Undead Freaks (6 page)

Frank didn't like it at all. Hutch
wasn't barking. Just hunting. It was something instinctual and it
was enough to make the dog ignore Josie. That meant
something.

“
Do you think any of them are in
here?” said Josie.

“
Your dog seems interested in
something. Stay close.”

Frank felt the weight of having
her close. He had to protect her.

They went through the kitchen to a
hallway. There were pictures on the wall. Family pictures. He kept
going, moving slowly, and saw something that made him stop. It was
a vase of flowers that had fallen off a small table. The flowers
looked freshly cut. They were on the floor and the vase was broken
on the wood floor. Frank knelt down and touched the spot where the
flowers were. It was wet.

Whatever knocked them over had
just been here. It wasn't the dog, either. If it had been Hutch he
would have heard them fall. No – this was something
else.

Frank said, “I think we have
company. Either they're still here or they came and left.” Frank
felt the weight of the assault rifle in his hands again. He was
ready to use it. But going through a dark house with a girl in tow
wasn't something he'd trained for.

Everything about this house was
dangerous as hell, and Frank knew it.

There was a short yelp from Hutch.
It came from upstairs. There was the sound of scuffling and
something that sounded like a deep growl. Then a
thump
and silence. Frank
felt his heart thud from adrenaline and he looked at Josie. He
said, “Stay real close. Company sounds like it's
upstairs.”

Frank and Josie kept going down
the hall until it opened up in a living room. There was a stairwell
on the side, a wide one with a big oak bannister on it. Frank held
the gun in front of him, ready to shoot at any instant. He and
Josie went up the steps to the first landing. The stairs turned the
other direction and Frank pivoted in the dark. He called out to the
dog: “Hutch? Hutch boy, come here.”

Josie joined him: “Come here,
Hutch. Come on, boy. Come.”

Nothing.

Frank thought,
Either the dog likes to play hide and seek or something got
to it in the dark.
But how likely was
that? A dog like Hutch wasn't supposed to get jumped in the dark.
It was supposed to be the one with surprise on its side.

They got to the top of the stairs
and Frank heard a noise down a long hall. It sounded like it was
coming from one of the bedrooms. It was a wet sound. Now Frank's
spine was tingling all the way to the top of his head. It felt like
a trap.

When he was in Iraq, clearing
houses, this was the kind of setup that got good men killed. It
didn't matter how much you trained or how good you were over there.
Some suicidal asshole could pop out at the wrong time with an AK or
a grenade and you went from living, breathing soldier to casualty
in a split second. Frank almost wished he was dealing with ragheads
with guns right now. He'd take getting shot full of holes over
having some freak try to eat the meat off his bones.

Gurgling and slurping noises.
That's what they were. They were coming from the far bedroom on the
left. Frank approached slowly, hugging a wall. He told Josie in a
whisper, “You stay right outside the room. I'm going to go in and
check it out.”

“
Okay.”

Frank knew it was a risk to leave
her outside the room by herself without a loaded gun, but it was
worse to bring her in when he cleared it. Something was...feeding
in there.

Josie stopped just outside. Frank
crouched and pushed the door open and it all happened fast. He
didn't have time to think.

There was a zombie hunched over
the body of the dog, eating from the guts. It turned its head and
hissed, then turned back to its meal. Frank brought the gun up and
aimed for the freak's head.

There was a scream from just
outside the room. It was Josie. Frank hesitated a split-second as
he heard it and the zombie pivoted and went low, sprinting towards
him with its head down and arms outstretched. Its clothes looked
fresh.

Frank shot twice. One shot went
wide, the other one struck it in the shoulder. The zombie tripped
and fell on its face. It sprang back up, moaning as it did. Frank
shot again and hit it low in the guts. The thing dropped to its
knees and hissed at Frank, clutching its belly. Blackish red
intestines were spilling out.

Josie screamed again from outside
the room.

Frank beat it out of the room to
check on her and slammed the door behind him. He knew he'd left one
moving and that was too bad. He saw Josie all the way back up
against the wall at the end of the hall closest to him. There were
more of the fucking freaks now. These were shuffling toward them
from the top of the stairs, nice and slow, mouths hanging open,
arms outstretched. A hungry bunch.

Frank went to Josie and crouched,
taking his time to aim with the iron sight. He shot the closest one
twice in the head. Its brains exploded and it dropped to the floor.
Another zombie tripped over it and got up.

Frank felt Josie pressing against
him. He breathed out. This was a time to fall back on training and
not panic. He fired another two rounds and dropped the next one,
but there were more of them. It felt like a game he couldn't win.
He'd drop one and another one would come climbing over
it.

The one that Frank had gut shot in
the bedroom came out. It opened its bloody mouth and hissed again.
It was sneering. There were dark stains on its shirt. There was a
piece of intestine hanging down between its legs like a dangling
wet cock.

Frank knew the look in the freak's
eyes. The thing wanted to kill for sport. But instead of running at
Frank and Josie, it waited for its friends to get closer. Maybe it
was a zombie with some higher brain function left; it wanted
reinforcements.

Frank took a step back and now he
felt the wall right behind him. He knew that he'd eventually have
to stop to change the magazine. And then the two of them were
goners. The freaks would be able to rush them and close the gap.
The only other option was the window behind him and Josie. Problem
with that was that the drop was too high. If they chanced going out
the window, best case they'd only break their legs and then they'd
still be up shit's creek.

I should save two rounds for me
and the girl,
thought Frank.
But I don't know how many I've got left in the
chamber.

That might have been the end of
them. It might have, if not for one thing:

Ray Morrison's kid, Pete, fourteen
years old and cowering under an upstairs bed with a twenty gauge
shotgun in his hand, had heard the shooting down the hall. And he
didn't want to die alone.

10

Pete heard the shots. He knew that
someone human had come to save him. He was the only one left from
his family. His mom and dad were both zombies now, wandering around
the property looking for fresh meat. And it made him sick to think
about it, but Pete had killed his younger brother Sam, only six
years old, with a shovel to the head after he'd converted following
a bite to the hand.

This was ugly no matter how you
looked at it. But now he had hope. People were here and maybe this
was the time to come out with his gun blazing. He got out from
under his bed holding his shotgun and stood up. He looked at the
gun and it was shaking because his arm was shaking. It wasn't a big
gun, just a double barrel twenty gauge, but you could kill a deer
with it if you hit it right.

“
Here goes nothing,” said Pete to
himself. He opened the door to his bedroom and saw a pack of
zombies moving down toward the end of the hall. He shouted: “Take
this, motherfuckers!”

His gun was loaded with bird shot.
It wouldn't be lethal against a freak unless you hit it at point
blank range in the face. But Pete wasn't thinking straight anymore.
He shot into the mess of them and they stopped advancing. One of
them turned and hissed at him. And then its head
exploded.

For a second Pete thought he'd
done it. Then he realized it. Someone he couldn't see was shooting
them from the end of the hall. Pete only had one more shot loaded
in the other barrel. He had some shells in his pockets. He lifted
the shotgun again to aim, his arms shaking, and another zombie head
exploded before he could take the shot.

From the end of the hall someone
called out, “Get down. Stay down.”

Pete got down on a knee and shot
one more time. He blew a zombie knee to shreds from behind and made
it stumble and fall. It tried to get up but couldn't walk on its
bad leg.

From the other side of the mess,
Frank picked off the targets one by one. No more saving bullets; no
more thinking about death. Just aiming and shooting. Moving the
sight from one shadowy head to the other. The heads exploded one
after the other, spewing blood and tissue and bone as the bodies
dropped to the floor. The last zombie Frank got was low. It was
pulling itself along the floor with its hands. It grimaced and
Frank knew this one – it was the one that had been feeding on
Hutch. Frank squeezed the trigger and then the freak's face was
gone, replaced by a bloody, hollow mess where its nose and eyes had
been. It wasn't moving anymore.

Frank saw the kid then. He saw
Pete kneeling with the little shotgun, a stunned look on his
face.

Frank changed his magazine and
then he waved to the kid. The kid had made just enough of a
distraction to get them all through the zombie attack. Frank almost
smiled. The kid looked in shock.

Josie and Frank went to the kid.
The kid stood up. Josie said to him, “Are you okay?”

“
I – I guess. Where did you come
from?”

Josie looked back at Frank and
then at the kid. “We're looking to take an airplane.”

“
My dad's dead,” said Pete. “And
my name's Pete.” He held out his hand while he stood up and Josie
shook it.

Josie said, “I'm Josie. We're
looking for my dog, Hutch. Have you seen him?”

Frank shook his head and took
Josie's hand and squeezed. “We can't help him now.”

“
What? Did he get – ”

“
Yeah. Gone,” said Frank. It
sucked breaking the news to Josie. Tough times. But this wasn't a
place to think about feelings.

At least the house was
clear.

11

Frank and the two kids left the
house and went toward the barn. Frank saw Kelly and Todd walking
toward them. He called out to them and said, “What's the airplane
situation?”

Kelly said, “There's a Cessna 172
and a Piper Super Cub in the barn. They both have fuel. We won't
all fit in one plane.” Kelly looked at Pete then back at Frank. She
knew The 172 could take 3 people, four if they wanted to risk it.
But two kids and three adults and the thing might never get off the
ground, especially on a grass strip. She said, “We'll have to take
both planes.”

“
You're kidding me, right?” said
Frank. “You're the only person who knows how to fly those things.
No way that'll work.”

“
I can fly one,” said Pete.
Everyone looked at him. He had braces and pimples. He didn't look
like an aviator. “I have Microsoft Flight Sim and X-Plane on my
computer. I usually fly the heavy metal but I know how to handle
the single-engine Cessnas no problem.”

Kelly said, “This is for real.
It's not a game.”

“
I know,” said Pete. “But I know
the flight model in the sim is close enough to the real
thing.They've done tests. It stacks up pretty well to the real
world.”

“
Shit,” said Kelly. She looked at
Frank again. “If we want to get everyone out of here at the same
time we'll have to let him fly it.”

Frank looked at the kid. He said,
“His name's Pete. If he says he can do it, let him do it. We don't
have a lot of options.”

“
Cool,” said Pete. “I've always
wanted to fly real world. Dad never used to take me up, but that
was mainly mom being a hard-ass. She thought we'd crash together or
something. This is going to rock.”

“
It's not cool,” said Josie. She
was moping. She had the right. “Hutch is dead.”

“
I'm sorry,” said Kelly, putting
her hand on Josie's arm. “We should go.”

They all went to the barn. Todd
and Frank opened both of the big doors and they pushed out the two
airplanes. The sky had a red orange glow to it. There was the smell
of smoke.

Kelly looked at the Cessna. It was
the plane she'd trained on with Ray Morrison. It was the easier
plane to fly by far. The Super Cub, on the other hand, was a
taildragger. She had an idea of how to fly a taildragger, in
theory, but that didn't mean it was a good idea to fly one for the
first time with a passenger and no instructor. Taildraggers were
all dandy until you did something wrong with the rudder, and then
your day was ruined.

Kelly said, “Pete, you take the
Skyhawk. I'll take the Supercub. Frank, you ride with me. The
SuperCub can take more load.” She figured Frank had to be at least
200 pounds of muscle, even though he was trim for a town
cop.