Dead Hunger V: The Road To California (8 page)

I leaned in and took the metal box out, placing it on the bed and opening it.  We heard a sound in the hallway, just behind the closed door.

Lisa screamed.  I held my finger up to my lips and shook my head.  “Load that magazine,” I whispered, my ear against the door.  “Hurry.”

Lisa, crying again, got to work following my instructions.  I heard scratching through the hollow core door and with my hand against it, I could feel whatever was on the other side … moving. 

What I can only describe as wet sounds accompanied an unmistakable presence on the other side of the door, and I pictured Matt Rowe out there, looking just like all the others, gnashing or doing whatever it is they do when nobody’s looking.

Then I thought to myself that perhaps Lisa had gotten it all wrong, and what was on the other side of this veneer and cardboard barrier was my mother.  Tammy Rowe, hungry and ready to eat her children, come hell or high water.

I looked at Lisa.  If it came to that, it would be hell for her, and a different kind of hell for her daughter and me.

A living hell.  I think we were already there.

“I got it,” she said, standing again.”

“Okay,” I said.  “It’s here.  I don’t know what or who, but it’s right on the other side of the door.”

“Dad?” Lisa called, rushing forward and knocking on the door.  I held the .45 in one hand and pulled her away from the door by her shoulder.

“If either one of them were out there,” I said, “one of them would answer.  Whoever it is, they’re not the same anymore.”

“I need to see him before you do anything!” she shouted, and as she was mid-sentence, the door strained in its frame as something pushed it, slamming it and testing its strength.  We could hear moans over the scratching and pounding.

I pressed the gun barrel up to the door, and Lisa said, “No, David!”

“Lisa!” I shouted, then forced myself to calm.

People always told me I had a soft, soothing voice and a way to break tension with stupid jokes and an easy tone, but right now I wasn’t finding any of those qualities. 

“Leese,” I said, “we can’t do this all night.  We have to find out what the situation is, deal with it, and get out of here.  I’m opening the door.”

She stepped back to the far wall, the .22 in her hands.  She kept the barrel pointed toward the ground, but as I stepped aside, my .45 aimed toward the door, she raised the smaller gun.

I unlocked the door.  Very slowly, with my left hand, I turned the knob.  The wet noises continued from beyond our line of sight, but the scratching and banging had stopped.

I stepped back, the knob in my hand, and let the door open inward, silent and revealing.

Revealing a gray-faced, pink-eyed Matt Rowe.  He was holding my mother’s hand.  More accurately, he was eating it,
tearing
at it with his bloody teeth as he gripped onto her severed arm.  I knew it was hers at first glance.

“No!” croaked Lisa, her voice barely audible as she stared at the monster that had been her father, wearing his pajama bottoms and his shirt, the buttons all popped open. 

His skin was as pocked and heavily veined as any of the things I’d seen, and he clutched the horrifyingly familiar extremity in both of his destroyed hands, gnawing and biting into the fleshy part of the wrist.

He was quite involved and had not seen the door open just half a foot away from him – which is
probably
a terrible way to word that, but since I’m writing this longhand, it’s going to have to stay that way.

As he worked his way up to the fingers, both of us watching in sheer terror, he tore the second finger from its socket with his bared teeth and turned his head up to allow it to fall deeper into his ghastly throat.  Before this happened though, the gold and diamond ring that had once been on that finger dropped, clinked against the tile floor and rolled across the room straight toward Lisa, as though it were meant to convince my sister that it was all true.

Lisa stared down at the ring that lay just a few inches from her feet.  It was our mother’s wedding ring. 

She looked at what was once her father again, then at me.  “
Kill it, Dave
!” she screamed.

The creature turned toward me as Lisa’s voice shattered the sound of flesh being devoured.  Her cry was shrill and clearly acknowledged by Matt Rowe, for he looked up just as I raised the .45 toward his head.

Pink mist began to pour from his eyes as I pulled the trigger and staggered out of its cloud, sputtering. 

Nothing.  The gun had failed to properly chamber a round.  I had no backup plan, and this dead fuck was advancing on the door. 

With a guttural scream I charged him.  Dropping my head like a linebacker, I rushed the feeding creature, slamming my head into the dead thing’s midsection.  I hadn’t expected my
own
reaction, so it took the thing completely by surprise and he toppled backward into the hall, falling and sliding another three feet on its back across the hall floor.   My momentum carried me clear over him, and I rolled as I hit the floor, coming to rest against the wall next to Lisa’s room.

I recovered quickly, trying to clear the jam from the gun.  I quickly discovered it was good and stuck.

“Close that door, Lisa!  Close it now!” I shouted, and scrambled back to my feet just as Matt did the same, only a bit more slowly.

I watched until the door slammed before pounding on the wall to get his attention and running down the hall and into the dining room.  I threw the .45 down on the dining table, grabbed a hefty chair – the end chair with arms – not a side model – and waited.

I heard him coming up the hall, the chair raised high over my head, and timed my downswing so as his head appeared, the chair slammed into it.

One of the stiff, wooden legs punched through his skull and kept going, exiting beneath his chin.  I pushed at the chair then, and knocked him down, his body kicking and almost spinning on the floor.  I grabbed another chair and raised it high over my head, bringing it down onto his twitching head and neck. More damage, but it was still trying to get up.

Jumping backward, I grabbed the .45 and yanked on the top of it, seeing the jammed bullet, but unable to clear it.  Another try.  I pulled it back and the round ejected.

I spun and fired between the embedded chair legs and directly into his head, which exploded onto the floor behind him, the white tile floor turned red-black, spattered all the way to the corner leading to the kitchen.  At the sound of the gunshot, I heard Lisa’s shrill scream.

My stepdad’s deformed body seemed to deflate as it lay there, settling in with a squishy sound as his lifeless corpse sank in and molded to every grout line in the floor.

I leapt over him and ran back to the bedroom.  Careful not to frighten her, I called, “Lisa!  It’s me.  It’s safe now.”

Nothing.  I opened the door and saw Lisa sitting on the bed.  She had dropped the gun, which lay on the floor in front of her, her expression as dead as the zombies we sought to escape or destroy.  If any emotions at all dwelled on her face, horror and fear would be counted among them.

We needed to wipe those emotions away and replace them with one: fierce determination.  After all I’d already been through, I knew it was the only way we would survive.

I knew how she felt.  I slammed the door again – just in case – and tucked the now functional .45 away.  I went to Lisa and pulled her hard into my arms and held her very, very tight, trying to absorb her shudders and take away her trembling.

I pulled away, leaned down and picked up her gun.  I lifted her arm and put the rifle in her hand, closing her fingers around it.  “Hold onto this, Leese.”

She obeyed me exactly.  I led her back into her room.

“Get changed into some jeans.  Shorts won’t do.  You need your body to be as protected as possible.  I’m going back in there and getting a different shirt.  I saw some in the closet.”

“Don’t leave me,” she whimpered.

“Lisa, I’ll be thirty feet away.  You’ll be okay.  Hurry.”

I ran into the bedroom, pulling my darling tee shirt off and finding a long sleeved, chambray shirt.  Levis.  I threw it on and buttoned it fast, then slid along the wall past my stepdad and back into Lisa’s room.  She was already in her jeans and was tying her running shoes.

“Perfect,” I said.  “Is his car in the garage?”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice shaky.  “He filled it yesterday.  He always does on Saturdays.”

“Prius, right?”

She nodded.  “Keys in the kitchen.”

“I don’t think you should go in there,” I said.

“You check,” she said.  “If you don’t mind.  Tell me if it’s bad and I’ll take your word.  If it’s not, I need to say good bye.”

I knew in my heart and mind that it couldn’t be anything but.  But I promised her anyway.

“Okay.  You go to the garage, and I’ll come and get you.  I’ll walk you there in case you were wrong.”

As we walked tentatively down the hall leading toward the kitchen and dining room, I glanced to my left and shielded her face from what was once her father.

As I came to the kitchen door, my eyes turned right, where I saw my mother’s bloody barefoot feet on the floor.  All of the toes were gone.  The rest was red meat.  I did not want to look any closer.  I couldn’t see her once beautiful face in similar condition. 

But I needed the damned keys, and I needed to make sure she would not be rising again as one of these … creatures.

“Go,” I said.  “In the garage.  It’s bad.  I just looked.”

“Oh, Davey,” she said, her tears flowing again. 

“Get in the car,” I said.  “I’ll be five seconds.

She went, and I turned and ran into the kitchen, focusing on the counters, the walls, everywhere but at my mother’s prone body.

And yet I had to glance down.  Had I not known it was, there would have been no way to identify this female carcass as human at all.

I know there is a lot of barf in these chronicles.  But if I’m being honest, let’s just say that as my fingers curled around the Toyota’s keys, I left pepperoni sticks and Cheetos on the counter as payment.

One more task.  I pulled out my gun, squinted my eyes to avoid a good view of my mauled mother, and fired a round into her head.  The body jerked and fell still again.

I spat the horrid taste of vomit from my mouth and ran to the garage.  As I pushed the garage door opener and it began to lift, I saw two sets of waiting ankles, which became shins, knees, thighs and finally destroyed skin of hands and torsos.  I ran for the car, realizing the stuff I’d had in my bike was lost to me.  No more snack food.

I got in the Prius, pushed the start button, and threw it in reverse.  I threaded the zombie needle that were probably two of their walking dead neighbors, tried to skirt around the BMW, but couldn’t.  It was parked dead center, and I cranked hard, knocking it on its side and tearing off my driver’s side mirror in the process.  The Prius bounced into the street after running over the Beemer’s rear tire, and I turned on the headlights and threw it into drive.

I drove that hybrid piece of shit through the night like the Devil himself was behind me.

*****

“Where’s this church?” I asked Lisa, who was turned around in her seat, looking behind us.  Her eyes still held the dull glaze I’d seen there since she watched me kill her father, and I knew it would be a long time until it was completely gone; despite the fact that she had told me to do it, every time she saw me for the distant future, that is the image that would come to her mind.

In a single day, the world had turned into a living horror movie and Lisa had just lost both her parents.  There was nothing to say, and I knew my little sister wouldn’t ever be the same.

It was fully dark now, and cloud cover was heavy,

She turned back around and fell into her seat, buckling her seat belt.  “Take a right on Perry Street.”

I know that Hemp said these things lost their ability to hear shortly after their conversion into walking dead cannibals, but for now, even the relatively quiet engine of the Prius seemed to be drawing them toward us as we passed by.

They would change direction and turn their creepy heads as we passed by, driving home again and again how utterly fucked the world had become.  We were past them by the time they took four steps, but what would happen if they got their hands on us was never far from our minds.  I did not need to ask Lisa this to know that it was the truth.

As we rounded the corner onto Perry, Lisa grabbed her purse and pulled out her cell phone.  She looked at the screen, and started to cry again.

One eye on the road and one on her, I said, “Leese, what’s wrong?”

“It’s Stacy Hayes,” she said.  “I have six missed calls from her.  I don’t know how I could’ve – wait.”  She punched some buttons.  “They just came in while we were … well, after you got to me.”

Lisa looked at me, her brow furrowed, her expression desperate, even pleading.  “We have to go see if she’s okay,” she said.

I knew it was coming the moment she mentioned the missed call.  I wouldn’t deny Lisa anything right now.  If life had turned from scraping by in a tough economy to battling mindless creatures just to stay alive, then trying to save Stacy Hayes was probably one of the things we
should
be doing.