Eric S. Brown (2 page)

***

Lori screamed as the window’s glass shattered and a pair of loose skinned, rotting hands grabbed at her. She backpedaled away, tripping over the living room rug, landing on her butt and grunting from the pain. The hardwood floor wasn’t kind to her posterior. The dead teenager tore away the final nailed-in-place board with the help of two other rotters and began to haul itself through the window at her.

“
Michael!” Lori yelled. “They’re inside!”

She scrambled to her feet and bolted for the basement door. Michael met her there, a pump action shotgun in his hands.

“
I told you not to come up here,” he grumbled. “Now we’re really going to be trapped downstairs.”

“
As if we weren’t anyway,” Lori snapped at him, just as the teenager flopped onto the hardwood floor below the window. Another rotter was already climbing through the broken window after it.

Michael raised the shotgun but Lori slapped its barrel down towards the floor. “Don’t use it unless we have to,” she warned him. “Remember last time?”

Whether he did or not, Lori blamed the horde of creatures in the yard on him. The first time they had tried to leave the house, it had been his genius plan to try to fight their way to the car sitting in their driveway. It hadn’t worked out very well for them. As soon as he had stopped to reload, they had been forced to hightail it back inside and within minutes the number of rotters outside had tripled. She guessed there were at least fifty of the things around the house now and the makeshift fortifications were finally starting to crumble from the things’ relentless attacks. Lori put her hand on Michael’s chest and shoved him through the basement door. She saw him start to protest but cut him off. “We can’t fight them all, Michael, and you know it. You’ve got what, maybe two dozen shells left?”

The dead teenage boy was on his feet and he came charging towards them. Lori slammed the door in his face and together she and Michael held it closed as he raged against it on the other side.

“
So what now?” Michael demanded.

“
Get the board in place!” Lori shouted at him.

The two of them had rigged up an old fashioned katy bar for the door. Michael reached for the board with one hand, keeping his other in place to help her. Finally, they got it in place. Lori watched the door shake in its frame as more of the dead joined the teenager. She could hear several distinct hungry cries coming from the other side now.

“
It’s not going to hold them,” she admitted.

“
Not for long anyway,” Michael agreed.

“
Well, I for one am not giving up without a fight,” she told him and darted down the steps.

They only had the one gun so she snatched up a metal baseball bat from where it lay propped on the side of the washing machine and got ready. Michael moved to stand by her side.

“
Look . . . I’m sorry,” he said.

“
Not the time,” Lori said through clenched teeth as the door above them splintered and three rotters came half rolling, half bouncing down the steps. Lori didn’t give them a chance to recover from their fall. She sprang forward, caving in the closest one’s skull with a vicious swing as it looked up at her with soulless, hollow eyes. She bashed it two more times as Michael’s shotgun thundered, echoing off the cement walls, turning one of the rotter’s faces into reddish pulp.

“
Watch out!” she howled as the third rotter, not bothering to get up from where it had landed, latched onto Michael’s leg with its right hand. Michael swung the butt of his shotgun downwards onto the top of its black hair with the sickening sound of bone caving inward.

Seven more rotters had already taken the place of the first three and this time the things were on their feet and closing in fast. Lori met one with a swing that broke its jaw and sent it reeling into the others. The sound of gunfire erupted from somewhere above. Lori and Michael exchanged a “what in the Hades” glance at each other.

“
Hold on! We’re coming!” Someone called to them from upstairs. A nerdy looking guy in a Flash shirt appeared at the top of the steps behind the rotters. He fired three times with the 9mm pistol in his hand, knocking one of the rotters from its feet. A real weirdo, dressed like he’d just walked off the set of a low budget science fiction movie, came flying past the nerd into the rotters. The bloody blade of his katanna took the head of one of the creatures. Before the things could barely move, he’d gutted a second, causing it to trip over its own intestines, and slashed open a third’s head, splattering the basement wall with black pus and brain matter.

Suddenly, filled with hope that she’d live to see the next sunrise, Lori let loose a battle cry and rejoined the fray as Michael pumped off another round. The nerdy guy leaned over the steps’ railing to press the barrel of his pistol against the backside of a rotter’s head and squeezed the trigger. The rotter’s forehead exploded outward, its twitching form collapsing to the floor. The last of the rotters in the basement met its end as the weirdo’s katanna sent the top half of its head tumbling towards Lori.

“
I’m Jacob. That freaky guy is Elijah. We’re here to save you,” the nerdy guy said.

Elijah bounded up the steps, out of the basement, like a cat. His movements smooth but hurried. Jacob gave them a weak smile.

“
Stop standing there!” Lori yelled at him. She rushed passed Jacob with Michael on her heels. The living room was a war zone. The front door was smashed in, likely from where Jacob and Elijah had entered, and a dozen or more of the rotters filled the room.

Lori saw Elijah sheath his sword, drawing two Glocks from holsters underneath the trench coat he wore. Elijah ran at the rotters and through them, his guns blazing. Only three remained by the time he had disappeared into the yard. Lori heard Michael’s shotgun boom behind her. A rotter took its blast full on in the chest and went sprawling over the living room couch. Lori ran at the last one in her path to the door as Michael dropped the other remaining creature with a pair of quick shots that shattered one of its legs and blew off chunks of its right shoulder.
That’s my husband,
she thought,
Couldn’t land a headshot anymore than he could hit the broad side of a barn.
But she knew the creature wouldn’t be getting up until they were long gone.

The rotter in her path was a man in the blue shirt and khaki shorts of a mailman. A sack of letters still dangled, forgotten, in a bag strapped over his left shoulder. He had been mauled, badly. There wasn’t much left of his neck to speak of.
Easy,
she thought, rearing back her bat, but the dead man surprised her. He sprang at her with an inhuman speed, driven by insatiable hunger. He somehow managed to block her bat as she brought it around, knocking it from her grasp. Lori’s eyes went wide with fear as his cold hands clamped onto her arms. His chomping teeth shot forward at her flesh. A pistol cracked and the dead man’s eye imploded as a 9mm round dug through it into his brain, snapping his head away from her. The motion ripped apart what little sinew remained holding it to his body. Lori screamed and kicked the severed head that had fallen to her feet across the room before getting a grip on her situation again. She hopped over the headless corpse where it lay in her path and dashed out the front door. Elijah was waiting there in a van with the motor running. She dove through its open side door into its back.

As soon as Michael and Jacob made it into the van, Elijah floored the gas. The van smashed through the short, white fence lining the house’s yard and kept right on going.

“
Wouldn’t happen to have any Oreos on you, would ya?” Elijah asked without taking his eyes from the road ahead and the rotters racing to meet them.

“
Nope,” Lori answered, “fresh out.”

She saw that Michael and Jacob were as stunned by the bizarre question as she was.

“
Too bad,” Elijah said, jerking the steering wheel around to dodge an abandoned Ford Taurus sitting in the middle of the road. “I could really go for some right now.”

***

As they drove, Jacob explained how Elijah had saved him as well and gave them a rundown on the plan, if it could be called that. They were as awestruck by the insanity of it all initially just as he had been but Jacob had learned to just roll with Elijah’s craziness. If it kept him alive, it couldn’t be a bad thing, could it? Still, Jacob was happy to have Lori and Michael with them. The married couple sat across from him in the rear of the van, holding hands as the three of them traded stories and talked.

“
Any idea how all this started?” Jacob asked them. “I didn’t really keep up with the news . . . back when there was news.”

“
I figured you guys would know a lot more than we do,” Michael told him.

“
I don’t know anything,” Jacob confessed, “I heard there was a virus and that’s all.”

“
We heard that too,” Lori said as she undid her ponytail, fluffing waves of long, brown hair over her shoulders.

Jacob hoped Michael didn’t notice him checking her out. She was cute in an odd kind of way. Her body was super thin but well-toned, her breasts surprisingly large for such a lithe frame. The tight, white tank top she wore made it hard not to stare in spite of the red and black stains covering it. Her eyes were a fierce green, sharp and strong. The features of her face were angular like a bird’s. Michael, on the other hand, was nothing to write home about. He was your typical, big, hulking jock. Jacob would never want to go head to head with him in a straight up fight but was otherwise utterly unimpressed by the man. It was easy to picture Michael talking sports, going hunting, and lifting weights in the basement of the house he and Lori shared. He seemed the kind of guy Jacob and his friends had always mocked and made fun of. Quite honestly, Jacob wondered what Lori saw in him. Jacob knew he had let his gaze linger a bit too long on Lori’s chest as Michael cleared his throat.

“
I don’t want to come across as ungrateful,” the big man said, “But we’ve got family out there.”

“
No!” Elijah chimed in from the driver’s seat. “You don’t. They’re dead. The sooner you accept that the better. We stay together or you will be too.”

“
Now look!” Michael’s voice rose as his cheeks flashed red with sudden anger. “You can’t possibly know that.”

“
No, Michael,” Lori said as Jacob watched her squeeze his hand. “Elijah’s right. The world is dead. Everything we knew, everyone we knew, is gone.”

Michael slumped where he sat, clearly defeated. Jacob marveled at the little woman’s power over the giant but wondered if he would be any different in the big man’s place.

“
The only questions we should be asking are how to stay alive and how to start over,” Lori said. “This is all just so much to deal with.”

“
You got that part right,” Michael grunted.

Lori turned towards the front of the van. “Mr. Elijah, how many more people are you planning on trying to save?”

Jacob smiled. She really did go straight for the heart of things. She’d just put Elijah on the spot with a direct question he had to answer or risk losing them all.

“
There are two more places that I know of,” Elijah said. “There’s a police station where a small group of folks seem to be holding their own against the dead. They’ve been doing okay so far, however, I doubt it will go well for them when their ammo begins to run out. There’s also another sole survivor reading registering in the warehouse district, inside of what appears to be the city morgue according to my map.”

Jacob stared at Elijah. “There’s a whole other group of people still alive? Why in the Hades didn’t we go to them first?”

“
If we had, Jacob, would Lori and Michael be alive at this moment?” Elijah countered.

Jacob noticed the married couple staring at him. “I didn’t mean. . .”

“
It’s okay,” Lori assured him. “So which one do we go after, Elijah?”

“
The lone reading, of course. That person is the least likely to survive without our help. Besides, the group at the police station would bring too many problems with them.”

“
Afraid they’d stick you in a home for special people again?” Michael mocked him.

“
Man, that was a low blow,” Jacob shook his head.

Elijah was untroubled by Michael’s insult so far as Jacob could tell.

“
I never said I was in an asylum, Michael.”

“
That’s the point,” Michael said, “you haven’t told us crap about who you are or where you came from. Where did you get all these weapons and ammo much less that. . .that thing you’re using to find people? How did you survive the first night?”

Elijah suddenly hit the brakes. The van squealed to a halt in the center of the road. The cries of the nearby dead rose in pitch as they scurried to take advantage of what might be their only chance at a meal anytime soon.

“
You are welcome to go your own way if I disturb you that much, Michael.” Elijah’s voice was cold and firm.

Jacob hopped from his seat, moving to peek through the van’s front window over Elijah’s shoulder. Five rotters were closing in on the van and those were just the ones Jacob could see. “Elijah, what are you doing, man?” Jacob whispered.

Lori jumped as a pair of dead, gray hands slapped against the windows of the van’s rear door.