blood. So why don’t the zombies just tear the person to pieces? And if they did, then how is the virus spreading at all? The zombies should be tearing every victim limb from limb because of the blood.”

Walker stared at me for a long moment, and then began to speak slowly and deliberately. “I go back to the sharks analogy,” he said patiently. “Imagine a shark swimming into a pack of tuna. The shark snaps and savages at everything swimming past it. Some of the tuna are killed and eaten. Others are maimed and swim away to die. The blood in the water and the thrashing of the tuna attracts more sharks. More of the tuna are killed – but even more are maimed in the frenzy.” Walker clasped his hands together. “That’s how the infection spreads. The danger is when one of the undead corners a group of people. Some will die, but most will be bitten and stagger away…. long enough to turn.”

I leaned back against the bedroom wall. I nodded.

“Shit,” Jed said softly, his voice made hushed by dread and some kind of gruesome awe.

“Shit,” I agreed.

Walker wasn’t finished. He shook his head. “Have you seen any of the undead up close?”

“No,” I said. “We saw some attacks through the window of the safe house, but they were on the opposite side of the street. When we escaped from
Forresterville, we were in a car – until I crashed it. All we saw were teaming hordes of running, panicked people.”

“Well it’s not like the movies,” Walker said. “The undead
I saw – the ones that killed my wife – didn’t have their chests shot out, or their arms missing. And their faces weren’t torn away. Not yet, anyhow. Maybe the virus will change, but the undead I saw were still very human-like. But their skin is dry. Dry as grey paper,” he said, rubbing at his own face as he spoke. “Their eyes are sunken, their cheeks hollowed… but they’re not the stuff of blood-soaked B grade horror flicks. They’re more… more real than that.”

We left the main bedroom, carrying the nylon bag with us, and went into the room that was filled with stored furniture.

Everything was covered with a heavy dust sheet. There were a couple of tables stacked on top of each other, a couple of wardrobes, a desk, bookcase and several low chests of drawers. We worked quickly, opening drawers and doors. We found nothing of value apart from a couple of Stephen King paperbacks that were on a shelf of the bookcase between a collection of cooking and gardening books. It stuffed the paperbacks into the bag.

We ignored the bathroom – I had searched the medicine cabinet above the vanity the night before, after I had cleaned up the blood from Jed’s tooth extraction.

We gathered in the kitchen and Jed paused to glance warily through the gap in the curtains, out at the back yard. He shook his head. “Nothing moving,” he said.

I let out a long breath. “Okay, we’ve found probably everything that might be useful to us,” I said.

Jed interrupted.

“What about the little shed?” he asked. “The one by the fence. Was there anything in there?”

“Not a lot,” I said, recalling my hasty search in the dark. “A few gardening tools, some bags of potting dirt…”

“What about in the garage?”

“Tools.”

“A car?”

“No. Not even a pushbike.”

Jed didn’t look surprised. “What about weapons?”

“You mean guns?”

“No, dipshit. I mean tools that we
could use as weapons. Hammers – that kind of thing.”

I felt my anger start to boil
. I had gone out into that garage in the middle of a damned storm, in the dark, to find pliers, so he could have is tooth removed. Now he was interrogating me.

“Gee, Jed. I don’
t remember,” my temper flared. I felt the heat rising under the collar of my shirt, and my self-control slipping. I snapped at him. “I went out there to try to save your ass,” I reminded him. “For all I know, there might be hammers. Hell, there might be an entire gun cabinet filled with machine guns I missed.
Why don’t you go out and take a look for yourself
!”

Jed bristled and his face turned ugly – but Walker stepped smoothly between us, his voice low and calm. He planted a hand in the middle of my chest and pushed me away, then did the same to Jed. He stood between us, and his eyes were dark and black.