Moriah (26 page)

“What about Bruce?” demanded Riley.

“I need you guys to go,
now
.” He looked at Kevin, a look that said it all. “I’ll get Bruce.”

Riley gave him a look. How was he going to get Bruce?

“Have that boat ready to go,” Dee adjured, “and wait for us. Anyone gives you a hard time—” Dee nodded across the road towards the darkened home “—or tries to stop you, you kill them.”

“I think we should stick together,” protested Riley.

“I’m getting along easier on my leg than you are on yours,” Kevin pointed out. “I can go get Bruce.”

Dee could have smacked his own forehead. They weren’t getting it, neither of them. “We can’t argue about this—not now! Kev,” he reminded him, wasting valuable time, “you’re the only one who knows how to pilot that boat.” Dee stared out the window towards the house the children had fled from, the Python in one big hand. “Go do it!”

Riley and Kevin gathered together their packs, taking Dee’s as well. “Hey—” Kevin patted him on his bald head “—thanks,” before he left the room.

“Dee.”

He turned from the window. Riley was standing in the doorway to the next room.

“Come back to us fast.”

“I will, Riley. You go.”

He listened to them, the sounds of the stairs beneath their retreating feet. Dee waited with the iodine stink wafting in from the water, with the soft cries of the undead below. He waited, listening for the sounds of his friends making off in what remained of the night, but their getaway was silent. He waited as he had waited above the murder hole, peering down for Burning Man. He strained his ears for any noise Bruce might make tramping through the grass—“Get to the boat! Get to the boat!”—but no one called out, no one came. The tower stood where it had, unchanged.

Dee swallowed a lump in his throat. Bruce wasn’t coming because Bruce was done. He knew it. The sky to the east was lightening as the day encroached, banishing the murk. The zombies below took on detail and form: a hideous congregation, most of them standing in place, a few wandering about. He eyed the house across from him, knowing it was there, the thing that had followed them all these days, whatever it was.

He thought he heard a noise from the other room, through the wall. The room, it dawned on him, where he’d left his rifle.
Shit
. Dee hung the minocular around his neck and steadied the Python. Behind him, in the caliginous gloom of the rooms Riley and Kevin had left through, nothing stirred. He believed he was alone.

Dee caught a whiff of something but couldn’t place it.

With mounting anxiety, he retrieved the minocular and glassed the water tower. Its shape was more distinct to him now. He could make out the railing that ringed the tank. There was still no sign of Bruce, no green glow, nothing he hoped to see. A rafter cracked once somewhere in the building.

Bruce
.
Where are you, Bruce
?
Come on, Bruce
.

Dee feared he had seen the last of his friend. Zombies stumbled through the no-man’s land between the tower and these buildings. He wondered how many were crawling through the grasses unseen.

He didn’t understand why he was as scared as he was. He hadn’t felt this in the apartment building, manning the hole in the floor. He glanced out the window to the ground immediately beneath, to a large rhododendron.

Bruce
.
Why, Bruce, why
?

Dee’s nose warned him of a new scent, something acrid in the air, masking the briney sea. The zombies below were stirred up, obviously excited, louder. Excited by what?

The windows in Elmore’s house glowed.

Fire. Dee pressed his back to the wall beside the window and breathed, listening. He risked quick glances through the windowless frame, spotting the flames as they licked their yellowish orange tongues above the sills. Those people. They were all dead, Dee knew. Bruce, too.

And then, as if to confirm his worst suspicions, a voice came from the dark, carrying through the wall of the room next to his.

“You hear me?” It sounded like a man.

Dee wrapped one hand around the other—

“Yeah, I know you can hear me.”

—and straightened the .357 at the wall.

“You killed all my family.”

The thing was in the room next to his.
The fucking room next to his
! The room with his rifle, Dee reminded himself.
Fuck
. How it had gotten there, he had no idea.

“Nothing to say about that?”

“I didn’t.” Dee called back, weaker than he’d intended.
Keep
talking
. He tried again, more forcefully. “
We
didn’t.” If he could keep it talking, he could center the thing, get a good bead on its location. These walls were shit for stopping acoustics and conceivably wouldn’t do much to slow a bullet. “You’re talking about those other people. And they’re all dead now.”

“Them.”

Dee eased the Python’s firing pin back—

“You.”

—locking it in place.

“All the same to me.” Its tone, dipped in acrimony, brimmed with contempt.

“How have you been following us?” Dee’s initial fright was giving to curiosity, to something else.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.” The voice came from another part of the room beyond. It wasn’t standing still in there. “Wouldn’t your friend in the water tower have liked to have known?”

Dee almost cursed at the thing, almost fired. But he forced himself to hold his tongue and check his trigger finger. There was a chance—a very slim chance—that the thing in the next room was bluffing him. Sneaking up on a hardened soldier like Bruce, even when he was wounded, sneaking up on him when he was on the alert and the only access to him was a climb up a steel ladder—
that
would have been no easy task.

Bruce might still be sitting up there, greeting the dawn. Or so Dee wished to hope. And because there was this minute chance, he decided to play it and replied, “Was that her who screamed?”

The thing laughed at that. “Yeah.
He
screamed.” It had corrected Dee’s choice of pronouns, letting Dee know without a doubt that Bruce was done for. “He screamed all the way down.”

“Mother—” Dee lost his cool and fired the big revolver, blowing a hole in the wall. The cylinder rotated as the hammer dropped, plaster dust wafting into the room. He fired out the Python and reloaded, waiting for it to speak, and when it didn’t he started to think that
maybe
, just maybe he had gotten lucky and wounded or killed it.

“You done?” It called to him from the fresh holes in the wall. No such luck. “If it’s any consolation, I didn’t hurt the old man.”

Dee wondered why he believed it.

“What your family was doing to people,” Dee tracked the wall with the revolver. “It wasn’t right.”

“Want me to tell you what they said when they saw me?”

Dee paused. Who was it referring to now? He squeezed his eyes shut against his anger and opened them.
Can’t think that way
. Kevin and Riley would have made the boat long before this thing showed up.

“I didn’t kill the kids,” it said, and Dee knew it spoke of the family across from them, the family’s whose house was burning freely now. “I could have, maybe even should have, but I didn’t. And I wouldn’t have hurt the younger guy, either…” They knew it meant Elmore. “…except he wanted to play hero. You know what happens to heroes? That what you want to play?” It goaded him. “
Hero
?”

Dee pressed his back to the wall behind him and as silently as he could with his bad leg and foot, he worked his way across the wall, away from his place by the window. Adrenaline was rushing through his body. There was a chance he was going to have to run from here, run on a broken foot and a broken leg, and he thought he could do it if he had to.

“Actually, I didn’t kill him, either.” The voice was somewhere else in the other room. “Just smacked him around, trussed him up a bit. Set their place on fire…”

Dee took his eyes off the wall and glanced out to the house. Thick, black smoke billowed from the windows into the paling sky.

“Don’t see how he’s getting out of that.”

“Is there any chance we can talk this out?” Dee called. “You and me?”

“No chance.”

“You got a name?”

“Chase.”

“Chase.” Dee shook his head. “That’s appropriate. I’m Dee. Like the fourth letter in the alphabet.”

“I wasn’t asking.”

Dee centered the front sight of the revolver on the exact spot in the wall from which the voice had emanated, sighting over the red insert.

“I’m going to kill you,” said Chase, “and then I’m going to kill the other guy and the woman.” The voice hadn’t moved. “Save her for last.”

Dee refused to answer.

“Hey. Bet I know something you don’t know.”

“Oh yeah?” He shouldn’t answer, Dee knew, but he did. “What’s that?”

“Bet
you
didn’t know
I
know how to use one—of—these!”

Dee threw himself to the side as the wall separating their rooms came apart, chunks of plaster dust and Gypsum board exploding outwards. The hammering of his FN-FAL violated the early morning silence. As the wall above his head burst apart, Dee fired a round from the Python, the revolver close to his body. He extended his arm and continuing to drop the hammer. 7.62mm and .357 rounds tore through the wall in opposite directions.

Firing out the revolver, Dee rolled over the chunks of drywall and through the dust coating the floor. Chase adjusted his aim and the full metal jacketed rounds geysered floorboards and tiles around Dee, who lay flat on his back, dumping the empties from his Python. The rifle silenced.

“Still want to know how I followed you,
hero
?”

A severed head came through the wall, Chase’s hand gripping it by its hair. The zombie’s eyes blinked against the debris and dust clouding the room. The head dropped and Chase’s hand withdrew as quickly as it had appeared.

The head lay there, fixated on Dee. He recognized the tribal art tattoo on the side of its face from the battlefield.

Dee snapped a freshly loaded cylinder back into place and sat up, his splinted leg straight out in front of him, quickly firing three rounds into the wall. Chase came back at him, the heavy booming of the FN-FAL cutting through the rooms. Dee rolled and fired a fourth time.

The head on the floor rested on its cheek and temple, jawing at him. Dee put a round into the zombie’s face, sending the head spinning into a dark corner of the room. He braced the muzzle of the .357 on the floor, rising to a standing position.

The perforations pocking the barrier between the rooms smoked.

Dee knew there were no more magazines for the FN, so Chase couldn’t be reloading. He popped the cylinder on a live round, extracted the five spent casings, reloaded, and paused. What the hell was it waiting for?

“
Uhhhhhhhhhhh
—” The zombie staggered into the room. It wore denim cut off shorts, the pockets hanging out of them over its blue-veined thighs. The white socks it wore to its knees had somehow kept their elasticity and stayed in place. Debris crunched under its work boots. Dee turned and faced it, realizing that Chase would have left the door open to the undead, that their commotion would bring the things up the stairs to them. The Colt boomed, the zombie slumping to the floor, head-shot.

“You didn’t shoot my zombie, did you?” Chase demanded. Dee replaced the spent shell. “You shot my zombie. Now I’m mad.”

There was a mechanical roar from the other side of the wall, a deafening buzz, and the chainsaw ripped through the partition, bobbing in and out. The blade pressed down, gouging a ragged line to the floor, spewing dust particles. Dee stared incredulously—did Chase think he was going to saw his way into the room? He did. And he was. Dee put all six rounds into the wall, above and to either side of the blade. The chainsaw withdrew but revved on the other side, reappearing perpendicular to the initial incision. It drew across lengthwise, an inverted L perforating the wall.

Dee hastily reloaded and emptied the Python, a succession of booms. The chainsaw blade disappeared and the racket subsided as the engine sputtered out, replaced by an “
ahhh
—
ahhh
—
ahhh
,” the sound of someone hurt.

“…
ahhh
,
ahhh
,
ahhh
, you got me,” Chase spoke through the wall. “Oh fuck, you got me good,” he coughed—“I guess…I guess it’s over”—the cough melodramatic, transitioning from a faux-death rattle—“it’s over”—to a brittle titter—“It’s over!”—followed by a full throated chuckle—“Over!” The wall burst asunder as Chase came through it like a wrecking ball—

“It’s never over, motherfucker!”

—and into the room, wielding a truncheon.

Though he was neither as tall nor as malformed as his brothers and sister, Chase’s ontogeny had not proceeded unmarred. Bent through the trunk, his torso was warped and scoliotic, detracting from his true height. Wide through the shoulder, he was clad in a flannel, checkered shirt and canvas pants cut off below the knee. His eyes were wide set in a face masked by stringy, sparse hair that draped down the top of his liver spotted skull, fine hairs like the silk on corn. Chase’s face was off-center upon an asymmetrical head, his lower jaw protruding above a pronounced chin, his ears tiny.