Waiting to Die (Book 2): Wasting Away Page 9

“Here, you might need this,” the girl said, handing me the pistol.

  I nodded and smiled as I took the gun. The girl’s gaze fell towards the floor in a way that made me think she was ashamed. I held the weapon out in front of myself and pointed the flashlight with my other hand to guide the way. As quietly as I could, I climbed to the first landing and directed the light to the next flight of stairs. The building moaned and popped, making me stop in my tracks until the noise subsided.

  At the next landing, I peered through a window just big enough to fit my face at the center of the door, and gazed into the darkness beyond. I saw a vague outline of the hallway as I turned the flashlight away, but nothing more.

  “Hold this,” I whispered, handing over the flashlight.

  Slowly, I turned the knob and felt the mechanism release inside the door. With a faint click, it opened inward and I stepped aside to guide it away from myself. Dull, stagnant air flowed through, sending up tiny particles of dust into the light from behind as the girl guided the beam through the doorway.

  Doors lined each side of the hall, totaling four apartments on one side and three on the side of the elevator and stairwell. Dead center in the hallway, a small box protruded from the wall with a glass cover. Dust covered the glass, but I could see the fire extinguisher easily enough. I removed my jacket, folded it into a neat square and placed it over the glass. With a quick movement, I struck the jacket with my fist. With a dull crack, the glass broke, sending shards scattering along the carpet.

  “What’s that for,” the girl asked.

  “It’s for locked doors,” I said, placing the pistol into my waistband. I heaved the canister out from the box and held it across my chest.

  We quietly made our way along the hallway. I randomly picked a door and checked to see if it was locked. The knob turned easily. I pressed my ear to the door and listened. Like some far away ocean, I heard nothing but the sounds of distant waves and cresting surf.

  “Is it safe?” the girl asked.

  I scrunched my shoulders and told her that I didn’t know. I placed my hand firmly around the knob and turned it again, cracking the door an inch or so. I saw grey fingers curl around the edge of the door. The sweet smell of death hit my nose and I was repelled backward as the door swung fully open. The blackened outline of a person swayed in the doorway, shrouded in moonlight from an open window from within the apartment.

  Gaunt, tragic features revealed themselves; sunken shoulders and a sickly bending head unraveled before me as the shape realized I was there. With a gaseous release, the figure launched itself at me, knocking me back into the hallway. I tripped and fell hard onto my side. I turned and the fire extinguisher slammed against my chest from the impact of the corpse. I gasped for breath as the creature clawed at me, snarling with thick lengths of spit and blood coursing from its mouth.

  In a panic, I positioned the extinguisher between the corpse and myself, trying to use leverage to push the thing away. Globs of rancid phlegm hit my chest through a wound in the creature’s cheek. I turned my face away to keep the rotten bits from getting into my mouth. I felt a tug at my waist. Suddenly the head exploded. A cascade of bone and tissue sprayed across the hallway to my side, and over my head.

  I lay there, trying to catch my breath as the girl stood above me. A deep, rasping moan sounded out from somewhere outside as the girl extended her hand to help me up.

  “We might want to get into the apartment now,” she said.

  “That was quick thinking on her part,” Mary said.

  “She didn’t even bat an eye,” I replied. “It was like she had been doing this forever.”

  Brown stains covered the walls; handprints crisscrossed along in abstract patterns, weaving and winding into the type of art that only the dead could make. Empty water bottles and spent cans of food littered the floor.

  “Food!” the girl exclaimed as she tossed open the cupboard doors in excitement.

  I heard the sound of a drawer being open and the clank of utensils knocking together.

  Before I could get to her, she had already started to open a can of peaches, twisting the opener as quickly as her hands would allow. In the next breath, she was slurping down the juice and wrestling out a half of a peach with her index finger.

  “Want some?” she asked, her voice muffled by the food in her mouth.

  I smiled.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just been so long since I’ve had anything to eat,” she apologized.

  “We should find something to put the food in and get moving to another apartment,” I said as I surveyed the mess. Something glistened on the floor next to the wall. A splattering of blood clung vicariously to the ceiling in a circular pattern, the thin trail of a drop that never fell.

  “Right,” she replied with a swallow.

  “He shot himself,” I said as I picked up the revolver from the floor.

  “What?” she asked - her mouth full from another bite.

  “There’s a bullet hole in the ceiling right in the middle of a splatter. And here,” I pointed to a dried pool of brown gore on the floor, “it looks like he bled out.”

  “He killed himself?”

  “Or tried to,” I replied. “Poor bastard must have missed the mark.”

  Other than the disgust that covered the apartment, it was decorated like any other home; an entertainment center with a couch and chairs facing it, family pictures depicting what looked like a camping trip. Various knick knacks were scattered about from where the body had knocked them from their rightful places.

  In the bedroom closet I found several suitcases and a duffle bag filled with gym clothes. I tossed the track pants and running shoes aside and brought the bag into the kitchen. The girl was just finishing off the remainder of peaches from the can as I sat the bag on the kitchen table. She looked up at me with a smile as she placed the can in the sink.

  “He was pretty well stocked up on food,” she said as she pulled the cans out of the cupboard and placed them into the bag.

  “It looks like it,” I replied. “We’ll just take what we can carry. If worse comes to worse, we can always come back for more.”

  “So what’s your plan?” she asked.

  I stuffed the can opener into my pocket. “I was thinking we could sit it out for a few days. It would be nice to sleep in a bed for a change. Hell, it would be nice to just sleep without worrying about something coming out of the shadows to eat me.”

  “Do you think there’s anything else we’ll need from here?”

  I shook my head. “I have just about everything I could want on me. While you’re getting the food situated, I’m going to go check out the other apartments. Unless you want to come along so you can save my ass again.”

  She laughed. “You’re a big boy; I think you’ve got it covered. Just shoot them before they tackle you and you should be fine.”

  The hallway was eerily quiet as I walked around the body and sidestepped the gore that saturated the carpet. The corpse vaguely resembled the man I had seen in the picture, despite that half of his skull was gone. The dried wound on his face told a different story; he tried to put a bullet through his brain and missed, blowing a chunk out of his face. He bled to death on the floor of his apartment. The prospect hit a little too close to home and I shook off the image to investigate the other apartments.

  After checking the clip in my pistol, I tried the door to the next apartment over. I was taken aback to find it open.

  Inside, it was as quiet as the rest of the building, but in better shape than the previous apartment. Furniture upholstered in flower print fabric, stationed around an old radio from what I assumed was the early 1940’s. In a vase on top of an antique end table were more flowers, dusty plastic, sitting on a doily.

  It reminded me of something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. It was only missing a ruby cheeked kid playing with an old truck in the living room. The smell of potpourri hung leisurely in the air like it was bereft of what had happened out in the real
world. And the flower patterns that covered the couch and curtains only made the tragedy of the dead all that more depressing.

  “Wow…” the girl exhaled.

  “I know, right?” I turned to face her. “It’s just like grandma’s house.”

  “I don’t know about you, but this a lot nicer than my grandma’s house,” she said.

  She dropped the bag on the floor by the entry and moved toward the couch. The springs beneath the cushion made a faint squeak as she sat down. She kicked her feet up onto the coffee table and let out a sigh. “Now this is what I’m talking about.”

  I shut the door and moved the bag of canned goods into the kitchen. From the partition, I said, “This is as good a place as any to settle down for a while.” I began to unpack the supplies, placing them in neat rows on top of the counter.

  I opened a long cabinet in the kitchen. “I’ll be…” I said in awe.

  “What is it?”

  “A hell of a lot of food,” I replied. “I think we started with the wrong apartment.” There were five shelves brimming with glass jars full of fruit and vegetables. I let out a laugh. “At least we’ll eat well.”

  “So how long has it been since you’ve seen someone?” she asked, walking toward the kitchen.

  I thought about the question, “I really don’t know; time tended to blend after it began. The last person I spoke to was my wife. I saw a woman at the beach the other day. There was an old man and a young girl too.”

  She looked at me. “What happened to them?”

  “They got away before I could get to them. I turned to clean myself off in the waves and they were gone.”I paused and thought. “I don’t even know how long I’ve been out there,” I said.

  “A few months, maybe more,” she replied.

  “It seems so much longer than that.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “being hunted really puts time into perspective. So you didn’t see which way they went? Maybe we could try to find them.”

  I shook my head as I sorted through the mason jars. “No, I tried to look for them, but the dead were everywhere. I was lucky to get away with my life.”

  I found some candles in a drawer and placed them on the coffee table. The light brought out the features of her face. I wondered how someone so young managed to survive. Stray smears of dirt did little to take away her beauty. A sloping nose and refined cheek bones outlined the curl of her lips.

  “So what’s your story?” I asked. “How did you wind up on top of that water tower?”

  “I lived at an encampment about ten miles from here with a handful of people. It was one of those convenience store gas stations, but it was under construction so there was a fence around it,” she said, fidgeting with the trim of the countertop. “Things were getting pretty desperate. We ran out of food a couple of days ago and decided we had to leave. That’s when the dead got in…” she trailed off in thought. “Mike, the guy we sort of looked up to was trying to get out of the front gate and got bit. The dead were able to get past him as the rest of us tried to push the gate closed. There were just too many of them… There had to be hundreds pushing the first row in tighter as we strained to get the gate closed. It was just too much for us.” Tears welled up in her eyes as she tried to explain.

  “It’s okay, you don’t have to finish,” I told her.

  “No, its fine,” she wiped her face on the sleeve of her shirt, cleaning a strip of dirt away from the side of her mouth. “I don’t mind, it’s good to get it out,” she continued. “A couple of us ran to the rear of the gas station. Most of the dead had moved up front when they realized that there was an opening in the gate. I jumped the fence and got to the top to help Tammy up when one of those things rushed her. The look on her face … it was like she was pleading with me. Her eyes were so big … Her hand slipped out of mine and a bunch of those fuckers got her and tackled her to the ground,” she sobbed the words.

  I touched her shoulder. “Just stop there.”

  She hugged me, burying her head in my chest. “I can’t get her screams out of my head.”

  “It’s okay,” I brushed her hair out of her face and held her tight.

  She took a deep breath and backed away from me. “I’m sorry. Tammy was my sister.” She wiped her eyes. “We had been through so much together. To see her taken away like that after we had survived so much … She just kept screaming my name over and over again. The last thing my sister ever said was my name.”

  The girl wore a far off expression, staring blankly at the wall of pictures from the couch. Her silence was unnerving and made me think of my own past. No matter how much I didn’t want to remember, the images came like a relentless flood.

  “I had been enjoying the day with my wife in the back yard,” I said as I stood next to the couch. “We knew that there were problems in the city with looting and riots, but we lived in a gated community so we didn’t think it would get to us. You see shit happening on television and it’s like a million miles away; that it’s just some bullshit the media put out for ratings,” Constance looked up at me as I spoke. “I went into the house to make some tea. I filled the pot in the sink and took down the box of tea bags from the cupboard when I heard her scream. Her voice was shrill like she was vomiting the sound. My skin crawled when I heard it. It was a sound that I would soon become accustomed to.

  The rest of my memories are just flashes. It’s like snapshots from some morbid slideshow. They play over and over again with the same terrible ending.

  I ran from the back door to find some man standing over her. He was hunched over like a marionette, wavering in place with his head in her stomach.

  I must have yelled out because, in a flash, he whipped his head around and stared at me. His eyes were clouded over and blood was smeared across his face,” I told her flatly. “I could see something in the creature’s mouth, just an outline of something that resembled a turkey neck. At least that’s what my mind perceived it as at the time.”

  “What was it?” Constance asked with a pleading expression.

  “I didn’t know it at the time, or maybe I did, but refused to consciously acknowledge it, but my wife was pregnant,” I replied blankly.

  “Oh my God…” her face scrunched up as if she were going to be sick.

  “That’s the last image I have of my wife; her mouth was still moving in a silent scream as this thing that had taken her glared at me with the baby’s…” I trailed off as I drove away the memory.

  “I didn’t know …” Mary trailed off.

  “I mentioned my wife before,” I said.

  “But you never said what the creature had in its mouth.” A tear rose in her eye. “I’m so sorry.”

  “So am I,” I said, tightening my lips.

  She stared at the floor as she fidgeted with her hands and rubbed them together in a ball on her lap. She bit her lower lip and looked up from the couch, “None of this is fair,” her voice cracked. “It’s been so long and I still don’t know why it’s happening.”

  “No one does,” I replied. “One day we’re paying our mortgages and fighting to keep the electricity on and the next, we’re watching our friends and family being ripped away from us by something that couldn’t logically happen.” I sat down on the opposite side of the couch. “There’s no rhyme or reason to any of this. If I believed in religion, I would say that I died and went to Hell, but I can only imagine it would be more pleasant than this.”

  “I had just got into college when all of this happened,” she said. “I had big dreams. I was going to become a teacher,” she laughed.

  “Really, a teacher?” I asked. “How old are you?”

  “I’m going to be twenty in a few months, I think,” she smirked, shrugging her shoulders.

  “You don’t look a day over sixteen,” I said.

  “It must be from all of the exercise,” she replied.

  “Either that or you didn’t get enough growth hormones in your milk,” I winked.

  “Yuk! I nev
er liked milk.” She made a disgusted face. “Tastes like watered down snot.”

  “Well then, that’s it,” I poked at her. “You didn’t get enough hormones and it has stunted your growth.”

  “Yeah, that must be it,” she smiled and shook her head at me.

  Chapter 12

  “You don’t like talking about her, do you?”

  “My wife?” I asked.

  She nodded and looked at me.

  I met Mary’s stare. “It’s not that I mind, it just that I still haven’t dealt with it yet. I try to think that everything happens for a reason, that we’re guided by something bigger than us, but when it really comes down to it, I believe we’re all on our own.”

  “My husband and I used to go to church every Sunday. We even sat through Christmas Mass.” She fidgeted with the fabric on the couch. “With all of that, I find it horrifying to think that some higher power let this happen. Now I don’t know what I believe. In some ways, I try not to think about it, but that little voice in the back of my head keeps saying that I’m really alone.”

  “Ah, that little voice,” I repeated. “That’s the very thing that kept me running for so long, the very voice that told me to hide away in that family’s house. Sometimes I think that voice is the voice of cowardice, keeping us from facing our fears.”

  Constance and I spent our time talking and eating the assortment of canned goods that were left in the apartment. I hadn’t eaten so well for longer than I could remember and it felt good to have a full stomach.

  As time went on, she reminded me of what it was like to have someone there to share memories with. No matter what we talked about, it was good to just talk, to have someone to communicate with, to get it all out.

  Sometimes, late at night, I could hear her sobbing in the other room. I wanted desperately to hold her and tell her that everything was going to be all right, that life would eventually work itself out, but I couldn’t find it in me to lie to her. I knew what this world was capable of and with the dead only feet away, waiting for us to make a mistake; I knew that it would be a long time before anything would get back to normal.