Those Lazy Sundays: A Novel of the Undead (18 page)

"I still think for now we don't need to do anything but stay here," he said. "We should keep thinking about how we might get out of here, but I think they're still saying that people should stay where they are if they're safe, right?"

"I think so. They put up those rescue stations earlier, but they were just telling people to go there if they had no choice."

"Right," Jack said. "We're safe here right now, so I think we stay here. Even if this all isn't completely gone anytime soon, I'm sure they'll at least be able to get it under control, so people aren't completely trapped forever. There's no way the government will just let this keep happening like it is."

T
HE MAN IN the baseball cap looked up the flight of metal stairs curiously. His brain registered little more than a flash of understanding, an echo of a memory from what had been a conscious, thinking brain, but was now little more than the engine that ran a body devoid of feeling. The split second image was enough, however, to spur him to action, and he lifted one leg and brought one sneakered foot on top of the first stair. Slowly and clumsily he began to climb the staircase.

When he got to the first landing, he stood in place for a few moments, then looked back down from where he came. His mind used what little logic it had left to consider the possibilities. It was really just a fifty-fifty shot that he would choose the right one, but he did, and continued up the next flight of stairs. On the second landing he didn't hesitate. Whether by some rudimentary form of learning or just the simple product of which chemicals mixed in his brain at that specific time, he simply kept going up the next flight of stairs.

When he reached the top, he faced another confusing situation: a large square rectangle, with a little bit of red, glowing light peeking out from around it. At the bottom, by his feet, was a small bucket, wedged in between this rectangle and the building. Not knowing what else to do, he reached for the rectangle and pulled. More light flooded out of the building, and he stepped in.

A myriad of odors caught his attention, smells just a day earlier he would have been able to identify and talk about: old coffee, carpet cleaner, the remnants of dozens of snacks and lunches eaten the day earlier, garbage not taken out. But the strongest odor that caught his attention was one he wouldn't have necessarily recognized a day earlier. It caught his nose and seemed to hypnotize him, pulling him deeper into the building. Through the still open door, the metal stairs creaked under the footsteps of the line of people climbing up behind him.

Two floors below, Thad McCkelvin, the maintenance worker who usually spent his breaks smoking a cigarette at the top of the fire escape, was dropping an ash into an empty plastic wastebasket in a small office where he'd been using his power drill to screw the top of a desk that he'd sawed off of its base, over the window. His buddy, Leonard Milac, usually joined him on those smoke breaks, but Leonard had called in sick the day before, leaving Thad to smoke his Camels alone.

He could've used Leonard's help, with all of the boarding of windows and doors he'd had to do yesterday, and again today now that he'd dug up some more wood screws from an old storage room. It was Leo's loss. Thad couldn't even imagine the overtime that the station would owe him once this all ended. That is, if they didn't try to find some excuse to screw him out of it.

Which they probably would.

He hadn't thought much about his usual smoke break spot, or the fact that he'd left the door propped open the day before. For one thing, it was raining, and he usually smoked under the roof of the back exit when it rained ˗ something he couldn't do today for obvious reasons. For another, he'd already seen a couple of producers, a camera man, and even Bob Bartolo, the newscaster, smoking inside the building. It violated company policy, but he figured they wouldn't have much cause to punish him for it. They'd have to punish their muckety-mucks and their pretty boy news anchor too, and there's no way in hell they'd do that.

Anyway, if they did punish him, he'd sue them for a hell of a lot more than one day of overtime pay. Maybe that wasn't such a bad angle after all, he thought. He'd been fairly discreet about his smoking-in-the-building transgressions. Maybe it was time to be more overt about it.

He set a last screw and drilled it into the corner of the mahogany desk top, through the drywall, and into the wall stud. He pulled on it. It was on there good. He stood back to admire his work. In just a day and a half, he ˗ well, with some help, he reminded himself ˗ had turned the first floor of WPUR into a fortress. Bob Bartolo and all the suits would probably get all the publicity, all the credit for staying on the air through it all, but he, Thaddeus McKelvin, had made it possible for them to do it. He had driven in the screws, nailed down the nails, blocked the windows and the doors to keep those people out. If it wasn't for him, there would be no WPUR right now, no Bob Bartolo or Elizabeth Etherton. If it wasn't for him, the station would be overrun with those people.

The first floor was safe and secure, and that meant the station was safe and secure.

Thad put his power drill back into the tool box, slipped the cigarette into his mouth, and left the room. He ran almost head-on into Elizabeth Etherton, who let out a quiet scream and jumped to the side. When she saw who it was, she put a hand to her chest.

"Jesus, you scared the hell out of me," she said. "I thought for a second..."

"That I's one of those people?" Thad asked. He took a drag off the cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke out of his mouth. A look of annoyance came across the anchorwoman's face, and he could tell she was thinking about dressing him down. But it disappeared, replaced with a smile ˗ fake, but a smile nonetheless.

"Yeah, we're all on edge in here," she said.

Thad laughed. "They ain't getting in here." He patted his toolbox. "I've got every door and window on this floor nailed shut tighter'n a nun's knees."

She resisted making another face at the phrasing, and kept smiling.

"I know you do," she replied. "Thanks for all the work you're doing here."

He nodded, and she continued down the hall. In spite of the man's gruffness, she actually did feel good that
someone
was in charge of making sure the building was secure. Between Thaddeus McKelvin and their one security guard, neither of whom had much else to do other than check the building's security, they were pretty safe. And it took gruff men to do that. She didn't appreciate how he talked, or that he was smoking in the building, or even his general appearance, but she sure as hell wouldn't have a clue how best to nail a door over an office window, or build a barricade over a glass door. She was also pretty sure that Bob Bartolo had even less of a clue than she did ˗ he hadn't looked like it earlier, when he'd tried to "help."

The world needed Thaddeus McKelvins, and it needed a hell of a lot more of them than Elizabeth Ethertons. In a rare, fleeting moment of introspection, as she was stepping into the elevator and pressing the button for the third floor, she admitted that to herself.

The thought had already vanished by the time she stepped off of the elevator and began walking down the hallway to her office. She only had fifteen minutes before she needed to be back on the air, but she wanted to sit down at her computer and check her e-mail. It had been nearly seventeen hours since her boyfriend Gordon had sent her an e-mail or a message on Facebook. With the phone systems down or overloaded, that had been the only way they'd been able to get ahold of each other. But now...

She sat down at her desk and checked her e-mail first. She had messages from a lot of people ˗ her parents, some of her friends ˗ but she ignored most of them, firing off just a quick note to her dad in Michigan, and another to her mother in Wisconsin, both of whom were naturally worried about her.

She logged onto Facebook and ignored another flurry of messages and postings on her wall, searching for something from Gordon. She had nothing in her messages, so she checked her wall, but saw nothing there either. She looked at his profile last, hoping to see at least
a
posting since the last time she'd heard from him, something indicating that he was okay. But there was nothing new: no new status updates, no replies to anyone else, nothing.

She had just opened up a new message and begun typing when everything went dark.

"Shit," she cursed, sitting back in her chair. The darkness was unnerving, but the silence even more so. The steady drone of her computer, the usually unnoticed white noise of ticking clocks and buzzing electronics and swooshing heating and air systems, were all gone. In its place was darkness. And silence.

She picked up her cell phone from beside her computer screen and turned it on, the white glow of the screen providing a small amount of light. She stood up and went to the door of her office, pausing there for a moment, working up the courage to go into the hallway. It was silly. She was a grown woman, and she had nothing to be afraid of in the dark.

But she was afraid.

She listened to the silence for a few more seconds.

Except that it wasn't silent. Not completely. She could hear... something. Or maybe her ears were just playing tricks on her in the dark.

She listened more closely. It sounded almost like footsteps.

She felt the urge to slip back into her office and lock the door. The footsteps continued, becoming louder, closer. They were still slow, and plodding, almost like...

She got ahold of herself. They were slow and plodding, like someone walking very carefully through the dark. It was probably that Thad guy, or maybe one of the other staff coming to check up on her. She had told them where she was going.

She went into the hall this time, keeping her cell phone on.

"Hello?" she asked. "This is Elizabeth. I'm fine, I just was in my office when the power went off."

She waited for a reply. She heard something that sounded like a grunt, but otherwise received no response. Now she started feeling nervous again. She would have to take the stairs, which were in the other direction from the elevators ˗ the same direction as the footsteps.

She again thought about locking herself in the office. Again, she told herself she was being stupid. She needed to get back downstairs and back on the air. The emergency generators had probably already kicked in on the first floor to keep the broadcast going, as was their standard procedure, leaving non-vital areas of the building ˗ like the third floor offices ˗ in the dark.

She began walking. She would get to the stairs quickly. If someone was actually up there with her, they would figure out soon enough that she was all right and back doing her job.

She half-walked, half-ran down the hallway, turning right at the intersection. The door to the stairs was at the end of that hallway, less than one hundred feet away. The footsteps sounded really close now, and she stopped and turned around, holding her cell phone up like a mini-flashlight.

"Excuse me, who's there?" she asked.

The footsteps continued, and before she could react, a figure lunged out of the darkness towards her. She screamed when she felt the cold, dead hands clamp onto her shoulders. She tried to tear away, caught her high heels on the carpet, and fell forward, landing painfully on the floor. Her cell phone flew from her hand, descending the hallway into again into darkness. She rolled over and screamed a second time. She tried to crawl forward until something slammed into her from behind, pinning her to the ground.

A sharp pain stung her neck. Something warm spurted onto her face. The world started spinning as another searing pain went through her shoulder, and then another.

And then, nothing.

T
HE POWER WENT off just a few minutes after the President's speech ended. Kate and Jack had been sitting in the hallway, still planning their strategy for leaving the house, if that time came. Jack had been in mid-sentence when the lights went out and the television went silent. They sat there for a moment, stunned, not just at the lights going out and the loss of their connection to the outside world, but also at the fact that they no longer had anything to cancel the growling, snarling and pounding of the people on the stairs. It sounded like someone had turned up the volume a thousandfold, and now it was all they could hear: a stark reminder that they were only a couple inches of wood and drywall from a violent and painful death.

Behind them, Phil, roused out of sleep as if he sensed that something had changed, lifted his head off the pillow, his eyes glazed, and looked around.

"Did the power go out?" he asked. His voice was weak ˗ weaker, even, than it had been before, barely above a whisper, and they could only just make it out in the hallway.

"Yes," Jack replied, yelling through the open door. They got up and went into the bedroom, feeling around in the dark to make sure they didn't run into anything.

"Some flashlights in the closet," Phil whispered, then dropped his head back onto the pillow, and closed his eyes again.

Jack went to the closet, and after fumbling around in the dark for a few seconds, found three large flashlights next to the twelve pack of Coke, now down to four cans. He grabbed two of them, turned one of them on, and brought the other one to Kate.

"I think we should use one at a time if we can," Jack said. "Keep the batteries. Who knows how long it'll take them to get the power back on.

"Yeah," Kate agreed.

Jack stood up and stepped into the doorway, looking out into the hall. He scanned the area with the flashlight, letting the small beam of light pass over the door, still vibrating under the blows of the people trying to get through it, over the dresser that was blocking them. He shined it down the hallway, the shadows of the doors playing on the walls. He felt a trickle of sweat roll down his back. Bathed in darkness, the house, once a safe, if not inviting, sanctuary against the insanity outside, now seemed foreboding, a place where every shadow might contain a monster, every door might be hiding a psychopath waiting to sink his teeth into Jack's jugular.