Zombie D.O.A. (19 page)

As quickly as it started, the fight was over and I drifted off to sleep again. I dreamed of being
at
Joe Thursday’s apartment, of the first time we’d gone there. We were in the corridor, him in the lead, me behind holding Ruby. Joe removed the single key from his pocket and showed it to me. He started working the lock and the female Zombie detached herself from the wall and attacked. As had happened in reality
,
Joe shot her through the eye.

We entered the apartment
and Joe beckoned me to follow
him. We
went into
the room were I’d slept before
. Except
it wasn’t that room, it was the tent I was
in now
.

Joe showed me the key again
, really hamming it up like a magician performing a trick. He
lifted the pillow
from
his
bed,
t
he
n
placed the key
on the sheet, did one last magician’s sweep of the hand and replaced
the pillow.

Outside I could he
ar
the high-pitched whine of a tank turret being rotated and I looked in that directio
n half expecting to see
Chavez, leather-coated with the bullhorn in his hand, except I saw nothing but blackness and when I turned again Joe was gone.

Still the whine of t
he tank turret persisted, even growing in intensity. Somewhere another joined it, then another. Now I
could he
ar
the voices of the tank crews scrambling and
heard another familiar sound
, whup-whup-whup.

I
woke
standing next to the bed in the darkness, having somehow gotten up in my sleep. As wakefulness started to take hold I
realized that what I was
hearing was not the sound of tanks, but
the sound of helicopters preparing for take-off. The airlift had begun.

The flaps of my tent fluttered as the first of the
choppers
started to lift. Through the gap in I could see the mini dust storm it was kicking up, backlit by the first fragments of a red dawn.

Was Ruby onboard? I was sure that she was. She was after all their most precious cargo and they’d want to get her out of the danger zone as soon as possible.

I heard the fading sounds of the first chopper as it headed east
and then, I was sure, mad
e a southerly turn. The second chopper followed further from
me, so not as loud. And then the third rose,
its rotors slapping the air lik
e a giant swatting flies.

Suddenly, there was a huge explosion, and a flash bright enough to light
up
the tent
.
I ducked instinctively and felt the cuffs cut into my wrist.

Someone s
creamed and there was
the thump of something heavy crashing to earth, followed by the pitter-patter of smaller debris. For a second there was a deathly silence and
then,
the sound of machine-gun fire.

“Jesus Christ!” someone shouted, “Look how many of them
there are
!”

A woman s
creamed and then came the popcorn
sound of small arms fire, a rapid military tattoo that seemed never-ending.

I had been sleeping fully clothed and now slipped my feet into the combat boots under the bed.  I examined
the
bedstead where the cuff was fixed and it was solid. Tracing it down to where it joined the bed frame, I saw that they’d been welded together. The only way I was getting out of this was with the key.

Outside the battle continued with gunfire, shouts and explosions. I could hear people running and vehicles racing past. Someone was giving the order to fall back. 

The flap of the tent suddenly flew open, and the pretty nurse, the one who have given us our me
ds
, half-ran, half-
stumbled into the tent, her white uniform spattered with blood. Her eyes were wide with fear and she was crying and frantically looking left to right.

“Nurse!
” I
shouted, “Have you got the key?
Have you got the key to these cuf
fs?
”

She ignored me entirely and continued looking frantically around, presumably for a place to hide. Finding none, she crept into the corner of the tent, curled herself into a ball and started sucking her thumb. I noticed that most of her ear had been ripped away, leaving a bloodied stump.

“Have you got the key?
” I shouted again
,
and then suddenly the dream came back to me.
Joe deliberately showing me how he’d placed the key under the pillow. Could it be? I whipped the pillow aside
but there was nothing but the white sheet.

“Thanks a lot, Joe,” I muttered under my breath.

I tried the bedstead again, yanking hard at the cuffs but knowing that it wasn’t going to give the way the fence had in the alley. Outside I heard the roar of a tank and the thunder as its cannon fired. Something big came crashing down and there were screams and shouts of  “get clear, get clear”.

Another explosion
force
d
the tent flap
to flutter open
giving me a brief glimpse of the carnage going on outside. I saw fires and
people
running
and
broken
bodies.
The debris of the wrecked helicopter formed a centerpiece for the battle, lying on its side, a smoldering wreck pouring
oily black smoke into the air.    

For a brief moment
a
feeling of dread engulfed me. W
hat if
Ruby had
been aboard that
helicopter
?

A
lmost immediately I was overcome with a dead certainty that she hadn’t been aboard, that she was even now heading south aboard the first flight. I hoped that the same was true
of
Valerie and her boys.

I knew I had to get out of
there
even if it meant dragging the bed with me. How long would it be
before one of those things pushed through the f
lap and made an easy meal of me?

I looked past Joe’s bed to the tent flap, half expecting one of them to stumble through at any moment. And then it struck me.

Joe’s bed! In the dream Joe had placed the key under his pillow, not mine. I knew I was right.

I slid over my own bed, then pulled it onto its side, and manhandled it closer to the bed next to it. I ripped down the mo
squito net
and took a long deep breath before lifting the pillow. And there it sat. Not the key I’d been
expecting
, but a single hairpin
.

“Shit, Joe, w
hat am I supposed to do with that
?”
I’d never picked a lock in my life.

Still, it was my only hope.
I
inserted both ends of the hairpin into the slot and started wiggling it randomly. Outside the sound of
a
tank gun boomed close to the tent, s
et
ting my ears
ring
ing
. In the next instant I heard a distinct click, and the cuff sprang open.

I’d been focusing on the cuffs as I tried to pick them. Now as I looked up I
looked
straight into the fac
e of the once pretty nurse.

Her
face was now unrecognizable, her eyes blackened by running mascara, he
r
mangled ear bloody, her lips drawn back in a maniacal smile that exposed straight, white teeth that seemed somehow too big. A line of drool trailed down from her chin and
from her throat she emitted a low, angry growl, like a muscle car idling.

My hands were free, but I had very little room to move, trapped as I was between the two beds.
The nurse lunged forward and I
sidestepped
, throwing her off balance and them pushing hard into her
chest with both hands. She
was thrown backward over Joe’s bed and landed in a heap on the tent floor.

She
got
slowly to her feet
, her lips drawn back, and murder in her eyes. The growl in her throat increased in intensity as she prepared for another attack.

Just as she was about to leap,
one of the
tanks crashed through the tent
and caught her side-on, dragging
her under its tracks. The sound that it made was
like
a
walnut
being crushed
under
a
boot
.

The tank rumbled on taking the tent with it and kicking up a mini dust storm. As
the dust
cleared I could make out the carnage of the battleground. Bodies were everywhere, some half consumed, some blown apart by shellfire, others looking like they were just taking a nap in the early morning sun.

Two of the four guard towers were down and a third blazed furiously. From the forth tower came a murderous rain of machine gun fire, but still the creatures swept forward through gaps in the barb-wired perimeter. Some of them were caught in the wire an
d
wriggled impotently like captured bugs.

To my right there was
a massive explosion
, as one of the tanks
ignited
, it
s
ammunition tearing it apart.
Two other tanks were on fire
, while a third rumbled through the carnage like some terrible prehistoric beast.

This tank now turned its turret towards the remaining guard tower. The machine gunners continued firing, their small arms fire bouncing uselessly off the tank
’s armor
. At the last minute, one of the gunners jumped from the tower landing in the midst of several of the creatures who quickly engulfed him.

Suddenly
the tank rocked backward and spewed flame, the thunder of its gun coinciding with the tower being reduced to match wood.