A Little More Dead (18 page)

Chapter
Thirty-Three

Snapping his eye shut, Paul froze. The blood
pounding strongly in his temples made it difficult to hold his breath but he
had to or else. Despite the fact that the man was missing an eyelid and most of
one cheek, Paul recognized him from the pictures in the house. Paul could hear
the home owner sniffing at him like he was a batch of fresh cookies just pulled
from the oven and it was nearly impossible resisting the urge to wipe the drool
from his face. His mind raced. Where the hell were Dan and Wendy?

He wanted to scream.

No, correction.
He had to
scream.

A long strand of saliva oozed from the
slug’s festering mouth and landed on Paul’s lips. He tried not to cringe,
surreptitiously sliding his right hand down his leg. The man’s discharge was
salty and Paul wondered if he was infected. He wanted to open his eyes again
but fought the urge off as his fingertips hit cold steel. The car show spook
licked Paul’s face with a long rough tongue, painting Paul’s left cheek with a
coat of putrid slime that made the bile rise in the back of his throat. He
played possum, the impending bite out of his face looming just overhead. Barely
moving a muscle, he drew his sidearm from the holster on his leg. The thing’s
breath
smelled like beer farts and when Paul opened his eyes
the man’s jaws sprang back like a snake. Paul pulled the trigger and sent the gangly
man of the house rolling onto the living room floor with a heavy double thud.
Mockingly, he got back up, fresh blood seeping from the bullet hole in his
side. The man didn’t care or seem to notice. Paul sat up on the couch, trading
a long stare with this terrifying creature that couldn’t be real. Yet here it
was in the silver light of the moon, staring him dead in the face, jeans caked
with dried blood, Polo shirt torn and stretched.

“Do you know who you are?” Paul said
,
aiming the gun at the man’s decomposing face.

The man tilted his head to the left, skinny
fingers curled into permanent claws.

“What happened to you?”

The car show guy answered with an ear
piercing shriek and stumbled closer. Eyes still foggy with sleep, Paul fired two
rounds. The first shot drove the man back a step. The second found his nose and
made an awful mess on the drapes behind him. The backdoor slammed shut and Dan
and Wendy sprinted into the room with their guns drawn. Wendy inhaled sharply when
she saw the gory mess inside. Dan stared at the listless body on the living
room rug,
Glock
clenched in his right hand. He turned
to Paul with saucers for eyes. “Are you okay?”

Paul sprang from the couch and wiped the
nasty slobber from his face with the Texans blanket. “Can I not get one minute
of peace around here?” he yelled, spitting the vial toxin from his mouth and
wondering how long he had left to live. “I can’t even take a nap without
getting killed!” He threw the blanket to the floor and put two more rounds in
the man’s face.

“I thought the place was clear!” Wendy
searched the house with frightened eyes as if they weren’t alone.

“Where the hell were you?”

“W-We were out back for a minute,” she
stammered, gesturing with Sophia’s gun.

“Hitting some golf balls,” Dan added. “We
found a lantern in the shed.”

“Well it must’ve been a long minute because
that
sonofabitch
was licking my face for what seemed
like forever!”

Wendy and Dan turned back to the mess on
the floor, blinking in disbelief.

“Where’d he come from?” Dan asked
softly.

Paul shot the big screen TV in the face.
“Can’t even watch TV anymore!”

Silence sucked the air from the room.

“No more movies, no more going to work, no
more fucking
nothing
. It’s
all over
! All of
it!” Paul towered over the corpse, thinking and sweating, voice softening to a
whisper. “All because of this guy right here.” His brow went up. “But this is
the hand we’ve been dealt and what’re the odds we live to see forty?”

Dan stared at him, aghast. “Paul, we’re
going to make it, man. We’re almost there.”

“And for what?”
Paul screamed
so loudly, Dan stepped back as if he might shoot him next. “So we can live on
the beach and sing
How Great Thou Art
?
Well, good for fucking you, Dan, but you can count me out!”

“What else are we supposed to do, Paul?”
Wendy interrupted, tears cascading the bend in her cheeks. “Give up? Hide in
the basement all day with the doors locked? Shoot ourselves in the head?” She sharpened
her gaze and clenched her teeth. “There are still good days ahead of us and I
won’t let you take them from me!”

His eyebrows pulled together. “Oh, I’m
taking from you?” he whispered, throwing his hands out. “Well take a good look
around, sweetheart, because everything’s already been taken!”

She bowed her head and sniffled,
slipping Sophia’s gun back inside Sophia’s hip holster.

Dan looked up from the corpse. “Look, I
am beyond sorry about Sophia and I don’t know what the hell is going on out
there but I do know you cannot check out on me now.” He paused to find Paul’s
eyes. “I am scared to death and I need you, man.”

“You know who needs me?
My wife!”

“Your wife is dead, Paul! We’re not.”

Paul’s gaze fell to the floor. He pushed
a jagged piece of the television aside with his shoe, eyes narrowing.

Dan watched him bend down on one knee
and run a hand across the rug. “What is it?”

Paul brought his fingers to his nose.
“Mud,” he said, following the muddy footprints down the hallway and into the
bedroom that looked like a NASCAR store. He stopped, studying the still wet prints
coming out of an open closet. “I thought we checked this door.”

“We did,” Wendy replied.

Paul looked back. “Where are the prints
leading inside?”

Dan’s eyes swept the room. “It’s
impossible.”

Paul stepped inside the small closet and
slid a young boy’s shirts back on the rail. “What’d he take his shoes off when
he came inside?”

“I’m telling you we checked that closet!”

Paul’s heart sank. Slowly, he looked up,
pulse hammering when he saw the rectangular opening in the ceiling of the
closet. “He was in the attic,” he whispered.

Dan poked his head inside. “Oh my God, but
where’d he come in at?”

“Does it matter? We’re all fucked now.”

“Paul,” Wendy said, her voice cracking.
“We’re not fucked. We just need to…”

“Need to what, Wendy?” he screamed. “Be
more careful?
Take a look
around! They can
fucking
hide, for Christ’s sake!” He pushed past them and
stormed into the living room, the7-Up igloo display surging to the forefront of
his mind. He’d kicked those 7-Up cans over to draw the infected from the
grocery store’s shadows but, for whatever reason, the butcher and pharmacist didn’t
take the bait – same with the Kohl’s manager and the chubby little redheaded
girl hiding inside. Paul collapsed onto the couch and stared at the ceiling, a
weary sigh prying itself from his lips. If those things could hide, what else
could they do? He found himself wondering if the flesh-eaters could, one day,
learn to use weapons and tools while Dan and Wendy checked the attic for the
missing family members. He didn’t know what they did next and, just before falling
asleep in a pool of wet slobber that smelled like dog shit, Paul imagined those
things shooting back.

Chapter
Thirty-Four

DAY ONE

The patio door exploded into the kitchen
and a woman wearing an unzipped winter parka and brown boots entered the dining
room, tracking snow across the carpet. With the hood up, it was hard to see her
face. Her hands, however, told a different story. Bloody and torn, her bony
fingers reached for Paul and Sophia from across the dining room table. They
backed into a yellow wall and pressed up against it. A wet moan rolled from the
woman’s gaping mouth, sending a chill down Paul’s spine. Her left boot caught
on a table leg and she stumbled. Paul didn’t squander the advantage and shot
her in the crown of her head.

First kill.

Her forehead smacked against the table
on the way to the floor, turning the carpet red. Paul pressed Sophia up against
the wall and peeked through the curtains covering a bay window. His hope sank.
There were at least nine of them out there now, probably more he couldn’t see.

“Shit,” he whispered.

Sophia bent around him for a look he
shouldn’t have let her take. She gasped and flattened herself against the wall,
eyes wide and jumpy. “What’re we going to do?”

Paul pulled his coat from a dining chair
and slipped into it. “We’re leaving.”

“What about Dan?”

“He’ll be here,” he said, carefully
stepping over the woman’s lifeless body to reach his hat and gloves.
“Everything we need is in the Jeep and the tank is full.”

“Be careful, Paul!”

He froze and looked down at the unmoving
corpse, expecting her to grab his leg at any second. But she didn’t. He bent
closer, unable to recognize her. His eyelids flipped back when he saw her Iowa
State sweatshirt.

“What’s wrong?”

Slowly, he turned to Sophia. “She’s
pregnant.”

Sophia covered her mouth with both hands
and burst into tears. “No!”

Paul threw a wooden chair into the
kitchen, denting the dishwasher. The wind howled through the broken patio door.
“Okay, okay,” he panted, pacing the room and trying not to look at the pregnant
woman he just killed. “We have to go.” He jumped when a gunshot went off behind
him. Spinning, he saw a dead man kiss the table. Smoke trailed from the pink gun
clutched in his wife’s hands.

Her lower lip quivered as badly as her
hands. “I had to.”

“I know you did and that’s my girl. You
keep shooting if you have to and we’re going to…” His words died with a horn
honking out front. Paul yanked the curtains back to see Dan’s Ford Fusion jump
the curb and mow down the stiffs in the front yard like bowling pins.

“Come on,” Paul said, taking Sophia’s
hand and towing her to the front door. “Just remember what the guy at the range
said – slow and steady breaths. Squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it.”

She nodded, her entire body shaking with
fear.

He almost opened the front door but
stopped short. “And aim for the head.”

“Okay,” she whispered, brushing away a
tear.

“Let’s go!” Dan hollered from out front.

Gunshots followed.

Paul took a few quick breaths, pulled
the door back and stepped outside. A man hiding off to the left grabbed Paul’s shooting
arm and pulled the warm meat to his teeth. Paul shot him through the eye and the
man in a cheap suit and tie fell back but his hand refused to let go. Paul
shook the bloody claw but it wouldn’t release so he laid the man down on the front
porch and tried peeling the hand away finger by finger. He flinched with Dan’s
shotgun blast that decapitated a small woman lunging for Paul. Over his
shoulder, he watched Sophia take aim on a fat man rushing through the falling
snow like a pissed off linebacker. “Shoot him,” Paul shouted, wrestling with
the dead man’s hand.

Sophia spread her legs, the shirtless man
closing the distance in a hurry.

Paul switched the handgun to his
non-shooting hand. “Shoot him, baby!”

She squeezed the trigger. The man’s
tennis shoes slipped out from under him and he landed on his ass in the front
yard. Bounding to his feet like a ninja, he resumed his charge, kicking up snow
while Dan took out the ones closing in on the vehicles. Sophia’s next two shots
missed and Paul fired with his left hand. The man took the porch stairs two at
a time and Sophia’s fourth round found his forehead. Head snapping back, the
large man’s momentum sent him crashing into Sophia at full speed. She smashed
against the siding with a loud grunt bursting from her lips and fell to the
porch, her gun disappearing into the deep snow.

Paul put three rounds into the cheap suit
and tie guy’s wrist and stomped on the arm with his boot. A loud crack pierced
the frigid air and suddenly Paul was free. With the man’s hand still clinging
to his wrist, Paul helped Sophia to her feet before following her gun’s trail
through the snow and retrieving it. Shooting as a team, they carved a path to
the Jeep where Dan covered them until they were all inside.

“Holy shit!”
Dan panted from
the backseat, drawing his
Glock
and taking aim at the
people shuffling closer to the car. “Go!”

“Buckle up!” Paul yelled, shifting into
drive and swerving around a young girl with pigtails blocking the end of the
driveway. They slid sideways into the street and Paul gunned it, leaving their
house and worldly possessions behind. He slammed on the brakes. A woman in
curlers and a robe threw herself on the hood. She stared at them through the
front windshield, the untied robe exposing her droopy breasts.

“Please,” she cried out. “Help me!”

Paul rolled his window down a crack,
letting in the snow. “Get in!”

She followed his nod to the backdoor and
came around the front end, screaming when a man tackled her against the SUV. The
car shook and Paul watched in horror as the short man wrestled her to the
ground and bit into her cheek before tearing away a chunk of sinewy flesh.

The woman screamed like hell, flopping
wildly beneath the man’s weight.

“Jesus Christ!” Paul said
,
trying to find his sidearm buried beneath his heavy coat.

Dan rolled down the window. “Should I
shoot him?”

“Shoot him!”

He shot and missed. The man turned to
them with malice in his eyes and blood dripping from his chin, the woman weakly
beating against his chest.

“Go Paul,” Sophia yelled, mashing an
invisible gas pedal to the floor on her side of the car.

The short man got up and Paul pulled away,
watching the woman’s flailing arms go limp in his side mirror. He pounded his
fist against the
wheel,
the dead hand flopping around
his wrist like some messed up tribal bracelet. “What the fuck!”

“Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!” Dan cried,
waving his
Glock
around in the backseat.

Paul
white-knuckled the wheel.
“Don’t you shoot me,
Dan!
”

“Dude!”
Dan pointed,
the color draining from his face. “There’s a hand on you!”

Sophia screamed, pressing up against her
door.

Paul blew a red light, power-sliding
onto Hickman Road with the tires spitting out snow.

Dan pointed out the front window. “Over
there! Look!”

Paul slowed down and came to a stop. Up
ahead on the left, two men in bright ski coats ran like hell across a shuttered
Kmart parking lot, madly waving their arms over their heads. Paul’s eyes
thinned. Barely visible through the falling snow behind them, a dozen shadowy
figures gradually emerged.

“Make room!” Paul said, giving it some
gas.

“What if they have it?” Sophia asked,
gripping her nine millimeter in both hands.

Paul pulled over and watched the men
dart into the street, sweet relief clearly visible on their red faces. “They
look normal.”

Dan popped the back door open and
scooted over. “Get in!”

The taller of the two men offered a
grateful wave just as a red pickup came barreling out of nowhere with zombies
hanging on in the truck bed, trying to get inside the cab. Sheer panic
contorted the driver’s face as she fought off the hands clawing at her hair.

Sophia hit her imaginary brakes again and
let out a guttural scream.

The two men crossing the street never
saw it coming. The pickup steamrolled them and disappeared back into the
snowfall like nothing happened. Paul stared at the crumpled bodies in the road
and ran a hand down his horror-stricken face, the severed hand dripping blood
into his lap.

And this was just the beginning.