Dry Rot: A Zombie Novel Page 9

  “You moron,” I groaned.

  “Come again, Lucas. I didn’t hear that last bit,” Senator Heathway said.

  “You said it was a large group,” I said. “Heathway, how many people are in this group?”

  “I believe they said at least seventy,” Senator Heathway answered. “Lucas, why do you sound so agitated? I thought this would be good news.”

  “Good news?” I said. Senator Heathway was desperate to gather survivors and rebuild some small piece of the world he understood. What he couldn’t comprehend was that just because people were alive and had a certain skill set, it didn’t mean they were good people. He was too busy dreaming of a new America and forgot about all of the problems of the old one, problems that had only been made worse by the husks and ash. “Heathway, listen to me. You do not want these people finding your group. A few of these people broke into my house and attacked my friends. I was forced to kill them and now more of them are searching my neighborhood.”

  “Lucas, I’m sure this is all a huge misunderstanding,” Senator Heathway said. “Just let me contact them and I’m sure we can iron these wrinkles out. Everything will be fine.”

  “Is planning to assault a child and woman a huge misunderstanding?” I asked. The plastic of the receiver popped as my hand squeezed it. “You will not let them know about me. You got that, Heathway? Don’t tell them anything. It’s the only way we’re going to survive this.”

  “You said that they were going to assault a child and a woman?” Senator Heathway sounded unsettled. He was beginning to comprehend the glaring mistake he made by rushing to trust these people. “No, Lucas, that most certainly is not a misunderstanding. You have my word that I won’t contact these people again. I’ll alert the soldiers we have on patrol and tell them to be on the look out for a large group. Good luck, Lucas. Be safe.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said.

  I hoped that Senator Heathway’s word was good. We’d find out as soon as we went outside.

  -32-

  We snuck out the back door of my house. It opened off a small sun porch that was attached to my kitchen. When I built the sun porch, Lisa and I talked about Sunday morning breakfasts and summer nights with glasses of wine. Every plan we made was crafted with the best intentions. Like most people, we wanted to be happy and dreamt of ways to ensure that we would. Somehow life always seemed to get in the way and reality always won out. Things like happiness and love just didn’t seem to fit into reality very often. We used the sun porch to store Kara’s old bike and a million other things that never got used. After a while, we stored our dreams out there too.

  The ash stopped falling from the sky about a day ago. Most of what was in the air had blown off the roof of nearby houses. A few husks stumbled through the powdery mess that covered my neighbor’s backyards. A six-foot wooden fence ran around the edges of my yard. The husks stood ankle-deep in the ash, swaying and groaning dully. When they saw us standing on the steps, they became more animated and began to beat skeletal hands against the wooden slats of the fence. I wasn’t worried about a few husks tipping the fence. It would take a lot more than what was back there. Danni was a different story.

  “Don’t look at them,” I said as I tugged on the sleeve of her NBC suit. Danni was frozen. The attack had rattled her and made her even more scared. Seeing the leathery grins of the husks might be too much for her.

  “Mom, I’m going out there and so are you. Lucas needs us to help him,” Jared started down the stairs. Danni blinked as if awakening from a dream.

  “Wait,” she said. “Jared, wait for us.” He stopped on the last step. Danni and I walked down to meet him.

  “Come on,” I walked towards the garage.

  “I thought you wanted us on the roof?” Jared asked.

  “I do, but not yet,” I answered.

  Inside the garage, we edged around the sides of the Bronco II and made our way to the back. I grabbed four wine bottles from the recycling bins in the back. Putting the blue buckets out had been something I forgot to do before going to prison. Now, I was glad that I hadn’t.

  “Hold these,” I passed the bottles to Jared and Danni. Using the hand crank, I filled each bottle two thirds of the way with gas. Shredding a rag on my bench, I stuffed the frayed fabric into open mouths of the bottles. I took the bottles, put my thumb over the top and tilted them back and forth until the rags were soaked with gas.

  I grabbed an old coffee can full of mismatched screws and nails and dumped it out on my tool bench. Normally, a mess like that would have bothered me, but I didn’t have time to be anal-retentive. Attaching a few long strips of duct tape together, I pressed the sticky side into the screws and nails. Once it looked like a decent amount had been picked up, I repeated the process three more times and then wrapped the gray tape around the bottles.

  “You want us to drop these from the roof?” Danni asked.

  “Yes, but you’re going to need to be careful. Wait for them to get into the back,” I said. I looked at Jared. “How’s your throwing arm?”

  “I guess it’s pretty good,” Jared said. “I never was a baseball pitcher or anything like that, but I can throw a bottle.”

  “Hold it by the neck, light it and aim for their truck,” I said. “But wait for them to come around the side of the house so they don’t see you move to the front.”

  “What about me?” Danni asked.

  “Aim for something hard so the bottle breaks and try not to set the house on fire,” I said.

  Back outside, I steadied the ladder while Jared and Danni climbed onto the roof. They could stay hidden on the backside. I moved the ladder back and kicked the ash around so there would be no clear sign of them up there.

  Behind the Hummer, I watched the gate leading into my backyard. It creaked open and five men crept into my yard.

  I took a deep breath and stepped out from behind the Hummer.

  -33-

  The first blast from my shotgun blew out the stomach of the lead guy. Blood and meat sprayed sideways like a morbid rose coming into bloom. The two men standing next to him were splattered with gore and stood dumbstruck. I wasn’t waiting to discuss anything. I had seen how these people did things.

  I fired off two more shots as the remaining members of the group turned to run. One screamed and fell to the ground. The springs on my gate pulled it closed. It bumped against the man’s feet. It wouldn’t be long before most of this group closed in on my yard.

  On both sides of the yard, the husks were getting restless. The noise and smell of blood called out to them. Sections of fence shook as they battered their desiccated frames against it.

  A heavy diesel engine rumbled in front of my house. The three men that escaped from my yard must have flagged down their friends.

  The steely gray of the sky flashed the color of polished amber as a cloud of fire bloomed. Screams, erratic gunfire and black smoke filled the street. Jared had a pretty good throwing arm after all.

  I couldn’t stay cornered in my yard and figured the confusion out front would give me the best chance of moving undetected. The fence on the right side of my yard shook. The left side swayed a little, but not nearly as much. I jumped over the left side.

  Three husks lunged as I thudded to the ground. One was missing its eye. The leathery skin looked scratched and puckered around a cavernous eye socket. A second husk dove forward. Its arms hung limply at its sides. The husk belly flopped to the ground. I kicked the third husk in the right knee and collapsed it beside its comrade.

  The one-eyed husk stumbled forward, its teeth chattering and one remaining milky eye fixed on me. I pulled my T-shaped knife and drove it into the empty socket. With a twist and a second push, I felt the husk go limp. It slid off my blade and fell to the ground in an ashy cloud.

  The husk with broken arms flopped on the ground like a recently landed fish. I stomped on the back of its neck and felt a satisfying pop. It wouldn’t be dead, but it wouldn’t be causing me any more problems either.


  I turned my attention to the third husk. From the knee down, its leg hung uselessly. The husk tried to step forward, but having no recognition of its injury, collapsed to the ground. Pushing the husk’s face into the grass, I drove the blade of my push knife into the soft spot between its neck and head. The husk thrashed and then went still.

  A few more shots popped from the front of my house, but I didn’t hear any aimed in my direction. A loud whoosh followed by a roiling black pillar of smoke bloomed on the right side of my house. They had to know that Danni and Jared were on the roof. I needed to move and draw the attention away from them.

  Coming around the far side of my neighbor’s house, I got a clear view of the street. The twisted remains of a large truck smoldered in the street. Human remains, as twisted and black as those of the truck, were scattered around the wreckage. Jared had great aim.

  Behind the remains of the truck a handful of people crouched and fired wild shots at the roof of my house. Jared and Danni were safe on the other side, but without the ladder, they had no way to escape. Three men crept around the edge of the ruined vehicle. They were going to try and flank Danni and Jared.

  Crouching low, I moved to the side of my neighbor’s porch. A few sheets of lattice weren’t going to stop bullets, but it kept me out of sight while I edged around to the steps.

  From the porch, I could see more of the street. Shell casings glittered in tufts of ash like long-forgotten nuggets of gold. My roof looked pretty terrible, not that it really mattered. After this fight was over, there was no way we could stay.

  Senator Heathway said there were seventy or more people in this group. Counting the dead, I wasn’t even looking at half of their numbers. Three guys missing had brought this much attention. More than five times that many gone was definitely going to draw an even bigger crowd.

  The three men edged around the truck and sprinted towards the side of my neighbor’s house. It looked like they were planning on going over the fence and into my yard. What they weren’t planning on was me hiding on the porch, standing up as they walked beneath me and firing off three rapid bursts from my shotgun. Ragged bits of meat that had once belonged to humans splattered across the ground. The ash, once gray and light, now looked like fresh tar as blood soaked through it.

  The remaining men behind the truck turned their attention towards me and peppered the house with bullets. Bits of wood and splinters of plastic from cheap furniture rained down around me. I held my shotgun tight and rolled for the far side of the porch. I blindly fired back.

  Under the metallic clamor of bullet casings falling to the ground, I heard glass shatter. At first, I took it to be one of the front windows being shot out, but that had happened almost immediately. Smoke drifted through the street. No more shots echoed between the empty houses.

  Carefully, I looked over the railing. Debris from the porch clung to my NBC suit like snowflakes, but I wasn’t bleeding. I slipped off the porch and moved towards the truck. Jared must have lobbed the last Molotov when he heard my shotgun fire. That kid could have played in the majors with that arm. Of course, he had a shit home life and the stands would now be filled with reanimated, leathery corpses instead of screaming fans, so that was kind of out of the question.

  No one moved. The bodies smoked and a few still burned. I checked all the complete corpses, just to be sure. Screws and nails chewed through chunks of meat or become lodged in boney joints. It was unpleasant to look at, but I was glad the bombs had worked.

  “It’s clear,” I shouted up to the roof of my house. “Danni. Jared. It’s clear.”

  A muffled footstep thudded behind me. The gunshot cracked before I even had a chance to turn.

  -34-

  The gun slipped from Jared’s hands and slid down the front side of my roof. It hit the gutter and spun out into space before falling to my front yard in a powdery cloud of ash. Jared’s eyes were huge. Even from where I stood on the ground, I could see his eyes bulging behind the protective lens of his NBC mask. Tears welled and his shoulders hitched and heaved. Danni crawled up next to where Jared lay on the crest of the roof. She placed a protective arm around her son and drew him into a hug.

  A body lay sprawled on the ground behind me. A small bullet wound on the side of the dead man’s head wept blood, slowly turning the collar of his blue flannel shirt to an inky black. Three more wounds peppered his back; black puddles stretching sickly tendrils towards the one on his collar. A revolver was still clutched in the dead hands, the index finger still slipped around the trigger. I had never seen the guy coming up behind me. It was a stupid mistake, something I never would have done in prison. I had gotten careless. Jared hadn’t. He was the only reason I was still alive to curse myself for being careless.

  Around the back of my house, I steadied the ladder as Jared and Danni climbed down from the roof. Jared had stopped crying, but his eyes were still raw and red. Danni still had tears streaming down her face. I wanted to say something comforting, offer some sort of explanation, but what was there really to say? She had just watched her young son shoot someone. Sure, it had been to save my life, but I doubted that would make it any easier to stomach.

  “Thanks, kid.” It wasn’t much and I knew it wouldn’t offer any real comfort. “You saved my ass.”

  “I dropped the gun,” Jared said. “Sorry, Lucas.” He slowly worked his way down the ladder. Danni was close behind.

  “Here.” I held the gun out to Jared. Danni’s hand moved towards it, but stopped and hung midair. She didn’t want her son to be part of a world where he needed to carry a gun and kill, but like it or not, he was.

  “Go ahead, Jared,” Danni said. “It’s okay.”

  Jared took the pistol and slipped it into his pocket. “I guess we’re even now, huh?” he said, trying to make light of what had just happened.

  “Yeah, I guess so, kid,” I said. “You had to do it, you know that, right?” I didn’t want this to eat at Jared, but knew that it would. I had killed people. Hell, that had been why I was in prison in the first place, but it was different for me. I was an adult. I had sufficient time to learn to rationalize shitty situations. Jared was still a kid. His mind hadn’t hardened and become calloused like my own.

  “Honey, he would’ve killed Lucas if you hadn’t stopped him,” Danni said. She was convincing herself as much as Jared.

  “I know,” Jared responded. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. He looked like he might be okay. I hoped that he would.

  The fence on the other side of my yard shook. I watched a wave pass over the undulating wooden slats. Fingers wrapped in dried, yellowed skin grasped the top of the fence. The heads of at least twenty husks bobbed on the other side of the fence. Their dull moans drifted over the fence.

  The smell of blood and sound of gunfire had drawn more husks into the surrounding yards. A worried looked passed between the three of us.

  Wood protested and groaned as the fence posts splintered and broke. A large section of fence tipped into my yard. Husks swarmed over broken section of fence like cadaverous termites. More husks spilled through the opening.

  Danni looked at me. Jared fired on the writhing pile of desiccated zombies.

  “Run!” I shouted and pushed the two of them towards the house.

  -35-

  Thin fingers with skin like over-cooked, wrinkled hotdogs squirmed through the small gap between the door and its frame. I pushed against the door, trying to break the fingers and close it, but for every gratifying snap there were two more sets of digits. The husks had been drawn by the sound of dying men, the metallic tang of spilled blood and the promise of a meal.

  Dull thuds echoed from the front of the house. Miraculously, the windows on the first floor had not been shot out, but a thin pane of glass wasn’t going to hold up long against the relentless knocking of the husks. More shadows shuffled across my front porch and darkened the windows. It wouldn’t be long before the husks were inside.

  The rear door pu
lsed and pushed inward. I could hear the rear porch boards creak under the weight of the husks that swarmed my house. Jared and Danni ran to help me push the door back. Jared smashed at the leathery fingers with the handle of his gun.

  “Danni,” I shouted over the husks’ charnel chorus, “grab a kitchen knife. Over there, in that drawer by the stove.”

  Danni rushed to the drawer and the door slid a little more open. Jared opened his mouth to say something, but slammed it shut and braced his shoulder against the door. Danni withdrew a long serrated knife from the drawer. I had used that knife to carve countless Thanksgiving turkeys. Kara and Lisa loved that holiday. There were less of the commercial expectations and more focus on spending time together. They were never huge football fans, but would humor me and watch the games. Holidays never evoked strong feelings for me, but I loved Thanksgiving because they did.

  Slashing at the husks’ fingers, Danni tore away ragged, dry strips of skin. I watched a yellowed knuckle bone flex as it worked into the open space.

  “Get a bigger knife,” Jared shouted. He smashed the handle of his gun against the boney joint. The finger popped and cracked before twisting to a sickening angle. The remaining digits continued to grasp for us as the now useless finger dangled and bounced before snapping free and falling to the floor by Jared’s boot. I half expected the finger to inch across the floor like some sort of hellish caterpillar. It remained motionless on the kitchen floor.

  Danni rushed back the drawer, grabbed a meat cleaver and ran back to the door. She hacked downward, removing fingers and chunks of palm. The husks showed no reaction and attempted to force the stumps of meat that had once been hands through the door. Danni swatted away the ruined limbs and pushed them back through the door.

  Glass shattered in the front of the house. Something thumped to the floor of my living room. A second window broke. The shadowy outlines of husks squirmed over the broken glass like maggots covering road kill.