When the Dead (19 page)

Rob’s favorite part of any day had become the evening, the
night. When darkness fell outside he had the opportunity to watch his son
return to normal since he could no longer stare at the dead outside. Gabe was
happy, fed and playing with his toys again.

            “Raaaarrrgh!!! Mooooaaawwwrrgghh!” Gabe roared
as he moved Lego figures around on the dining room table.

            “This sounds exciting!” Rob moved closer to
watch the action his son had created. When he sat down he noticed that his
son’s arms were covered in red and green marker.

            “What’s all this from?”

            “I made them zombies!” Gabe said happily as he
held up two of the little plastic people. He had scribbled their faces with green
and spots of red. “The red is where they are hurt. They ate everyone at the
pizza shop and the pizza too ‘cause they thought it was people.”

            “We need to find you a friend, Gabe.” Rob
sighed.

The
Barnes and Noble loomed over them in the dark, its tall columns creating areas
darker still, places for dead people to hide. Without parking lamps in the lot
or lights on inside, the brick façade and rows of books were eerie. Isobel went
through her list of books. Gabe wanted a dragon series and some comic books. Rob
wanted some educational books for Gabe since he’d have to be homeschooled in
some form. Molly wanted the three Sookie Stackhouse novels she hadn’t read yet.
Ben “would appreciate an older classic”. Edward asked for something on the
Civil War. Moira didn’t ask for anything but Isobel had seen some yarn and
needles when the Cabels were moved to the second floor. She decided to look for
a book on both crochet and knitting if possible because she didn’t know what
type of needles they were. The doors were unlocked so they pulled them open,
taking a moment in the airlock to try to look around inside.

“Hey Isobel, where am I gonna find that vampire shit?” Vaughn looked
confused. Hayden had asked for the Twilight series to reread. Vaughn probably
hadn’t finished a book in his whole life.

“Why does she want to read about dead people walking around? She could
just look outside all day,” Isobel laughed.

“Don’t ask me. If she told me I wasn’t listening.”

            “Upstairs.
Young Adult section.”

Vaughn pushed the second set of doors open and they walked inside. Isobel
moved to the left and hopped behind the checkout counter to get something
between her and the darker black of the store interior. She scanned slowly with
her flashlight across blank journals that would remain forever empty, calendars
that counted days that didn’t matter, novelty items that weren’t worth much
when things were normal and now just made her laugh to think that anyone ever
cared about mini Zen gardens. Those small patches of combed sand and tiny
pebble sit abandoned on countless office desks, with no one left to bring
tranquility to. Some horse head bookends caught her eye.
Those are heavy
looking. I could kill a zombie with one
, she thought as she gazed at the
sturdiness of the equine bust. She snapped out of appraisal mode and verified
there were no undead nearby. Moving through the discount book rows, towards the
language and travel sections, she kept her handgun in front of her. Still, she
could find no sign of . . . life.

A door marked ‘Employees Only’ was propped open and a rectangle of
blackness was just beyond. Isobel started to move towards the threatening void
when Vaughn came from her right. He was eating what looked like a rice krispie
treat from the café.

            “Gross,
Vaughn.”

            “It
hasn’t gone bad. It’s like pure sugar, Isobel. You should eat one too. They’re
still really tasty.” He pushed the partially eaten square of cereal and
marshmallow into her face. She pushed it away, a bit pissed off at him for
wasting time.

“Have you just been snacking or did you look around too?”

“I checked the magazines, the café, computer books, crafts, and the music
section. There isn’t anyone down here. Let’s check upstairs.”

“We can’t. We’ve got to look in there still.”
She pointed to the
open door but didn’t have the guts to shine her flashlight in.

“What have you been doing over here? Looking at THIS?” He chuckled loudly
as he pulled a plastic-wrapped calendar from a shelf behind him. Twelve
Precious Puppies of 2012 stared at her. It was a strange feeling, seeing something
so innocent with a gun in her hand, looking for dead people to re-kill.

“You really know how to lighten the mood,” she said with a half-laugh.
“But more seriously, I’m not as skilled at ‘sweeping an area’ as you are,
Vaughn.” A quick image came to her mind of the dead gathering outside the
bookstore, following the smell of Vaughn’s cigarette and her fear, the sound of
Vaughn’s booming laughter. Delaying no longer, she raised her flashlight and
gun at the doorway. Ten feet down the hallway a zombie stood facing away from them.
Its hair mostly gone and its ears chewed away.

“I don’t think it can hear us,” Isobel said hopefully but quietly. The
corpse started to slowly turn around, the light of the flashlight drawing it
toward the doorway.

“What do you bet it can still see with those rotting eyes?” Vaughn said.
It had completed the turn towards them and finally saw Isobel and Vaughn,
waiting to be eaten. It started jogging. Vaughn dropped the calendar from his
sticky fingers, found his handgun and blew the head away. He walked into the
hall and started checking doors but they were all locked.

Isobel bent down to look at the body. She saw the name badge on her
shirt. “She worked here. How sad. She didn’t get to go home to her family.”

“How do you know that thing is a girl? It’s gooier than the rice krispie
snack I ate.”

Isobel shot a mean look at Vaughn.

“Sorry. Just an observation.”

“
She
has eye shadow on. Or, she did anyway before you shot her. My
flashlight hit the shimmery blue of it when she turned around.”

“Ok. Well,
she
is redead now so
she
doesn’t matter anymore.
So can
we
move on?”

Back in the main store Vaughn’s gunfire had alerted the small group of
undead on the second floor. One had already fallen from the balcony ledge and
splattered in a grotesque spread in the middle of the lobby between the
escalators. The head had cracked open and the decomposing remains of the brain
were soaking into the carpet. Isobel brought a hand up to cover her nose. The
smell was unbearable. One arm had come off on impact and rested on the New
Releases in Non-Fiction table. Another zombie had come towards the down
escalator (which had become stairs in the power outages), stepped and tumbled
all the way to the first floor. Body rot covered the sides and steps and the
corpse, however mangled, was still moving at the bottom. The middle-aged woman
was shuddering, trying to move toward Isobel inch by inch. Vaughn found an
unabridged dictionary and brought it down on the corpses head.

Dead
(ded)
adj. 

1
.
No longer living.

2.
Having no capacity to live: inanimate.

She was dead.

“Who’s next?”
Vaughn yelled in a macho, bring-it-on type voice, as
he looked upstairs. He tossed the bloody dictionary onto the stomach of the
dead woman and started climbing the up escalator.

3.
Lacking feeling or sensitivity.

Vaughn was dead.

Isobel vomited and wondered to herself:
What book was she looking for
that was worth her life?
Isobel still cared for others; she wasn’t dead
yet.

She followed Vaughn up the escalator, making sure not to rest her hands
on anything. Near the top they turned to face the balcony opposite them. Two
zombies shuffled about but had lost the direction of the gunshot, leaving them
without a clear destination. Vaughn, liking a challenge, took aim at the one
closest but hit it in the neck so it continued to move around. The other zombie
started to walk towards the balcony railing. Vaughn shot it in the face and it
fell out of view.

They checked the Children’s section directly in front of the escalator.
It was a wreck, books scattered everywhere, but no surprises, no undead
children. Isobel found the dragon series Gabe wanted and put it in her bag
while Vaughn kept watch. Once again they split up. Isobel went toward the games
and upstairs bathrooms. She found a display of classics on the way and selected
two for Ben:
A Tale of Two Cities
and
Frankenstein
.

The men’s bathroom was empty except for someone’s final shit, left in a
bowl. The woman’s bathroom was not. Isobel tried to open the door but it only
moved an inch before it was pushed shut from the inside.

            “Go
away!!!!” A man’s voice yelled coarsely. Isobel jumped back, frightened by the
unexpected noise. He didn’t sound well, as in mentally stable. “I don’t like
you. I don’t know you.”

“I’m not one of them,” Isobel assured him, coming closer to the door
again, “if that makes a difference.”

“You can’t have this place. I found this place.”

She could hear his footsteps on the tile floor of the bathroom, pacing back
and forth.

 “I found it!” he yelled.

“I don’t want your hiding place. You can keep it,” Isobel laughed to herself
thinking what a horrible hiding place a cold, unsecured bathroom was,
especially once the water stopped running; especially inside a book store with
little food or warmth. He didn’t have to convince her and he didn’t try. He
said nothing else for a few minutes so Isobel tried again.

“Do you need any help?” She wasn’t going to invite the man to live with them
or even tell him where they came from. He was unstable for sure. But maybe she
could bring him a magazine or a rice krispie treat.

“Do you have water?” Upon uttering the last word his throat became drier,
more rasp, and completely sane.

Isobel had a bottle, three quarters full, in her backpack. It wouldn’t do
much for a man that refused to leave a terrible shelter. Perhaps only stave off
dehydration by a day. Next to it in the bag, Isobel found an unopened granola
bar. She tapped on the door with a knuckle. It opened two inches or so, not
wide enough to jam a shoe in, but wide enough for passing the poor meal
through. A dirty hand grabbed the bottle and bar and the other hand slammed the
door closed again.

Isobel decided not to tell Vaughn about the squatter. That wouldn’t end
well and if Vaughn had taken this side of the top level, it would have started
much differently too. Moving down the hall Isobel stood in front of another
door marked
Employees Only
. She hesitated a second and then checked for
any give.
Locked! Thank god
,
she exclaimed in her head. She
wasn’t cut out for adventure.

She spent some time browsing the comic section for Gabe. While scanning
the titles she found a graphic novel series called
The Walking Dead
. She
took a couple volumes, thinking they could learn something. She wondered if the
authors and artists where still living.
I bet the authors never thought
their comic might be used as reference
, she thought. She heard Vaughn
finish off the zombie he’d shot in the neck on the other side of the top level.

With the store clear they grabbed the rest of the books for the other Willow
Brook residents. In the cooking section Isobel came across a book called
Life
in a Can
. The book was full of recipes using only canned goods. A read she
would have never even glanced at before, it had now reached a near-Bible
importance to her. She excitedly stashed it in her backpack, looking forward to
getting creative with her can opener.

Before going back downstairs Isobel looked towards the hallway. She
thought about telling the man that he could come out of the bathroom and be
safe in the larger store. Maybe there was something more to eat in the café. But
there wasn’t any way to help the man and keep the knowledge of his existence
away from Vaughn.

“Come on Isobel. Enough books. I want some new shoes.”

 Isobel’s happiness over the books she’d pilfered quickly disappeared as they
stood together at the windowed-doors at the front of the bookstore, viewing the
expanse of pavement. Estimation was not her forte, but she guessed that there
were about fifty undead attending the party that Vaughn’s gunshots had invited
them to.

“Fantastic.”

“What was that?”
Vaughn had caught the breathy sarcasm.

“Nothing. Let’s go.”

“You’re in the lead, remember cowgirl?”

“Don’t call me that.”
She leaned her right shoulder into the door,
gun ready, and pushed.

Isobel
wanted to leave the backpack of books behind. The combined weight of them made her
slow and awkward as she fought for her life. Vaughn was in his element, moving
quick and calculated, shooting only when necessary and hitting everything he
pulled the trigger away from. Isobel used all the bullets in the clip and
couldn’t keep her hand steady to swap the empty one out for reload. She hit
three of the corpses she shot at but didn’t bring one of them down.

“If I make it back alive, I’m never leaving the building again!”
she
yelled at Vaughn.

“Speak for yourself. I love it out here!” he called back.

 The other side of the mall parking lot was deserted. There were undead
scattered across the street near Target and in the lot of the Liquor and Wine
store. It looked to Isobel like they had a little bit of time.

The shoe store was locked so Vaughn pulled a crowbar from his bag. He hit
the glass of the door five times before he could make a hole for them to climb
through. They walked quickly passed the high heels, flip flops, and Crocs. All
anyone wanted or needed was running shoes. No loafers, no sandals. They didn’t
even go barefoot at Willow Brook unless they were sleeping. Running shoes were
laced up before breakfast as they never knew when the dead could be upon them.

Finally they reached the athletic section and started searching with
their flashlights. “I can’t find my size! Why can’t I ever find my size?”
Isobel said, frustrated. It didn’t help that she had to keep looking up to keep
tabs on the approaching dead. They had started lurching across the distant
street, drawn by the noise of Vaughn’s crowbar on the glass.

“Pick something that will work Isobel! We have to keep moving!” Vaughn
already had a new pair of boots laced up and a handful of extra shoelaces in
his hand. He was checking out the rest of the sales floor for any dead that may
have been locked in the store.

            She
found a suitable pair that was only a half size too large for her feet. The
dead were halfway across the parking lot of the mall. She wanted to grab a
second pair but didn’t think she had room in her pack. She sat down in the
aisle to put them on but she heard something from the front of the store. One
of the zombies had reached the glass front doors. She could read his shirt when
she shone her flashlight in its direction.
I’d rather be bowling.

            “I’d
rather you were bowling too!” she yelled at him.

            Vaughn
laughed but gestured for her to hurry up. “They aren’t going to give up.
They’re like marathon runners. Really slow marathon runners.”

            “He
found the hole in the door!” Isobel yelped and tried to focus on tying her
shoes.

            “They
made it here faster than I thought they would,” Vaughn commented.

The bunny goes around the tree and into the hole,
Isobel thought,
to
get the hell out of harm’s way.
Bodies filled the front of the store now.
There were about twenty rows of shoes between them but the aisles were
unobstructed so the dead made their way through the store with ease. Isobel
hopped to her feet and collected her bag and weapons.

“We’ll have to find another way out. There’s got to be an exit in the
back,” Vaughn said. They ran to the storeroom, pulling shoeboxes off the
shelves in a poor attempt to slow the undead. The storeroom was dark and soon
after entering it Isobel tripped on something and fell to the floor.

“Shit!” Isobel screamed. Her backpack full of books made it difficult for
her to get up. Her flashlight had spun away from her and come to rest against a
door. A cool breeze came from the crack at its bottom.

“Vaughn, my flashlight, that’s the way out!” Isobel pointed. His
flashlight shone on her but he moved it away to expose the door more fully.

“Come on then!” Vaughn yelled. Isobel tried to pull herself to her feet
but the bag kept her down and a burning pain rose in her left ankle.

“I twisted it. My ankle, I can’t use it,” Isobel cried, terrified that
this would be the moment when Vaughn would leave her to save himself.

“Are you kidding me?” He said as he ran back to Isobel’s side to help her
to her feet.

 Clumph
. The sound of feet collapsing cardboard shoeboxes reached
Isobel’s ear.
Clumph
. The dead were getting closer.

“I can leave the books. It’ll be easier,” Isobel said.

“No. You don’t ever leave anything behind. If you do that, the trip was
pointless. Now hop for all you’re worth!” The zombies had made it into the
pitch black storeroom. Vaughn and Isobel crashed forward into the back door. It
gave way and let them out into the cool night air.

            With
Vaughn’s help, Isobel was able to make it across the parking lot and up the
embankment to the freeway.

            “I
have to stop!” Isobel yelled as she pulled free from him.

            “We
have to keep moving. I already said that!”

            “It
hurts, Vaughn! We have to find somewhere safe to stop for a second.”

            “Fine,”
Vaughn didn’t want to stop but he didn’t want to listen to Isobel’s whining any
longer. “Look around for a vehicle with tinted windows. We’ll be much better
hidden.”

            Isobel
found a gray van with windows as dark as the night that surrounded them. She
tried all the doors and found the back two to be unlocked. She stood and stared
at it.

            “Well,
open the damn thing. Those dead people are coming. One of them has made it to
the hill.”

            “I’m
scared.”

            “Scared,
but you feel alive again, don’t you?” He smiled. Without a moment’s hesitation
Vaughn opened the doors to the empty van. He helped Isobel inside, climbed in
himself and closed and locked the doors behind him. Three or four minutes
passed before the dead reached the freeway. Vaughn imagined them trying to
climb over the guardrail. Isobel held her ankle and rested her head against her
knees. She needed to cry but she wouldn’t allow Vaughn to see her
that
weak. 

They spent the night in the van. Vaughn fell asleep quickly and slept
deeply, leaving Isobel to analyze every bump in the night. Her ankle was
throbbing and her body shivered in the cold. She was reminded of Jill and her
night outside.

“Going outside is never a good idea,” she said to herself to drive the
lesson home.