Empire (13 page)

    Kipp drew himself into a ball. Kneeling beside him, Wendy gently pried his hands from over his eyes. "Honey, we're safe in here, I promise. But I need you to get up, okay?" She motioned to the front, to the crucifix. "We need to move up there so we can push these seats against the door."

    He shook his head with a whimper. She took his hands and pulled. He resisted, his body - and fear - stronger than hers.

    There was a loud thud against the chapel door. Kipp jerked away and buried his head in his arms.

    "Open up! C'mon!!" It was the ex-con. The door rattled in its frame but held; Wendy grabbed another pew and dragged it across the floor. "Please help me, Kipp!"

    In the community room, Shipley hammered frantically. Most of the windows had been cleared of boards, but thankfully were too high and narrow for the undead to climb through. The living fought off the rotters' grasping hands using the fallen planks.

    Voorhees had followed Shipley back into the room. He aimed his pistol at a thin female face peering through a window. She met his gaze and opened her mouth, as if to protest; a second later she was sent reeling, leaving a red mist in her wake.

    Yeats dragged Oates in, crying "One of them's got a gun!" Checking Oates' pulse, he groaned. "He's dead!"

    Palmer saw the gaping hole in the front door and grabbed Mike's shoulder. "We've got to put more shit on that barricade!" The P.O. shook her off and aimed out one window, then another, as if he couldn't decide where to waste his bullets first. She spun him around to face her. "They can't get in that way! They CAN through the door!"

    Mike stared dumbly for a moment, then nodded and followed her from the room.

    Voorhees fired a second shot and turned to see Shipley wrestling with the chapel door. "Back off!" He shouted. Amidst the chaos, Shipley probably didn't hear him, or even know who was being yelled at. Voorhees crossed the room and shoved him roughly. "Forget it! Help us out here!"

    Shipley turned and threw a fist into Voorhees' gut. The cop wasn't expecting it and doubled over, nearly dropping his gun. Shipley went for the door again and Voorhees grabbed his leg. He yanked the ex-con to the floor, pressing the gun hard into Shipley's back. "I said FORGET IT."

    "Okay." Shipley said to the floor, relaxing his body. Voorhees rose slightly, keeping the pistol against Shipley's flesh. "Help us secure the building or everyone dies. You, me, the people in the chapel. Everybody."

    "You don't understand," Shipley argued, though still lying prone. "The kid--"

    "I don't wanna hear about it!"

    Across the room, a board cracked over a leering zombie's ahead. Voorhees looked up. Shipley rolled over beneath him and drove a work boot into his groin.

    Voorhees buckled again; the ex-con scrambled to his feet and grabbed at the chapel door. "You gotta let me in! Listen to me!"

    Voorhees drew the widowmaker from beneath his coat and sliced cleanly through the meat of Shipley's right calf. The man howled and staggered back. Voorhees tackled him to the floor, snapping a handcuff around one of his wrists.

    He yanked Shipley across the room and slapped the other cuff onto the broken radiator, just below an open window. A gray hand lurched inside and groped blindly. Shipley flattened himself against the floor. "Lemme go!!"

    "You're staying right there." Voorhees fired out the window and the hand retreated. With a sneer, he muttered "Worthless," and left Shipley to his protests.

    Inside the chapel, the soft lights flickered and dimmed. Wendy collapsed onto a pew while pushing it. Then Kipp was beside her, trembling, but fighting to keep his head up. "I'll help."

    Though she barely had any strength left in her body, Wendy got back up and braced herself against the pew. "Okay honey. Let's go."

    He brushed his hair from his eyes. She saw the dark outline of the bite again, just above his hairline, then the lights went out completely.

    "J.J.!!" Wheeler shouted from the mens' room. He pulled a screwdriver from his coat and worked furiously at the hinges of the stall door. The other man ran in to see the boards dropping from the window. The rotters would be able to get through this one.

    "What do I do?" J.J. cried. Screws clattered at Wheeler's feet. "Just keep 'em away til I get this fuckin' door off!"

    J.J. edged toward the window. A dead man thrust his hands through. J.J. staggered back into the doorway.

    "C'MON!!" Wheeler bellowed. He dropped to his knees to take off the last hinge. J.J. slammed both fists down on the sink faucet, knocking the rusted length of pipe loose. "Okay!" Taking the pipe up in his hands, he turned to face the window.

    Another rotter had taken the first's place. He pointed a rifle at J.J.

    The stall door slammed against the rifle just as it discharged, and huge chunks of plaster exploded from the tall, spitting dust and debris into the air. J.J. felt tiny, hot daggers lashing his cheek and fell to the floor.

    Wheeler pushed the rifle outside and held the metal door against the window. "Get up, J!"

    The door rattled in Wheeler's grip. He put all his weight against it, but then there was a gunshot and the door rocketed into his face.

    J.J. watched Wheeler drop. Getting to his feet, he caught the warped, smoking door and thrust it upward again. A dead hand snaked around it and grabbed him by the hair. "Aaaah!" J.J. let go of the door and grabbed the rotter's wrist, snapping it. As the door fell aside, J.J. saw something pushing past the other rotters, some kind of skull-thing dressed like a doctor, holding an axe.

    It was planted between J.J.'s eyes with a solid thud. His body was pulled outside.

    Wheeler feebly pulled himself from the room, and before he kicked the door shut he saw their faces, crowding the window; a cry escaped him.

    The young cop hauled him to his feet. "Are they in?" The cop shouted. "ARE THEY IN?!"

    Wheeler nodded. "Addison. They're the Addison children, I know them. He sent them."

    "What? Who?"

    "Addison," Wheeler answered, then passed out.

    Several years prior to taking up permanent residence at the shelter, Wheeler had moved from building to building, squatting a few days, stealing what he could. Sometimes it was an abandoned construction site or an alley where he spent the night, and without fail on those nights it rained. It had been raining when he'd entered the cemetery, and though he first huddled beneath a stone angel in his stinking wet rags, Wheeler was forced to give in and enter one of the burial vaults.

    It would be safer in the vault, he told himself. All he carried for protection were a switchblade and a bat. The vault with its shadows and its coffins at least offered a place to hide. Maybe he'd spare himself pneumonia. Settling on the floor, Wheeler gripped the bat tightly and fought sleep until there was no fighting it.

    A scraping sound awoke him. He sat perfectly still, eyes wide open in pitch blackness.

    "Mrm," came the voice from overhead. The coffin that Wheeler was crouched behind trembled, then the lid fell on his head. He didn't move. Jesus, the body in the coffin wasn't ALIVE, was it? It didn't work like that!

    "You'll do." Said the voice. Wheeler shut his eyes and waited for death.

    "Who are you?" The voice snapped. He opened his eyes to see Dr. Addison standing there. He'd seen Addison a few times before, back when he'd earned a few meals working as security

    (decoy)

    at one of the west end's wealthy estates. Addison was the one that adopted all the kids, claiming he could cure the plague. And here he was, pulling a papery brown corpse from its coffin and piling it into a garbage bag. The doctor shot another look at Wheeler. "Do you live here?"

    Wheeler shook his head. "Just getting out of the rain."

    "You could probably use a shower and a shave."

    Wheeler couldn't give a fuck about the shave, but a hot shower sounded like Heaven. He nodded.

    "Help me here, then."

    So Addison and Wheeler loaded a second corpse into a second bag, then carried both out to a pickup with some landscaper's faded logo on the side. "This yours?" Wheeler asked. He knew the rich guys still had cars but he thought they'd be a little nicer. "Don't ask questions." Was all Addison said in reply.

    They drove across town - it took a couple of hours, Addison silently cursing at the manual transmission - and to the edge of the swamp where Addison's house lay. Addison turned on a powerful electric lantern, they got the bags out of the back, then they set off into the swamp.

    "Does anything strike you as unusual about this place?" The doctor asked. He was short of breath, as was Wheeler; the soft earth was threatening to swallow the damn bags. Wheeler shrugged. "It's creepy. People don't come out here much."

    "Why is it 'creepy'? What's so unsettling about it?" Addison pressed. Wheeler looked at the gnarled trees, their clusters of branches covered in moss, with great leaves dragging them toward the boggy ground. The night sky was completely obscured. He opened his mouth to speak but Addison spoke first.

    "You don't see plant life like this anywhere else, do you? So green, so full, devouring everything around it - it won't stop growing. We have to cut it back every day to keep it from overtaking the manor. What's your name?"

    "Wheeler."

    "Mister Wheeler, this swamp is a sort of Source - a wellspring, if you will, of some energy. It feeds the swamp, engorges the swamp, infuses every cell of this place. Hold tight to that bag! This place...well, rather than try to explain it I'll just show you."

    Stopping, Addison opened his garbage bag and let a pair of bony arms fall out. Barren of life, wrapped in shriveled skin and tissue, the arms lay like little fallen branches among the trees.

    Then they moved.

    The skin tore, and stringy tendons produced only subtle, jerky movements, but Jesus Lord they were moving. That's when Wheeler felt a shuffling about inside his own bag and dropped it with a cry.

    "It brings the dead to life." Addison said, his smile horrifying in the lantern light. "This is the Source of the plague. Here it isn't contagious, caught up in the simple trappings of a virus - I suspect we're responsible for that particular development - but it still infuses dead tissue." Addison watched the two corpses shaking themselves free of the bags, teeth in hollow skulls click-clacking and the bodies themselves crumbling under the strain of new life.