The Dark Trilogy (79 page)

It was time to leave.

George squeezed Al’s arm and gave the younger man a curt nod. Al returned the gesture and pulled his wife close, leaning in and whispering in her ear. She went white as a sheet as she listened to him speak. Her hands were on Jason’s shoulders, and as they tightened, the preteen looked back at the others. His eyes sparkled with excitement as he realized their adventure was about to begin.

When the sound of gunfire from outside became audible, only a few people toward the back of the lines noticed. When those people hesitated, several soldiers jabbed at them with their M16s and kept them moving toward the cafeteria. Soon everyone could hear the weapons fire, and frantic conversations broke out up and down the lines of refugees. Several of the men and a few of the women yelled at the soldiers, demanding to know what was going on outside. When they were ignored, they screamed even louder, and others added their voices to the mix. What started out as apprehension was turning into something far worse as panic spread throughout the crowd.

The foursome knew they needed to make their move before things got ugly. They fought through the surging crowd, toward the front of the pack, making their way into the cafeteria. They then maneuvered toward the exit through which Jason had departed hours before. They waited, afraid that if they tried to leave at that moment, their departure would be noticed as the rest of the refugees filtered into the room.

George couldn’t recall exactly how everything went down, but he believed that was the moment when several people decided to charge the soldiers. He could not recall if it was a bunch of individuals acting on their own or some sort of concerted effort. What he did remember were the results.

A warning shot boomed out, and soldiers pointed their rifles at the potential attackers, who had enough sense to stop before they were fired upon. Another noise, this time an explosion from outside, shook the floors and walls moments later. After that, everything was a blur. There was pushing and shoving and more shots fired, but George didn’t pay any attention. Instead, his eyes were focused on the door offering him and his friends a chance at escape. He grabbed Al by the shoulder and slammed his other fist into the door, pushing it open and shoving the other man through. George then waved Jason and Jennifer into the depths of the darkened building. They took off running, the sound of gunfire and screams echoing behind them.

Jason took the lead, maneuvering them through the building, easily avoiding areas that had been populated by soldiers. There was little to worry about; it appeared as if most posts had been abandoned, perhaps only moments earlier. The repetitive reports of automatic gunfire and the rage of the crowd became muffled as they passed through several more doors.

After a while, it was hard to determine whether the gunfire they were hearing came from inside or outside the building. The echoes made it hard to tell if they were getting closer to or farther from various trouble spots as they followed Jason down another dark hallway. After ten minutes of running, George began to worry that the twelve year old was leading them in circles. But when he saw a beam of light shining from down a hallway, he breathed a sigh of relief and swore never to doubt Jason again.

Moonlight shone into the hallway as they turned the corner and made their way down that final corridor. Jason ran ahead and waved them on as they rushed toward the exit. The sound of gunfire and screams grew louder. The letters in the EXIT sign glowed a luminous red, and everyone felt a great sense of relief. George gestured for Jason to get behind him, and he moved to peek out the glass door. What he saw confirmed what the boy had told them earlier.

The door led out to the staff parking lot at the back of the building. The lot was jammed full of cars. Beyond that, a flat field ran for about a quarter-mile, with a wooded area farther still. George cursed, wishing that just one member of his little party had some familiarity with Gallatin and might know how deep the woods were and what lay beyond them. His best guess was that they weren’t too deep and that a subdivision or a farm or two weren’t far off in the distance.

Even if the stand of trees were only a few feet thick, they should be able to slip into them and not be discovered by the Guardsmen. George didn’t want to creep around in the darkened woods for too long, especially with the infected roaming out there. There was no distant glow of city lights out beyond the woods, but he wondered if the power were still up and running anyway. Besides starlight, the only illumination came from the other side of the high school.

Another explosion had the little group grabbing for each other, and Jennifer screamed, startled by the excruciatingly loud noise. The building vibrated, and a bright light flashed overhead, casting dramatic shadows on the parking lot. The image was so bright it burned into George’s retinas, and he spent the next thirty seconds trying to blink it away. More gunfire followed, louder and closer. He listened for any other noises he could differentiate from the explosions and was rewarded with sounds of men yelling and vehicles moving off in the distance. There was something else as well, a sound he could not quite decipher.

He turned to face the others. The plan wasn’t complicated. The woods were their best bet. They could angle away from the parking lot and go north—the trees dipped in at their closest point there and were only a hundred yards away from where the group was now. They would avoid going deep into the woods unless they were spotted or in danger and would try to figure out the best direction to head after they got there.

Even when George could no longer hear any yelling or the sound of vehicles moving out in front of the high school, that other noise, the one he couldn’t quite put his finger on, continued. It was a constant hum, almost a buzzing. It was as if a massive hornet’s nest had been riled up.

George ignored the sound as he wrapped his hand around the door handle, ready to jump outside. It was then that he noticed something out in the dark—shadows moving in the woods. Before he could take a closer look, he heard the thudding of boots echoing down the hallway behind them. The four turned as one to stare back down the passageway. They couldn’t see anything, but heard yelling along with the echoes of gunfire and screams coming from inside the building. The noise had been muffled before, but now was much clearer.

George said a little prayer and opened the door, ushering the others outside, where they pressed themselves up against the building. As soon as the door opened, sound thundered from all around them, and the meager noise from inside was drowned out. The night sky flashed repeatedly with a lightshow that reflected off the woods beyond the parking lot. The shadows George had seen moments before coalesced into human shapes moving through the woods toward them. He swung his arm out, a warning and an obstacle to Al, who was about to depart their shadowy hiding place to rush for the woods as they had planned. George motioned for Al and the others to take a closer look at where they were headed.

A man had broken free of the trees. Behind him, several others followed. With only intermittent lighting, it was hard to tell if they were men or women.

At first, none of them could discern much about the man as he stumbled out from behind a tree and moved closer. When another flash of light came from the front of the building, his face was lit up brighter than daylight for an instant.

Al hugged Jennifer and muffled her scream. The man moving out of the woods was dead. He wore a pair of overalls with a tremendous rip down the front. The hole in the material was wet with blood, and macabre tendrils dangled from the rift, bouncing against the soiled denim fabric as the stiff stumbled along. To George, it looked like the man had been torn open so that some creature might dig into his guts haphazardly, pulling out random bits and pieces. As quickly as the man was showcased in all his malignant glory, the light blinked out and he was hidden from view once again.

They tried to remain calm as they huddled against the wall, watching more of the human-shaped monstrosities approach from the woods. George recalled wondering if he had gone insane, because none of what he was seeing could be real. But as the lights flashed on more ghouls making their way toward the soldiers at the front of the building, he realized that this was far too horrible for his mind to have created on its own.

The quartet was still trying to grasp the full magnitude of this nightmare when another door, about thirty feet from their position, opened and slammed against the brick wall. Another group of refugees poured out and ran toward the cars in the parking lot. They didn’t notice George’s group and apparently had not looked outside before bursting from the building. Based on how fast they were running, George guessed that something inside had scared the hell out of them.

One of the people in the other group, a heavyset man wearing a John Deere cap, waved the rest on, motioning them to fan out and check the cars for one or more that had keys in it. George hushed his crew to silence as the other group became loud enough to be heard over the clamor coming from the far side of the building.

When some of the shadowy forms to the north stopped their progress toward the front of the building and turned to face the parking lot, George knew his decision to remain quiet had been the right one. The infected switched direction and moved into the parking lot toward the other group. As George watched them, he blinked twice, hard. He could see more human shapes coming toward the other group of refugees, but these weren’t bunched together like the others. They were spread out, coming from … everywhere, from every direction, every angle—from across the field, from the woods … everywhere.

A dark thought trickled into George’s head.
If these people hadn’t come along, we would all be dead now.
He would have led his group into the woods and right into the arms of the undead if the loud group of refugees had not drawn their attention first.

A scream ripped through the air from the north side of the building, and the thunder of M16s firing on full auto nearly shattered the foursome’s eardrums. The mix of sounds was joined by the screams of the group outside as they discovered the unwanted attention they had gained. George counted at least forty shapes closing in on the parking lot.

He motioned for his group to move south along the building, toward the larger student parking lot situated to their left and away from the other refugees. He put his finger to his lips, and the others nodded, petrified. George was just as terrified as Al, Jennifer, and Jason, but he knew that unless he found a way to fight through his fear, he would never see his wife and daughters again.

Even as they kept moving, it was hard not to watch the larger group of refugees as they were slowly surrounded. Most of them were hysterical with fear, but they continued to search the vehicles in the lot. The first of the shambling monsters reached the edge of the parking lot with five others right behind it. They stumbled along, but did not falter as they stayed locked on the live targets in the lot.

A young man thought it would be a good idea to climb on top of one of the cars to get a better view of the lot. He then proceeded to leap from one car to the next, glancing down through each windshield as he did so. He moved so quickly that George wondered if he would be able to tell which car might have keys in the ignition, assuming that was his intent. It was too dark for him to have much luck, even as bright flashes lit up the sky every few seconds. After about a minute of this futile exercise, he had gained the attention of several of the rotting figures. If he noticed, he didn’t seem to care as he continued his jumps, each ending with a loud
whump
as he crashed into the hood of the next car in line. He’d gotten halfway through one row of vehicles when he noticed a hand reaching up for him. He was out of its grasp, but he panicked and twisted his body away from the clutching claws and slipped, flying headlong into the next car. A sickening thud accompanied the fall as his skull connected with a Taurus’s front quarter panel. George watched in horrified anticipation as several fiends closed on the young man’s position. A shaky hand grasped the hood of the sedan, and the refugee woozily got to his feet. He steadied himself just in time for the first ghoul to arrive. A scream burst from his lips as another came from behind and, together, they dragged him back to the ground. George tried to ignore the sounds that followed, which could only be described as cannibalistic euphoria. He looked away and fought the urge to retch.

All of them saw what had happened to the car jumper, but there were other things occurring at the same time. Several people tried to outsmart the stiffs by weaving and darting around the parked cars, but still found themselves trapped between vehicles. One or two put up a valiant struggle, but others appeared to give up almost immediately as they were surrounded by ravenous fiends.

A young woman, possibly in her mid-twenties or maybe younger, had a small girl in tow as they made their way through the lot, focused on testing every door handle they passed. On the third try, the woman struck pay dirt: a Mercedes station wagon was unlocked. The woman tossed the little girl into the passenger seat and climbed in after her. Looking around frantically, she found the automatic door lock and pressed it before searching for the keys. An elderly man in their group who was nearby witnessed the young woman’s success and moved in her direction. He jiggled the handle and knocking on the window, pleading with her to let him in. After a few moments, he pounded frantically on the window with the flat of his hand, his voice rising several octaves as his frail arms smacked against the glass.

The quartet all watched as a teenager moved up behind the old man. For a moment, it appeared as if he were going to help him with the car door, working to convince the woman to let them join her inside. The kid wore a yellow t-shirt, and as the light brightened and another explosion rattled everyone’s eardrums, George could see words tattooed across it: Bravo Echo Echo Romeo. When the young man gripped the old man’s hair and pulled his head back to take a huge bite out of his nose, George’s little group knew the truth. The bite sent a geyser of blood across the window of the Mercedes, but even before the blood had stop spewing from the wound, the monster had removed his hand from the septuagenarian’s hair and wrapped his arm around the old man’s body. The ghoul’s mouth never let loose its prize as the two crashed to the ground. The old man’s bellows of rage at being locked out of the car turned into honking squeaks of terror, then gurgling noises as he died on the pavement. Two other rotters joined in the feast, but were thankfully hidden from view behind the cars.