Dying Days 3 (11 page)

"I wish you could come meet them now, but I understand you can't. We're having hamburgers and fries for dinner."

"Really?"

"Yes," he said and thought quickly. "There is a McDonalds on the property, so we grill up burgers and have anything on the menu we want."

"Maybe I could visit soon?"

"Maybe." Jeff had been inching closer on the rail, and was within five feet of her. He'd make his move soon, taking the gun from her.

"Can you really bring me there to meet them now?"

Jeff smiled. "Of course, I can. It would be my pleasure." If she was willing, it would be so much easier to transport her all the way back to Daytona Beach. "I'll take you back for dinner, you can hang out for a bit, and then I'll drive you back home."

"I’d like that." Bri frowned.

"What's the matter?"

She was looking back over the bridge. "Um… nothing. We should go."

Jeff waved his hand. "After you. We need to ride out, if we want to get you back before dark."

"This is going to be fun."

Jeff grinned. "You have no idea."

Chapter Eighteen

"What the fuck?" Eric asked incredulously. "Did you just see her slip under the water?" He handed the rifle to John.

"I didn't see her. Are you sure she didn't just fall or get caught in the undertow?" Abby asked. "Maybe the way she was moving in the waves made it look like she was making a face at you."

John looked through the sight. "I don’t see her."

Eric ran across the street and stood at the edge of the dunes, looking down at the beach. The others joined him.

"Remember when the zombie ducked, coming up the stairs? There's something going on." Darlene scanned the waves but didn’t see anything. "It's like Azrael showed me, too. They are regenerating. What if their minds are also coming back?"

"If that's the case, we are royally fucked," John said. He pointed south, toward the pier. "I think I see her."

Darlene could see a head bobbing in the waves, about a hundred feet off the shore and moving away from them.

"Let's cut her off," Eric said. He began running down A1A with Abby on his heels. Darlene and John went to the buggy and took off to the pier, parking and heading down the wooden steps to cut the zombie off if it got further away and Eric couldn't get there.

"Do you really think she's trying to get away from us? Is this even possible?"

"It looks like it. We need to have another meeting when we get back," Darlene said. "I hope Eric doesn't panic and shoot her before we see if she really is cognizant."

Darlene and John went to the water's edge, ignoring the piles of bodies and stench of rot around them. There would be time to survey the area once this piece of the puzzle was figured out.

"I think she's coming to us," John said. "Shit, she is swimming with her one arm."

As the zombie got closer, Darlene could see the zombie was definitely focused on them, but there was no facial expression, except for the normal hunger.

"I've never seen them swim before. If they learn how to use weapons and drive cars…" Darlene let the horrible thought trail off. She could only imagine hundreds or thousands of zombies, suddenly aware, and attacking them in their supposed safe haven stilt houses. They wouldn't last long.

The zombie got to a spot where she could walk, and she headed straight at them. Eric and Abby were coming down the beach at a run.

"Don’t shoot yet," John said to Eric when Eric raised the rifle. "We need to see how much she understands."

The four stood on the beach, taking turns gagging with the smell permeating around them, as she stumbled through the water, directly at them.

"Hello? Can you understand me?" John stepped forward and waved his arms at the zombie. "If you understand me, stop walking."

"Holy shit." Darlene couldn't believe her eyes, but the zombie stopped walking for a beat before heading on her path. Her face hadn't changed.

"What do we do now?" John asked. "There is something going on, some intelligence behind her eyes, even if it is fleeting."

"We step up killing them, and thank God for whoever is doing it in Flagler Beach. If they get smarter as time goes by, or maybe these are newer ones or older ones… who knows, and I don’t care. We just need to stop them."

"I'm scared," Abby said quietly.

Eric raised the rifle. "We take care of this one and do our search, like we planned. Hopefully, we don't encounter more of them. Before dark, we head back home and think this through. We need to get everyone together yet again, and come up with some solutions."

"We don't even know what's really going on," Abby said.

"I have a good idea, and it isn't comforting. I think we're in trouble." Darlene shook her head. She pictured sentient zombies, intent on feasting and able to dodge bullets and hide behind things, shooting guns at them and driving, climbing up and over the decks of the stilt houses and killing all of them as they slept or tried to fight back. Was this really as hopeless as it sounded?

"There, see?" Eric pointed with the rifle. "Her eyes flashed. She looks scared."

The zombie put her only hand up and twisted her mouth in what looked like fear, her eyes going wide. She stopped walking, ankle-deep in the water.

"Can you understand me?" Abby asked and took a step forward.

"Don't go any further." John put a hand on Abby's shoulder. "This could be a trick."

The zombie's eyes clouded over again and the snarling mouth returned. She began moving at the group again, oblivious to the rifle aimed at her head.

"I've definitely seen enough," Eric said and pulled the trigger. The zombie's head exploded and she fell into the surf. He pointed the rifle at the sand and turned to the others. "We need to finish this search and then get back. We need to get busy and not think about what just happened, or else we might panic or go insane."

"John and I will see if we can make sense of the bodies stacked here, and then find you up top and we can do house to house, as teams, side by side. No sense in getting split up," Darlene said.

"Good luck." Eric glanced at the rotting flesh. "We'll get some fresh air." He looked at Abby and smiled. "Ma'am, care to join me?"

"I hope I get lunch on this date," Abby said. The two walked off down the beach.

"Where do we begin? Search pockets for loose change, or just collect some watches? This isn't going to yield us much." John toed a body at the outskirts of the pile. "I don't see gunshot wounds or sharp cuts that are fresh on any of them. They might have been killed that way the first time, but all I see are broken necks."

Darlene covered her nose and stooped down. "I agree. Twisted necks galore. How is that possible? There's no way to kill so many zombies with your bare hands and not have a crowd of them overwhelm you. The only way is with superior numbers, but I don't see the footprints to warrant it." She stood and looked around. "I see a few in the sand but there would need to be dozens of unarmed people breaking necks."

"This is getting weirder and weirder," John said. "Just when you thought the dead rising and eating us wasn't crazy enough. Now we have another threat? And we don't know if it is even related to the zombies."

"Are you thinking sea monsters? Space aliens make as much sense right now as zombies." Darlene pointed at the female zombie bobbing in the surf. "We need to explain that, as well. She definitely had a moment of clarity, where she saw Eric. I know he wasn't lying and he didn't see things. She proved it when she came at us, but then her face changed."

"Yes, I saw the same thing. She was able to control it, or snap out of it, whatever you want to call it. But then she went back to being a zombie and trying to attack us. Does this mean they are coming back? If they are slowly changing into their former selves… we've killed so many of them since this began. What if the population reverts back, like this is some flu or virus and the body eventually shakes it off or becomes immune." John pointed at Darlene's ankle. "You've been bitten, yet you never changed."

Darlene looked away. She remembered the attack, in the snow in Baltimore, when a zombie bit her leg. She thought she was going to change into a zombie and die. But she never did. Darlene had no idea why. "I wish Azrael was still alive. He was experimenting on zombies and trying to find out what was actually going on. I bet he had data we could find and maybe complete what he started."

"Do you remember where this high school is?"

Darlene shrugged. "I know it was in Palm Coast, so it has to be somewhere over the bridge, right? We need to be more proactive. Look what I did with the gas station: I left it alone and out of my mind for weeks, even though it was an easy place to get back to and stock up. Why didn't I do it? It's really the same thing with the high school. Azrael… damn, his name was Russ… he had a stockpile of weapons and food. The school was fortified. If it hasn’t been run over by zombies or scavengers, we could feed our community for a few weeks."

Azrael had saved Darlene on her return visit to the gas station, when she'd been overwhelmed by zombies. He'd taken her to safety at the Flagler Palm Coast High School, and shown her his research on the undead. Russ had helped her get to Saint Augustine but he'd died in the assault by Doug Conrad and his cronies. Darlene turned back to John. "Did anyone ever bury him?"

"Azrael? Darlene, we left and went back home. I imagine someone in town buried him with the rest of the dead."

"I hope so. He was a good man." Darlene sighed. "This is a waste of time here. I say we meet up with Eric and Abby and do the search before heading home."

John pointed at the steps. "After you, ma'am."

"You just want to stare at my ass when I go up the stairs."

John grinned. "Pretty much."

Chapter Nineteen

Frank stood over the zombies tied down to the tables and sighed. What had this world come to, when innocent people (dead or undead) were tied up and used like guinea pigs, experimented on and poked and prodded?

He leaned close to the bound zombie, a man about Frank's age, and stared into his eyes. There was nothing but anger and pain there. The hunger was strong in him like in all the rest, but Frank wanted to know how long before he turned and changed and… evolved. "The problem I have, my friend, is that I have no real idea how long it's been since you were bitten and
died
. Was it a month? A year? I don't even know how long I've been in this state. I can only imagine how long it takes to walk from Canada to Florida." Frank sat down in a chair, even though he wasn't really tired. It was more habit than anything else, like lying down on the pillows and blankets in the Java Joint while he thought.

Someone was obviously doing experiments on the zombies, and Frank assumed with no real results. He would go through all the journals and notes scribbled on loose pages, strewn on the desks and tables in the room. The school was filled with classrooms converted to makeshift laboratories, with dozens of zombies tied down and marked on.

Frank toyed with a tray of vials, filled with blood.

What if someone found a
cure
for this? If they could reverse what was happening to him… Frank slammed his fist on the table, scattering vials. The only people who would want to stop this majesty were those who didn't understand it. He would need to destroy the school and anyone who wanted to stop the inevitable.

He supposed there were other setups like this in the world, but one worry at a time. This was too close to home. Frank laughed at the thought this was his home now. He didn't feel part of the Florida landscape anymore than he still considered Canada his home. He just simply existed, and wherever he roamed was now his. Once he destroyed the rest of the zombie population, he would literally be the only one left to rule.

But rule what? In college, he'd been a voracious reader of science fiction, and the story
I Am Legend
was his favorite. He'd been disappointed in the movie versions over the years, because they always failed to get inside Robert Neville's head like on the printed page. Now Frank was beginning to see what he was feeling.