Those Lazy Sundays: A Novel of the Undead (22 page)

"W
HY DIDN’T YOU honk the horn?" Sarah asked. "How are they supposed to know we’re here?"

"They probably heard our engine," Brent replied. "I wasn't going to attract more of those peop˗ things. They were all over the fucking place as it was. We just sat there for a couple of minutes and they goddamn near surrounded us."

Sarah slumped back in her chair. "So what then? How do we pick them up if we can't even get near the house?"

Brent thought for a moment. He'd pulled the SUV back onto the main road and was driving slowly away from town. He didn't want to leave the area, but he also didn't want to stop. Stopping, he'd realized very soon after he got behind the wheel, was a bad idea.

"There's no way you can get ahold of them?" Brent asked. "Cell phone? Text message? Anything?"

"Hypothetically," Sarah said. "If my phone wasn't dead, and at the police station."

"Mary?" Brent asked.

"No," Mary replied. "Same as Sarah."

"Well that's terrific," said Brent. He pulled a U-turn and started going back towards town again.

In a couple of minutes, they were passing the driveway of the house where Jack and Kate were. Brent drove past it, and kept going, then turned around again.

E
VENTUALLY SHE FELL asleep. She didn't dream. She didn't hear the sound of the truck, its headlights off now, come up the driveway and stop. She didn't hear it turn around and go back down the driveway when the people started staggering out of the house, curious to see what their new arrival held for them.

But she heard the silence. And that did wake her.

She opened her eyes to the dim orange glow of the flashlight, its battery starting to wear down. She'd left it on. Oh well. They had two more, she thought, looking around, trying to figure out what had woken her.

She looked towards the door and realized what it was. She stood, picking the pistol up from the empty chair beside her and approached the dresser. She walked to the side of it and pressed her ear against the crack between the dresser and the door, and listened. She could still hear noise below. Footsteps. Some banging, probably the people bumping into things, she thought. But they weren't at the door. It didn't even sound like they were on the stairs, though she didn't know for sure.

She stepped back and shined the flashlight on the door and dresser, an act that didn't serve any real purpose, and then turned around and walked down the hall. She went into the bedroom where Jack was sleeping ˗ and snoring loudly ˗ and grabbed his shoulder. He sat up stiffly and let out a sharp yell.

"Jack, it's just me!" Kate said, shining the light on her face. He looked at her, his eyes wide, breathing heavily, and nodded.

"Sorry. Just was having a bad dream," he said. He looked around confusedly, seeing the still-dark window. "It's not the morning yet."

"Almost," Kate said. "It's a little before five."

"Okay," Jack replied, still half-asleep.

"I think those people are gone," she said.

He blinked twice and looked her, suddenly looking very awake.

"Gone?" he asked.

"Well not completely gone," Kate said. "I mean they're still down there. I can hear them. But they're not at the door."

Jack frowned. "Why?"

"I have no idea," Kate replied.

Jack swung his feet off of the bed and put them on the floor.

"Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth, then," he said.

"What?"

"Let's go," he said. "Let's get out of here."

"Go where?" Kate asked.

"Anywhere," Jack said, getting up. "We find the keys to Phil's car. Or we hike down and find a car. We can get to one of those emergency shelters. Our food is almost out anyway, unless we want to starve ourselves."

"You want to go now?" Kate asked.

"Yeah," Jack replied.

He picked up his flashlight from beside him and walked across the hall and into the bathroom, where he opened one section of the blinds with his fingers and looked through the hole. The rain was still coming down hard outside, and it was just barely starting to get lighter, though still not light enough to see much.

"I can't see anything," he said.

"Like I said, I could still hear them downstairs," Kate replied. "They're still around here, they're just not by the door."

Jack shrugged.

"Come on," he said.

They went back into the hall, and he set his flashlight on the chair, so the light was shining on the dresser.

"Let's move this out of the way," he said. He pulled out one of the drawers, still filled with clothes, and set it on the floor. Kate joined him, and when they had all of the drawers out, they both picked up the now much lighter furniture and slid it down the hall, out of the way of the door.

With that finished, Jack went back into the bedroom he had been sleeping in and came out with the baseball bat that Phil had given him two days earlier.

“We’ll keep this pretty simple,” Jack said. “I’ll open the door. We'll see what's out there. If it's clear, we go downstairs.
Carefully.
If they're still down there, we have to be real careful."

"What if we open the door and they're still there?" Kate asked. "What if they start coming up the stairs? Do we just shut the door again?"

Jack shook his head.

 "They’ll be bottlenecked here, so you shouldn’t have to deal with more than a couple at a time. I’ll help cover any of them you can’t handle.”

Kate thought about what that meant. More shooting. More killing. More blood on her hands. She felt a flash of anger rise through her. Of course it was easy for Jack to suddenly play the tough guy, to tell her to "deal with" them. He hadn't killed anyone. She had. More than one, now. And he was telling her to do it again, like they were playing a video game, and the people he was expecting her to shoot were just pixels on a screen.

The thought of a cure still went through her mind. She could imagine shooting their way out of the house, then finding the the police or National Guard on the lawn with a bunch of happy pills that would turn the monsters downstairs back into regular people.

That's some great medicine, doc. I don't suppose you have a cure for a bullet in the head, do you?

Jack held the bat up. “The revolver has six shots.  I'll keep the bat just in case I run out of bullets. I’ll only take a shot if there are too many for you to handle. If I go through all six bullets, I’ll take them down with this.”

Kate nodded. “Okay, I guess.”

“Plus,” he added, “I’m actually pretty good at baseball.”

He smiled, and Kate smiled back.

“I don’t want to jinx it,” Jack said, “But this shouldn’t be an issue, up here. It sure sounds like a lot of them have gone. I'm just trying to plan ahead if something were to happen.”

"I don't know, Jack. It sounded like a lot of them were still downstairs. I don't think they've gone that far."

Jack put a hand on her shoulder. "It's fine Kate. I'm just as scared as you. But this is like peeling off a Band-Aid. If we don't do it now, we'll never get the courage to do it, and in a few days, when we're starving, we'll look out and realize that those people left days ago, and that we were stuck in here for nothing. We've got to do this. Like, now."

"I don't know..." Kate continued.

"Come on," Jack said. "You stand way back there." He pointed down the hall, to the end.

Kate sighed, and nodded. "Fine."

She positioned herself down the hall, her back against the wall at the end. Jack stood by the door and grasped the doorknob. He looked back at Kate, who was holding the Glock with both hands in a low-ready position. The extra magazine was sticking out of her pocket.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready.”

Jack slowly turned the doorknob, and threw the door open.

He flattened against the wall, and was about to take a peek around the doorway when a  gunshot blasted through the house, shaking the walls and making his ears ring. A second later, a person staggered into the hallway, blood pouring from his chest. Kate fired again, this shot hitting the man in the head.

To their shock, people poured from the stairwell into the hallway. Kate fired rapidly, the first couple of bullets striking a man in the chest. Jack retreated into the bedroom, realizing, with horror, that he had been wrong. Those people had left the staircase, but they hadn't gone far. They'd been downstairs ˗ exactly as Kate had told him. Once they started moving the dresser, making noise, he figured, they'd started coming back. They must have just been climbing up the stairs when he opened the door.

And now they were coming for him and Kate. All of them.

"WE CAN’T JUST keep going back and forth all day," Sarah said. "We˗"

"Wait," Brent said. This time, he did bring the truck to a stop, just in front of the driveway. "You hear that?"

Sarah and Mary listened.

"Not really," Sarah said. "I hear the stupid rain and the wind."

"I hear it!" said Mary. "There!"

In the distance was a faint crack, like a tree branch splitting or a distant thunder clap.

"I do hear it now," Sarah said. "It sounds like..."

"It's gunfire!" Brent yelled. "Shit, don't tell me those two kiddies have guns up there."

He spun the wheel and took the SUV up the winding driveway. The noise became louder and more definite as they got closer to the house.

"I wonder what's going on," Sarah said. "I hope they're not in trouble."

"I don't know many people who shoot guns inside their house when things are going well," Brent replied.

"It's not their house," Sarah said.

"You know what I mean," Brent replied. When he approached the top of the driveway, he turned the SUV around so it was facing down the hill, nearly getting it stuck in the mud in the process.

"Give me the shotgun," Brent said. "You two stay here. I'm going to go see what's going on. Give your friends some help if it looks like it's worth it."

Sarah glared at him. "Like it's worth it?"

He ignored her question, reaching into the back seat where Mary was handing him the Remington pump-action, handling it as if she was holding a piece of expensive China.

"I've got both guns," he said, pointing to his pistol and holster ˗ his brother's, an hour earlier ˗ around his waist. "Would leave you one, but the shotgun only holds five rounds. Might need the bigger magazine on the pistol."

"Whatever," Sarah replied. "I don't know anything about that. But I'm not staying here in this stupid truck while you go and play hero."

"You're not coming with me," Brent said. "You said it yourself, you don't know anything about this shit."

"No, but I know my friends," Sarah said. "Now are we going to keep arguing about this or are we going to go get them?"

Brent muttered under his breath and opened the door.

"You don't want to come, do you?" Sarah asked, looking over the seat at Mary.

"No, I'm fine," Mary said.

"You should probably leave the car running," Sarah said. "And get in the driver's seat. Just in case."

Mary nodded. "That's fine."

Sarah got out of the SUV, the cold rain immediately soaking through her clothes, and hurried to catch up with Brent.

"Here," Brent said when she ran up beside him. He handed her the pistol. "Let me guess: you have no fucking idea how to use this."

"I've never used one before, but how hard can it be, Brent? You point it at something and you pull the trigger, right?"

"Harder than it looks," Brent replied. "That's why cops and soldiers have to train and qualify on the things. At close range it's pretty easy, but don't think you're going to be playing Die Hard on those people from fifty feet away. Try it, and you'll see how easy it is."

"Maybe I will," Sarah replied.

Brent looked at her. "Yeah, don't. You'll probably shoot yourself."

"More likely you," Sarah replied.

Brent laughed. "The fucked up thing is that I believe you."

Sarah smiled.

"Look ahead," Brent said.

They stopped at the end of the driveway. The sky was just beginning to lighten, though the clouds and rain kept a gloomy pall over everything. Through the dimness of the early morning twilight, they could see dark shapes moving around the house, on the deck, and around the vehicle in the driveway.

There were more gunshots, this time clearly originating from inside the house, accompanied by flashes of light in the second story window.

"What now?" Sarah asked. "Do we run in there guns blazing?"

"I have no fucking idea," Brent replied.

A FAT NAKED man lunged in from the hallway, two red holes in his chest from two of Kate's shots. Jack backpedalled, only to run into the bed and fall backwards onto the mattress. The naked man loomed over him and leaned in for the kill. Without thinking, Jack grabbed the gun from his jeans, stuck the .38 onto the man’s temple and pulled the trigger. Chunks of brain flew out the other side of the man’s head, and the heavy corpse fell forward onto him. Jack screamed and struggled under the dead weight before finally pushing the body off him. He looked at the corpse on the floor, its head in pieces, and felt his heart race, like he was about to go into shock.