Deadlocked: A Novel of the Zombie Apocalypse Page 2

  “We’ll come back for BC,” Rick told Maya. “We’re going to go and stay somewhere for a few days and come back. BC will be okay. The bathtub’s full of water for him and he has plenty of food in the pantry. We left it open for him. See?”

  “Rick. Please! We have to go. Now!”

  Without a word, Rick reached out and shoved back the timber blocking the door. He gripped the brass knob in his sweaty palm and pulled the door open, hinges creaking in almost an ominous joke.

  And Ned was standing there, filling the door.

  “Fuck,” Rick exclaimed, even as dead, blue hands reached out surprisingly quickly to grip his left shoulder. There was a moan and the thing that had been Ned Waters, Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, used the fleshy anchor of Nuttman’s upper arm to lever its unfeeling bulk inside.

  “Fuck,” Rick yelled again. He fell back, and the zombie’s grip only intensified, the greater mass of the zombie precluding Nuttman from tumbling to the floor. As it was he only partially collapsed, his knees buckling, but his arm firmly in the grip of the dead man. “Get him off of me, Tilly! Hit him with something!”

  They had no guns, of course. They’d been far too poor to buy one before the outbreak, and had been unable to locate one in the few moments they’d taken to search the abandoned homes nearby. Tilly stepped back, pulling the children with her. She pushed them into the den, just a few paces away, safely with BC, and then she was searching for one of the makeshift bludgeons Rick had created for her. But she’d left it in the children’s bedroom. “Damn it,” she said, turning to see if Rick had been bitten, yet. One bite, she knew, and he would be infected, and suffer a fever-ridden death before rising again as one of the deaders.

  But not only had the dead thing not attacked Rick, it had released him, and Nuttman was scuttling away to the far side of the small kitchen, upsetting a stack of dishes placed on the floor when Tilly had been picking out some things to load in the car. Ned’s dead, filmy eyes were locked not on Rick, but on Tilly. It stood in place for just an instant and then began shuffling her way. Its mouth opened, lips peeled back in a permanent rictus, tongue a dry and purple thing down low in the mandible. It wasn’t Rick Ned wanted. It was Tilly. She screamed, but her husband seemed less able to aid her than he had been able to help himself.

  The thing that had been Ned, her sometime lover, shambled forward. That, Tilly realized, was the most horrid thing about them. How single-minded and implacable they were. Once they’d made what amounted to a decision, they rarely deviated from whatever course of action dictated by the reptilian part of the brain that still operated.

  Tilly had retreated further into the den; the children cowered in the small bedroom that they shared. Rick continued to crouch in the kitchen, searching for something with which to strike the unliving thing, but unable to locate anything appropriate.

  Ned’s undead corpse loomed over Tilly. He’d been a big, fleshy man and he towered above her. His hands reached out, and the germ of the idea that had brought him there was immediately replaced with a stronger urge:

  To eat.

  Just as one blue-black claw grasped for her long, dark hair, something hit Ned from the right, actually toppling the zombie. It was BC, who had his fangs deep in the soft meat of the thing’s stomach. And even though BC was only fifty pounds, his jaws held tight, his neck muscles were powerful, and he twisted his body so that his mass was able to unsettle the zombie, who fell heavily to the hardwood floor with a meaty thud.

  “Tilly! Grab the kids! Hurry! While he’s down. Run!”

  Rick didn’t have to repeat himself. As he raced for the car, not so much as turning to see if his wife and children were on his heels, he was at the car door and unlocking it. Only when he heard a crackling noise from the back yard was he aware of two more of the undead shambling slowly toward him, eyes staring, mouths open, low moans exhaling from rotting lungs. At the sight, he actually did freeze the key in the door. But the arrival of Tilly and the kids broke him out of the shock.

  “Open the door, goddamn it,” Tilly screamed. “Open it and let us inside!”

  Rick quickly opened his door, slid into the driver’s seat and unlocked the passenger side doors. His wife shoved the children into the back seat with the blankets and food—she could buckle them in later. With no little anger she grasped Rick’s art portfolio and slammed it toward the rear of the car, hoping that she’d be able to crush everything in it, but knowing that was unlikely. It wouldn’t be for lack of trying, though.

  Once they were all inside, the children now screaming, Rick inserted the keys into the ignition and started the car. Despite its outward appearance, the car had a good engine—Japanese reliability ensures that, he liked to say. The pistons rattled slightly and as he gave it the gas, the car moved forward, Rick turning a hard right that took them very close to the pair of zombies reaching for them. But he left them behind.

  The last sight they had of the little house they’d all shared for the past three years was of seeing the Ned zombie shuffling out of the back door; BC herding the thing away from them with carefully aimed lunges and nips.

  And then the family was gone, weaving around stalled autos, downed limbs, blown trash. They were looking for salvation.

  Roland Thompson:

  Roland Thompson looked like a lion. That was generally the first thing that people thought when they laid eyes upon his striking features. He had a very high forehead. His hair was uncharacteristically long for a man of such dark complexion and he kept it swept away from that huge face and tied back in a tail. His skin was almost ebony in its cast. His nose was long, seemingly carved out of black stone. And his mouth was a wide slash, as if an afterthought by the master sculptor who’d fashioned him. He was not unpleasant to look upon, but there was a kind of sharpness to his gaze that some found frightening.

  It was no wonder that folk looked to him as a natural leader. And he was quite willing to comply to fill that role.

  If not for the fact that everyone’s journey to Sparta had been so fraught with horror and the unlikely, his story would have been exceptional. As it was, he rarely talked about the events that had led him to head toward the mountains and to finally stop, there, in this confederation of villages centered on this wonderful mountain town.

  When The Event had struck in all of its fury, Roland had been no more in a position to ensure his survival than many others. He had no military training and was, in fact, a recent college graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in World History. Both of his parents had been teachers, and he was thinking of heading in that general direction, professionally, just as soon as he’d finished graduate school and nabbed his Master’s.

  But, of course, all such prospects became ashes.

  Sometimes, he figured the Big Payback was worse than The Event. How many people had been gunned down or otherwise murdered by the living? There hadn’t been time to conduct a scientific study, but anecdotal evidence indicated that the toll due to racial and religious hatred and unbridled panic had been extreme--in the many millions, easily. Worst, all of those gunned down or battered folk had generally risen from where they’d been dropped, joining the ranks of the raving undead.

  And there were still people who wondered how it had all broken apart so readily, so easily. Roland Thompson knew better. He knew human nature.

  Single, unattached romantically when The Event had raised its monstrous head, his only concern had been to find his way from the University of Georgia in Athens to his parents’ home in Charlotte, North Carolina. The roads had been a dangerous place to be, but he’d had no choice. There was no one he cared for more than his parents and the last phone conversation he’d shared with them had been tense. “Come home, Roland. I think we’re going to need you,” his father had said. And his father had been a brave, levelheaded individual, with no tendency to resort to panic.

  A fellow grad student had given Roland a weapon--a single barrel old shotgun he’d claimed had been his gra
ndfather’s. “It’s a Long Tom,” he’d told Roland. “Easy as hell to use. Crack the barrel like this. See?” The barrel had hinged just below the stock, offering the chamber. “Just slide a shell in. Lock it back into place. Aim. Fire. It gives a hell of a kick. So hold it tight to your shoulder.”

  He’d thanked his friend and had taken the gun and two boxes of shells loaded with buckshot and another box of shells with something his friend had called slugs. “These aren’t filled with pellets, like the buckshot. These are single wads of metal. Tear a hole in a person. Could blow a man’s head clean off.”

  After that, he’d ended up stealing twenty gallons of gasoline from a parked activity bus in a fenced lot at the University, and he was off. When he’d found the Interstates clogged with burning wrecks and screaming crowds and roving knots of the flesh eaters chomping their ways through the idiot lemmings, he was barely able to get his little four-wheel drive jeep on a side road and headed uphill. It had been wise to leave what had been such a main artery of travel, but his mistake came when he decided to attempt traveling through a north Georgia County that had, for decades, been notorious for the rabid racism of its white residents.

  In the new millennium it had been easy to discount some of the stories he’d heard. Despite having delved into many accounts of slavery and lynching and post-Civil War racism, there was something in him that refused to believe that there were groups of people who still held to such twisted ideology and who were led by race hatred. It didn’t seem plausible, and so he had taken a look at his map and had figured his best way north was through Gilmer County.

  That was a huge error in judgment.

  The rural roads, by that point, were largely devoid of automobiles. He would see a few military vehicles from time to time, but they never stopped and they never acknowledged him, although he tried flagging one down once and honked his horn at the first three he saw. When one pointed a turret in his direction after he’d sounded his horn, he decided to stop doing that.

  The radio stations were largely silent. The old Civil Defense Network had been dragged out of mothballs, but it was mainly of no use at all. The weirdest things on the air were the stations that continued to play pop music non-stop. The ads had ceased, but the programmed music went on and on. Someone was changing the tapes, he figured, but no one ever came on the air to give out any information or to murmur words of encouragement to the listeners.

  For some time, he was beginning to think that he’d make short work of the journey and would soon be on the drive down the mountains to the western outskirts of Charlotte. He was making such good time that the idea that it all might be like a post-holiday jaunt began to enter his thoughts. He figured he’d have more than enough gas, the idea that he might run out before reaching his destination started to seem like an unfounded fear. The little towns passed by him as he drove on, sometimes allowing his speed to creep up to forty-five miles per hour. Little communities, dark and devoid of life, went by. He drove on, climbing higher into the foothills leading up to the Blue Ridge, towns giving way to farmland, and farms giving way to forests.

  Near dark, he began to see the bodies. That was disturbing, but by this time he’d seen so many corpses that it was taken for granted that he would encounter such things. There were abandoned cars beside the road. Windshields had been shattered out. People were lying inside these cars and outside of them. Some appeared to have attempted to escape, and had been gunned down as they did so. Zombies didn’t, however, run. These people had been alive when they’d been shot. Also, in his experience, zombies did not drive.

  Roland Thompson slowed down until he was moving less than twenty miles per hour. Ahead of him, there were more cars, about ten of them, all pulled off the road, both to the left and right, as if there had been a roadblock. He strained forward in his seat and peered at them. Beside the embankment above the road he could see where bodies had been stacked. By that point, he was barely moving, doing less than ten miles per hour. He squinted his dark, lion’s eyes.

  All of the people on the embankment were black. Every one of them. Not a light-skinned person to be seen.

  He pulled over to the right side of the road, stopped his jeep, and got out. Quietly, he took the Long Tom with him, hefting it in his arms, feeling the balance of it. “You can’t miss with this thing,” his pal had said. “Thirty-six inch barrel.”

  In the late afternoon light Thompson padded up the roadway, the remnant sun still hot on his shoulders. He carried only the shotgun and ten shells. He hadn’t realized it, but he’d grabbed the slugs rather than the buckshot. The stink of shit and blood was in the air. Flies buzzed, along with yellow jackets that were smelling meat. He could now see the dead people plainly--men and women and children. There were even the arms and feet of infants showing in the heaps of bodies. Quietly, his pace imbued with a sudden need to move carefully, he edged up the nearest embankment and stared in revulsion at the sight before him.

  These people had been stopped along the road, one car at a time, made to disembark, and gunned down. Mass murder, he thought.

  Kneeling, he avoided the creep of blood that was almost muddy in its mass. Making himself as low as he was able, he moved up to the nearest car, an old Impala, eased to the front fender and peered down the road, looking to see what was beyond the cars.

  It was the sound that got him first. There was a kind of low, lazy snapping. He squinted again, in the failing light, and realized that it was a flag, on a hastily installed post beside a makeshift roadblock: a Confederate Battle Flag. Six men stood beside their roadblock, their speech like a low mutter coming to him from the forty or so feet that separated him from the half-dozen. One of them said something and they laughed. Two nude women lay dead at their feet, young black women.

  Roland Thompson was inching back the way he’d come when one of them noticed him.

  “There’s one! A nigger!”

  Hardly had the words been said when Roland heard the report of a rifle. The bullet was not well aimed and hit the roof of the Impala against which he was crouched, caromed off the metal and went zooming off at a tangent. Recalling in the one glance he’d made of the men that all but two of them were on the other side of the big SUV that seemed to belong to them, he realized that the other four were not in a good position to fire at him. So, he stood next to the car, leaning into it so that he was almost glued to its solid shape, aimed the Long Tom at the man who’d shot at him, whose eyes were now gazing into the red ball of sun at Roland’s back, and he pulled the trigger.

  Just as his friend had promised, the Long Tom kicked powerfully against his shoulder, and it fired straight and true. The shell had been loaded with double-ought buckshot and the pattern of the metal spheres cut into the two men on Roland’s side of the SUV, tore into their chests and necks and faces, and they went down like the ripe sacks of excrement that they were.

  “The nigger’s armed,” someone screamed. There was the staccato burst of automatic rifle fire that Roland would someday come to know as having come from an AK47. But then, on that day, all he realized was that someone had a machine gun.

  He flicked the release on the top of the gun barrel and it broke open for him. There was the bright scent of gunpowder, some white smoke, and he pulled the warm shell out and fed a new one into the chamber. The Long Tom was a single-shot weapon; only room for one shell at a time. “Shit,” Roland hissed, thinking this was the end of the road.

  Hearing the heavy falls of booted feet, he realized that one of the crazy bastards was making a charge at him. Perhaps he thought that Thompson had run away. Once more, Roland stood up, leveled the Long Tom at the figure before him--this time a huge, lumbering man dressed in military fatigues--and pulled the trigger.

  It was only in that instant that he realized that he’d brought the slugs with him instead of the buckshot. He’d aimed at the man’s torso, but in his nervousness had pulled up slightly, and so the flying wad of metal tore not into the fellow’s chest but into the space below
his jaw, dead center on his neck, as if the guy’s Adam’s apple had been the true target.

  The man’s head did not quite explode as come free of the neck. His head actually popped up, away from his body, the shooter’s cap on his cranium remaining in place, and a huge fountain of crimson, made even redder by the glare of the setting sun, rose up in a colorful blossom from the ruined stub of his neck. The body fell straight to the ground, in a sitting position, knees jutting, arms cradling the rifle the man had held so belligerently just a split second before.

  “He blowed Wayne’s head off! The nigger done killed Wayne,” Roland heard someone scream. A car door opened and slammed shut and quickly he heard the engine roar to life. In those seconds he had put another shell in the empty chamber, once again smelling that wonderful bright sharpness of spent powder. There were three assholes left, he realized. The sun was at his back. At least one of them had his hands full of steering wheel.

  Roland came to a crouch again, this time beside the hood of the Impala, raised the Long Tom and he could see a man behind the wheel, another man in the back seat, and the third backing off toward the line of trees. With grace he pointed the 36-inch barrel at the driver, pulled the trigger and watched as the slug plowed a bloody, bony path through the man’s fleshy body, tearing his left shoulder completely off and hiding his chest behind a huge mist that frosted the inside of the SUV stem to stern.

  At that point, the man’s foot must have planted itself irrevocably on the gas and the big vehicle rocked forward, crossed the road, jumped the ditch on the other side, sped down the pasture there, and smashed with great force into a white oak tree growing at the forest edge.

  “By this time tomorrow. Reckon where I’ll be. Down in some valley. Hanging from a white oak tree,” Thompson sang to himself. Then he raised his eyes and looked to see the last of the six, a fat ass fleeing the scene, but not having much luck trying to run and hold his AK47 at the same time. Roland calmly pocketed the spent shell, inserted a fresh one, aimed at the bobbing, weaving, easily led blot of worthless meat, and fired. There wasn’t even a scream of pain.