The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead (8 page)

“You go fuck yourself,” he said.

Dan chuckled.  “Sit down, tough
guy.”

Jeff kept glaring at where the
voice was coming from.  He clenched his fists, ready to lunge.

“Tell your dog to sit down before
I shoot him,” Dan said.

“Fuck you,” Jeff said.

“Sit down, Jeff,” Jenny said. 

He spun and glared at her. 

“Sit down,” she said.  Her voice
was soft and calm.  He sat.  He wasn’t happy about it, but he knew she was
right.  After all, what was he going to do?  Run over there and get shot?  They
were at this man’s mercy.  It was that simple.

“Come on over, bitch,” Dan said. 
Jeff felt the anger again, like heartburn, burning up the back of his throat.

Jenny stood.  She locked eyes with
Jeff.  “Stay here.  I’ve got this.”

“Don’t,” he said.  His voice
hitched and caught.

“’Don’t,’” Dan mocked.  “Poor
baby.”

“Just stay here,” Jenny said.  “It
will be okay.”

She walked over to the darkness
and disappeared in it.  There was a rustle and then a sigh and Jenny gulped and
made a small sound in the back of her throat.  Jeff stood up again but then Dan
spoke.

“Sit down, loverboy,” he said. 
“I’m standing now, and your bitch is unzipping my pants.”  Jeff heard the
zipper.  “I’ve got your shotgun pointed at you and your pistol pressed against
the side of her head.  So I’ll shoot you both, if I want.”
Jeff sat back down.

Dan groaned.  “That’s right,
bitch, use your hands.  You like that?  You like that cock?  Don’t it feel
good?”

Jeff's stomach churned.  He wanted
to vomit.

“I think I’ll tell you everything,
loverboy,” Dan said.  “I think I’ll tell you everything she does, just so you
know.”
There was silence and then the sound of skin moving against skin.  Dan
groaned.  Jeff's stomach lurched again.

“Step back, baby,” Dan said. 
“Let’s let him see what he’s missing.”
There was a shuffling sound and then Dan saw Jenny, on her knees with her back
to him, move into the light.  She was followed by a small old man, his pants
around his ankles and her head between his spindly legs.  His skin was gray and
dotted with tiny, coarse hairs that flared in the light.  He wore a pair of
blue jeans, a white tee-shirt splotched with brown tobacco stains, a red
baseball cap tilted back on his head, and a grin the size of California
splashed across his face.  Bits of black and white hair shot out from under the
cap here and there, and he had a pair of blue eyes sitting just above his
crooked, bent nose, gray and cold like the eyes of a gargoyle. 

“You like that, don’t you?” Dan
said.

Jeff wanted to jump, to leap, to
fly across the room and rip that bastards eyes out.  But he didn’t dare move. 
The man had the pistol shoved into the side of Jenny’s head, just above her
left ear, and in his other hand he held the shotgun.  Jeff wouldn’t get two
steps before Jenny’s head would be blown off and he’d get cut in two. 

All he could do was watch and
curse God, or whatever was out there.

Jenny moved around and then
stifled a giggle.  She leaned her head back and looked up Dan and met his
eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He arched an eyebrow.  “Sorry for
what?”

“I can’t do this.”

“What?   You were doing good. 
Just put your mouth on it, baby.  Suckle it,” Dan said.

“But it’s to small,” Jenny said. 
“I like them big, when they fill my mouth.”  Jenny groaned like she was about
to orgasm. 

“It is big!” Dan shouted he pulled
back from Jenny and grabbed his dick with the hand holding the pistol and
wiggled it around. 

“There!  See!  It’s getting
bigger!” Dan said.

Jenny grabbed Dan’s wrists and
shoved them outwards,.  She screamed, “Jeff!” and then dove between Dan’s
legs. 

Jeff leapt forward, his feet
pumping and his heart pounding.  He jumped over Jenny as she snapped her teeth
around Dan's wriggling cock.

Dan didn’t have a chance.  Jenny's
teeth gnashed his penis, biting through and tearing it free.  And before he
could even react, to raise his guns or scream, Jeff was on him, pummeling his
face.  Dan fell back, his cock ripping free from his groin, as Jeff beat him to
a pulp.  Jenny turned and spat out what was left of his manhood.

Dan dropped the guns and whimpered
through shattered teeth.  Jeff kept punching, his fists lathered in blood and
snot.  He even had one of Dan's teeth jammed between his middle knuckles, but
it didn't slow him down.  Dan was a mess, blood everywhere, his nose broken and
shoved over next to his left ear.  One eye swelled shut and the other one
looked like a pimple ready to be popped.  He cried and screamed and held his
empty hand up, begging for mercy, as blood jetted from between his legs. 

Dan spoke, the word “Please”
popping out of a bloody bubble at the end of his blistered lips.

Jeff snarled and punched Dan one
more time, this one knocking the rest of the old mans’ teeth out.

A cold metal tube touched the side
of Jeff’s neck and he turned to see Jenny, shotgun in hand, standing next to
him.  A dribble of blood at the corner of her mouth dripped off her chin like
chewing tobacco.

“Move,” she said.

Jeff did.  He got up and stumbled
to the side and watched as Jenny put the barrel of the gun under Dan’s chin and
pull the trigger.

The top of Dan’s head—with a
generous chunk of brains, hair, bone, shredded flesh, and what was left of his
baseball cap—showered the wall behind him. 

Jenny handed the shotgun to Jeff
and staggered off on her own, down towards a dark corner.  He watched as she
disappeared into the dark and listened as she vomited, over and over again.

He didn’t move.  He stood over the
still-warm corpse of Dan and listened as Jenny fell into a heap of hysterical
sobbing. 

An hour later, he went looking for
her.  He found her huddled in a corner, arms wrapped around her torso, crying softly. 
He bent to her and she grunted and pushed away from him, a wounded animal. 

“It’s okay,” he said.

She moaned something and buried
her head in her hands.  He got back up, went to the kitchen, found a pot and a
box of tea, filled it with water, and set it to boiling.  When it finished, he
made her a cup of tea and brought it over.  He set it five feet from her; when
he came any closer, she started screaming. 

And then he went back to work.

The first thing he did was to take
the boards off the door to the office and hauled Dan inside. He shut the door,
re-secured the boards, and went back to where Dan had died.  He searched around
in there, finding a spot behind a couple of boxes where Dan must have hidden. 

The boxes were empty and pushed to
the side and there was a small crawl space behind them.  The old man must’ve
hidden behind them after Clint and Howie got killed and stayed there when he
and Jenny searched the place.  At what point he finally crept out and made his
move was anyone’s guess, but Jeff figured it was after they fell asleep.  Dan
was too old and wiry to even think about doing anything until they were
helpless.

He spent the next two hours going
over every nook and cranny, looking behind boxes and under shelves, just to
make sure no one else was in there hiding.  When he finished, he wobbled over
to the table where he and Jenny had been asleep earlier, the pistol in one hand
and the shotgun in the other. 

Jenny was already there, under the
table, curled into a ball. 

He got down on his knees and
looked at her.  She peered up at him.

“Thanks for the tea,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

“Will you come over here and hold
me?” Jenny said.  “I’m cold.”
He did, and they slept the rest of that night and most of the next day
together, huddled beneath the table.

7

The smell of smoke woke them.

It wasn’t thick, but it was
present, and when Jeff sat up, it filled his nose.  He got to his feet,
sneezed, and quickly checked the surrounding area but found nothing burning. 
Jenny was up and by his side, shotgun in hand.  They followed their noses out
to the loading dock and gazed out the back window.

The fire in Oakland was closer. 
Huge, billowing clouds of smoke choked the sky and gave the orange morning a
reddish tinge.  Jeff and Jenny watched the fire as it consumed half of the
city, the smoke drifting over to Alameda.  Eventually, they drifted back out
into the food area.

Jeff made soup and they sat at a
table and ate silently, the clanking of the silverware and the clawing of the
dead outside filling the quiet.

“We need to go soon,” Jenny said.

“Yeah,” he said.

They kept eating, both of them
lost in their own thoughts as the dead continued trying to find a way inside. 

They ate the burgers Jenny fried
later that night in silence.  There wasn’t much to say.  When they went back
under the table and held each other, Jenny dropped off into a deep sleep as
Jeff held her, a queasy feeling rumbling in his stomach. 

The next morning, Jeff checked the
progress of the fire.  It was closer.  Much closer.  Jenny looked out the
window with him.

“What do we do?” she said.

“If we’re going to leave, we need
to go today.  If we wait any longer, it may be too late,” he said.

Jenny took his hand in hers.  “I
like this place,” she said.

“I do, too,” he said.  “But we
have to leave.”

“Where do we go?”
“I don’t know.”

They watched the smoke fill the
morning sky. 

“North,” Jeff said.  “Where
there's less people.  I still think it's the best idea.”

He put his arm around her
shoulders and hugged her. 

“And we may not need to go that
far, anyway,” she said.  “We might find some people worth a damn.  At a
military base, or in some town.  We just don’t know what the rest of the
world’s like.  There could be lots of safe places.”
He shivered, the hope in Jenny's voice ringing false.  It bothered him,
leaving the safety of this place.  Out there they’d have to be on constant
alert, always ready to run or fight.  There would be no peace, no rest, and the
dead would be all around them, always a threat.

Not to mention other people.

They went to work. 

Jenny went through the food stocks,
gathering what they could possibly take with them, getting small canned
vegetables and fruits.  She fried up some of the meat and packed it away in
aluminum foil.  She found a cooler and filled it with ice, placing the meat
inside and moved all the goods over by the loading dock doors.

Jeff went to the office.  He didn’t
want to go in there, despite their need to get going.  He hesitated, his hand
hovering over the knob.  Inside were the people they’d killed, him and Jenny,
and he didn't want to deal with seeing them again.  Best to get in there and
get it over with, like tearing a band-aid off quickly. 

He grabbed the knob, twisted it,
and entered the dark room.  The stench of death smacked his face, thick and
wet.  It was like somebody had crammed a thousand wet paper towels soaked in
meat juice down his throat and into his lungs.  He staggered back, retched,
nearly vomited, and held his head in his hands.  He couldn't back out now.  He
squeezed his eyes shut and barged in, felt for the desk in front of him, and
tripped over  a  dead leg.  Jeff broke his fall by grabbing the desk, his eyes
flinging open, and he took the horror of it all in.

Black flies buzzed in the room,
stirred up like a hornets nest from his blundering.  They zipped around,
stinging his face and hands, bouncing off him, biting his skin.  He frantically
waved his arms to swat them away and after a few seconds, they lost interest
and settled back into the dead.

The bodies of Clint and Howie sat
in the corner, bloated and swollen.  Their skin was black and blotched with
large bruises.  Jeff avoided looking at them as he ransacked the office, every
nook and cranny, looking for weapons and anything else useful.  He was careful
to stay away from the dead bodies, and eventually found a backpack and a
crowbar.  When he finished, he staggered from the room and slammed the door
shut, gulping down clean air and coughing out the impure.  He leaned against the
door, his body slick with sweat. 

He never wanted to go back in that
room, ever again.

After gathering himself, he went to
the loading dock, his only bounty the crowbar and backpack.  Jenny greeted him
with an uneasy smile and a look of concern. 

“Are you okay?” she said.  He must
have looked quite the sight.

The lights went off.

They both looked around as the
stuffed space suddenly went pitch-black. 

“Flashlights,” Jenny said. 

They worked their way to the door,
feeling along the sides of the walls.  On the other side, they could feel the
hands of the dead, scraping along with them, keeping pace, their hungry fingers
only inches away.  When they reached the main room, there was a little more
light to see by.  Scrounging around, they found two flashlights and a pack of
batteries.  Jeff held the pack up and smiled.  They would come in handy.

“Guess what I got?” Jenny said
behind him.

“I found some batteries,” Jeff
grinned, holding up the package.

“I got something better,” she
said.  Her hand was hidden behind her back.

“What could be better than this?”
Jeff said.

She held her hands out in front of
him.  A can opener sat, cupped in her palms.  His smile grew and he closed his
eyes and shook his head.

“I almost forgot it,” she said.

They peered out the back windows,
dozens of the dead milling around like blind shoppers at a Christmas sale. 
When Jeff and Jenny got closer to the doors, the dead sensed them and moaned
and stumbled over to the doors, beating their hands and arms and stumps against
the walls.  They were rotting, getting progressively worse, Jeff noticed.  It
wasn’t so much so that they couldn’t move, but he could imagine, if this
continued, they’d be unable to move very well in a year or so.

A year.

Like he was going to make it that
long.  Like he or Jenny were going to be able to survive out there in a world
like this.  How many things could go wrong?  All it took was one tiny thing,
like an infected cut, and they could die.  Then they'd end up like the others,
stumbling and rotting. 

His eyes flicked from the
shambling dead to the fire burning ever closer to them.  His choices seemed
pretty clear:  make a run for it and have a chance, or stay here and burn to
death.  He hated the thought of getting eaten alive, but he hated the idea of
burning alive even more. 

“How are we going to do this?”
Jenny said.

He looked back outside.  The
loading dock was as tall as the average zombie's chest, so that gave them a
height advantage.  And the rear of the van was pulled up close enough so that
the doors, which opened outward—providing them more protection—could open and
close easily.  That meant it was only a short step to the bumper. 

“If we can get them away from
here,” he said.  “We can reach out, unlock the back of the van, load the stuff,
and climb in through the back to the front and drive out of here.”
“So we need a distraction,” she said.  She walked to the other side of the
room and paused by the door.

“I’ll go stir them up.  When it’s
clear, load up the van and then holler for me,” she said.

He gave her a wink and she was
off.

Jeff stood in the silence and
listened as the dead kept up their unrelenting assault.  They never stopped,
never rested, never slept.  They kept coming, like machines that never ran out
of gas, clawing and scratching and moaning, eager for their tender, warm
flesh.  Why was that?  Did all of this happen because God was disgusted with
mankind?  Had God tired of the constant destruction of the world he’d created
and decided to hell with it, he was going to not only rid the world of humans,
but mock them as he did so?

He didn’t know.  He mostly didn’t
care.  None of those thoughts helped him now.  The only thing that mattered was
moving forward, staying alive, and keeping one step ahead of those things out
there. If God really did want him and Jenny dead, then they were at least going
to make a fight of it.

Jenny started yelling at the
opposite end of the warehouse.  She made all kinds of racket, slamming
something metal against the doors.  It was so loud it even hurt his ears, and
he was a good distance away.  She banged and yelled and pounded and he heard
them, slowly but surely, leave off the walls to his right and left, and
presumably make their way towards Jenny.

All but the dozen outside the
loading docks.  They stayed right where they were, beating and scraping.  Why
weren’t they going, too?
Then he remembered his theory about body heat and stupidly realized he was
standing right where they could sense him.  He moved back, to the doors, and
then into the warehouse proper.  He kept going until he joined Jenny, who was
busy making sure that hell itself could hear her.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I have to wait until the rest of
them come around,” he said.  “There was a dozen of them and they wouldn’t
move.”
She banged the doors and he joined her, their din drowning out the moaning of
the dead.

They kept it up for several
minutes before Jeff came up with an idea.  He smiled at Jenny.

“Keep it up and give me a few
minutes.  I’ll holler when it’s good,” he said.

He ran back towards the kitchen as
Jenny went back to work on causing a racket.

Jeff walked into the large
refrigerator, which could accommodate him and Jenny, if need be.  It was still
cold, despite the loss of electricity, and would stay that way for a while
longer, as long as the doors were kept closed.

His plan was simple:  stay in here
and let his body temperature drop.  He stood in the middle of the room,
shivering, as the cold set into his bones.  His teeth chattered and he had to
fight the impulse to rub his arms and jog in place.  He held steady and firm,
his shivers turning to spasms, until he could take it no more.  He opened the
door and stepped out into the kitchen, shaking so hard he could barely put one
foot in front of the other.

By the time he reached the back
doors, though, he was warming up pretty well and he wondered if he should have
even bothered.  He didn’t have time to think about it, though.  He checked out
the windows, didn’t see any zombies, and flung the doors open. 

The van was two feet away.  He
leaned out, put his hand up against one of the doors, and put the key in the
lock.  He opened the doors and spun, grabbing as many boxes as he could.  He
moved as quickly, stacking the boxes of cans to one side and the other
items—matches and utensils and a whole mess of tablecloths that Jenny wanted
included for some reason—on the other.  He was about to turn and go back inside
when  a pair of hands grabbed his leg and a mouth clamped around his ankle.

He looked down and froze, not
believing what his eyes were seeing

A zombie, a skeletal old woman,
naked from the waist up, with chunks of flesh bitten out of her arms and by her
rib cage, with wild, wispy gray hair and dead black eyes, gnawed on his ankle.

Jeff screamed, exploding from his
stupor, and twisted in a panic, the teeth of the zombie scraping on his socks
and then coming out.

Coming out?

He looked down at a pair of
dentures, snagged in his sock, dripping with saliva and hanging from his leg
like a suicide jumper who’d changed their mind at the last second.  The zombie
didn't seem to notice.  She returned to his ankle, gumming away at it.

Jeff kicked her face with his
other leg and jumped back into the loading dock as another zombie, this one a
suburbanite man with half his face missing, white cheekbone gleaming in the
light, reached for him.  Jeff grabbed the doors to haul himself inside just as
another zombie joined the fray. 

It was a police officer, uniform
stained brown with old, dried blood.  He grabbed Jeff’s leg and tripped him. 
Jeff tumbled forward and fell back into the open van as the zombies, four of
them now, moved in for their feast. 

He kicked and screamed and tried
to keep them off of him but it was no use.  They were climbing in after him,
their fingers clawing divots in his legs.  Jeff screeched and fought back,
thrashing and rolling around, afraid he was going to die right there in the
back of the van.

A shotgun blast roared and the Cop
was cut in two, his lower body falling to the  ground as his upper body,
undaunted, gripped Jeff’s pants leg and hauled his torso up into the van.  Jeff
kicked to his right and shook the Cop off, its upper body tumbling from the
van.  As it fell, he could see the entire back of its head was stripped clean
of flesh, all the way to the bone, the zombie’s spine poking through the gnawed
skin like porcupine quills.

Another blast echoed inside the
van and the Old Woman zombie went down.  Another blast took out the Suburbanite
zombie. 

But there were too many of them
now, pouring around the corner, a surging mass of hungry creatures, swarming
for a hot meal.  Jeff saw a dozen of them flood the space between the van and
the loading dock, clogging any escape.  They clutched at Jenny's feet and
clawed their way into the back of the van, unrelenting. 

“Shut the doors!” Jeff yelled.

He sat up and grabbed the van’s
doors and swung them to him, knocking several zombies out of the way as he did
so.  He pushed and kicked and got some clear space and slammed the door shut,
banging them together on the head of a little boy zombie who wore a Little
League baseball uniform.  It looked up at him and moaned, its ragged lips
declaring its hunger for his flesh.  Jeff opened the doors and slammed them
shut, over and over again, smashing the Little Boy’s head until its brains
popped like a zit from the front of its face, shooting out its ears, eyes,
nose, and mouth.