Текст книги "The Darkest Place"

Автор книги: James N. Cook

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 34 страниц)

TWENTY

Evidently, Lance had seen the flare as well. He stood in his yard, armed and outfitted with a pistol, rifle, and MOLLE vest, waiting.

As he approached, I got a look at his sidearm. It rode in a quick draw holster, and had been so thoroughly customized I could not figure out what model it was other than it looked like a nine-millimeter. The barrel was long, fitted with a muzzle brake, the trigger and hammer were chrome whereas the rest of the gun was black, and had a reflex sight perched atop a rail. The only place I had ever seen weapons like that were at shooting competitions, the kind where people competed for serious money and wore polyester t-shirts with sponsors’ trademarks on them.

He saw me coming and approached. I leaned over to the Jeep’s open window and said, “I’m gonna go check on Bob and Maureen.”

“I’ll go with you.”

I opened the door and he climbed in. Neither of us spoke as I sped north around the perimeter of the lake, only slowing down when the Kennedys’ house rose into view.

“Take a left at this alley,” Lance said. “We’ll circle the block and approach from the back.”

“Sounds good.” I turned onto the street he indicated, then took another right a couple of blocks later. When we were four houses down from Bob and Maureen’s place, Lance pointed at a wide expanse of yard between two houses. “Stop here.”

I did, approving of the location. We were around a bend in the street, the top of the Kennedys’ house just visible over their neighbors’ roofs. From where we were, no one in the immediate vicinity of the Kennedys’ property could spot us, allowing us to move in unseen.

After I parked, Lance hopped out and beckoned me after him. “I’ll take point,” he said. “Follow my lead.”

Lance knew the neighborhood better than I did, so I figured it best to defer to his wisdom. We leap-frogged from house to house, one of us covering the other as he moved, until we stood in the back yard of the home immediately behind the Kennedys’ place. I kept my back close to the wall as Lance crept to the corner and looked around.

“Shit,” he whispered.

“What?”

He rounded on me, a finger pressed over his lips. Quiet, he mouthed, then beckoned me forward. He stepped behind me and pointed ahead. I raised my rifle and pied out the corner, exposing as little of my profile as I could. The Kennedys’ back yard was empty, but past the front corner on the north side I saw a knot of about ten people walking slowly toward the front porch. There was a brief moment where I felt a thrill of excitement at the prospect of contacting other survivors.

Then I noticed how they moved.

It reminded me of Perry Torrance: the shuffling, lumbering gait, the stiff posture, the jerky, birdlike movements of the head, the tattered clothes, the mottled gray skin, the white-glazed eyes. From the front of the house, I heard moaning, beginning with just one, then spreading to the others like a contagion. In seconds, dozens of voices rose like a hellish chorus, pounding at my eardrums. I stood on shaky legs, the coldness in my stomach making me feel like I was falling down a mineshaft. Nervously, I turned to Lance.

Infected, I mouthed.

He leaned close. “Are you sure?”

“Gotta be,” I whispered. “They’re just like that Torrance guy. My Dad told you about him, right?”

He nodded. “Wasn’t sure if I believed him.”

“Believe it. They’re real.”

He stared at the shamblers, indecisive. “What do you think we should do?”

It was the first time in my life I can remember someone older than me asking for my advice. “If the Kennedys are in trouble, we have to help them.”

Lance nodded. “How do you want to do it?”

I thought for a moment, weighing what I knew against how I had been trained. “Those things are not like normal people. They won’t be armed, so we don’t have to worry about weapons. But they’re vicious, Lance. And they’re strong as hell. If one gets ahold of you, it’ll kill you. The only way to kill them is to destroy the brain, so don’t waste bullets shooting center of mass. Go for headshots.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.” I wasn’t, but it was all I had to go on at the moment. If it didn’t work, we could always retreat and come up with something else.

I checked my rifle: round in the chamber, safety off, covers flipped up on the optics. Same deal for my pistol, minus the optics. Lance followed suit.

“You ready?” I asked.

He nodded. “Two-man skirmish line. You take left, I’ll take right.”

“All right. On three.” I counted down, and then we moved.

We got halfway to the Kennedys’ yard before the infected saw us. There were six of them in my line of sight around the corner of the house. I swung a few feet to the left to give Lance a better shot. He made the adjustment without even glancing in my direction.

The walking corpses looked confused for a moment. They swung their heads toward the house, then toward us, then toward the house again in unison. Under other circumstances, it might have been comical. It quickly became un-funny when they focused their ravenous gazes on the two of us and belted out ragged, throat-rending screams.

I stopped, peered through the Aimpoint scope, and centered the glowing red dot on the nose of a smallish round man who had been in his fifties or sixties when he died. Most of the meat on his chest, left arm, and upper left thigh had been eaten away, causing him to shuffle along with a limp. I let out half a breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger. The carbine bucked a little—an M-4 does not have very much recoil—and a fine red mist erupted from the back of the dead man’s head.

He stiffened, shuddered in place for a few seconds, then collapsed. Well, at least I know that works.

Lance spared me a glance, then sighted down his rifle and fired a double-tap at a walking dead woman behind the man I had just shot. Rather than shudder first, she simply went limp and slumped to the ground.

Lance and I lowered our guns and looked at each other. “It worked,” he said, surprise in his voice.

“Told you so.” I returned my attention to the dead.

We advanced slowly, picking our shots. I missed a couple of times, but scored kills on the follow up. Although we dropped them quickly, we soon found ourselves backing up as more and more undead packed the space between the Kennedys’ house and the house to our left. When it was clear we couldn’t kill them fast enough to keep moving forward, we turned tail and ran about twenty yards.

It was a good thing we did because the undead on the other side of the house had circled the screened-in porch and almost had us surrounded. If I had been on my own, I’m not sure if I would have made it out of there alive. But when Lance saw the situation we were in, he slung his carbine, drew his pistol, walked within ten feet of the undead, and fired eight rounds quicker than you can count it out loud.

Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

Eight undead fell, newly-carved tunnels in their skulls. For a second, all I could do was stare.

“Holy shit,” I said.

Lance smiled, holstered his pistol, and waved a hand at the opening he created. “Shall we?”

We ran until we had established sufficient breathing room. “Hey,” I said, tapping Lance on the shoulder. “You see that?”

I pointed up the street and two houses over. There was a two-story colonial with a second floor deck accessed by an outdoor stairway. “Might be easier if we take the high ground.”

“Good thinking,” Lance said, and started toward the house at a jog. Once there, we clambered up the stairs and took a moment to assess the situation.

There were far more undead than I originally thought. We had killed more than twenty of them, but three times that many slowly converged on our position, watching us as they came, outstretched hands curled into grasping claws, moans filling the air.

“We don’t have much time,” I said. Lance nodded grimly. After taking a moment to kick away the balcony’s flimsy wooden rail, we assumed seated firing positions and started shooting.

It was harder than anticipated. All my life, I had trained to shoot center of mass; headshots were something I did for fun, just to show off. Aside from the men who attacked Lauren, I had only ever shot at paper targets, never at ambulatory human bodies. If my optics had had magnification, it would have been easier. But they didn’t, so I had to make due by firing more slowly than I normally would have. Lance seemed to be having a similar difficulty.

I quickly realized the undead moved faster than their shuffling steps let on. Their gait was slow, but constant, never stopping or slowing down. It reminded me of something Tyrel had once told me about a Navy cruiser he spent a few weeks on. The average cruising speed of the ship, depending on conditions, was usually around fifteen knots, or just over 17 MPH. Which may not seem very fast, especially considering the vast distances ships have to cross, but they travel at that speed twenty-four hours a day. As a result, they can cover a lot of miles in a relatively short amount of time. The effect was the same with the undead.

I had reloaded once and was ten rounds into my next magazine when the horde, now reduced by half, reached the bottom of the stairwell and began climbing toward the balcony.

“This isn’t good,” Lance said, getting to his feet. The undead not on the stairs were now beneath the overhang where we could not get a shot at them.

“They’ll bottlenose on the steps,” I said. “Ever read about the battle of Thermopylae?”

Lance used the stock of his rifle to bust out the window of the door leading inside the house, then unlocked it. “If it looks like we’re going to be overrun, we’ll head through the house, throw whatever we can in front of the door, and try to escape on the ground level.”

I gave a single nod, then drew my pistol and knelt in front of the stairs. Lance took position beside me. “I’ll kneecap a few of them,” I said. “Try to slow them down. You take them out when they go down; I have a feeling they’ll try to crawl their way up.”

“Okay.”

We let them get halfway up the steps so they were at point blank range before we started firing. Lance let off four quick shots that toppled an equal number of undead down the stairs. For a few seconds, the tumbling bodies slowed the corpses behind them, but they quickly recovered and began marching upward again. I took careful aim and destroyed the kneecaps of four more, pitching them over face first on the steps. Lance’s pistol cracked four more times, and they went still.

Now we had a pileup. The undead began clambering over the mass of bodies in front of them, but their lack of coordination made them clumsy. I let Lance empty his magazine, then began firing while he reloaded.

Slowly, one by one, we exterminated them all. When we ran out of ammo for our pistols, we switched back to our rifles. By the time we were done, the stairway groaned and popped beneath the weight of all the bodies.

“Let’s get off this thing before it collapses,” Lance said.

We went in through the back and made our way to ground level, exiting through the front door. I almost started back toward the Jeep, then realized I had gotten so caught up killing the undead I had forgotten about Bob and Maureen. The brief moment of confusion was lost on Lance, who stood still, staring at the mess we had made.

“How many of them are there?” he asked.

“Probably about eighty or so.”

He frowned at me. “No, I mean all together. Like across the nation.”

I wiped a hand across the back of my neck. “The news said the whole East Coast is overrun.”

“More than half the country lives on the eastern seaboard,” Lance said. “There must be millions. Tens of millions.”

“Or hundreds,” I said.

For the first time, I saw genuine worry in Lance’s eyes. “I knew things were bad, but this …”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go check on the Kennedys.”

TWENTY-ONE

I knew it was hopeless when I saw the front door.

To call it smashed in does not quite do the damage justice. Shattered and brutally cast aside would be more apt.

Broken glass, bloody footprints, and expended .22 shell casings littered the floor. The infected had broken through all three windows along the front of the house, ripped down the curtains, and knocked the furniture askew. It occurred to me the moaning had been so loud I had not heard the crack of Bob’s gun. By the lack of bodies on the floor, I was guessing he was not aware of the headshot rule.

Looking upstairs, I saw red streaks along the walls and the blackened outlines of several pairs of bloody feet.

“Bob?” I shouted, standing at the base of the stairs. “Maureen? You all right?”

No answer.

I looked at Lance. He pointed upward and said, “I’ll take point.”

I let him go ahead of me, aiming my rifle at the vectors he couldn’t cover. We climbed slowly until we reached the first landing where I heard a snuffling and snorting like pigs rooting in a trough. We exchanged another glance before walking the rest of the way up.

A trail of red prints like a macabre version of an old-fashioned dance mat led to the master bedroom. Lance held up a fist for me to stop, crept to the doorway, and quickly peeked inside. His gaze lingered in the room for less than a second, then he stepped back.

I looked at him and mouthed, Well?

He shook his head sadly and made a slashing motion across his throat.

My shoulders sagged as I cursed silently, feeling as if someone had let the air out of me. I had only spoken with the old couple a few times, but they had struck me as warm, genuine, kind people. A few days before, I had stopped by to check in on them and Bob gave me a nine-pound catfish he caught that morning in the Guadalupe River. My dad and I battered and fried it, and it was damned good eating. I resolved afterward to stop by again soon and give them a vacuum-sealed tub of coffee as a show of appreciation. But that wasn’t going to happen, now. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

A warm, liquid darkness swelled at the back of my vision. The lights and colors in the hallway seemed to sharpen, growing in brightness and intensity. The grip of my rifle, once smooth, now felt impossibly rough, like low-grit sandpaper. Each individual whump-thump of my heart sang in my ears with biting clarity. I heard my teeth grind together, felt the muscles in my jaw tense, felt the air whistling in and out of my lungs.

“Excuse me,” I said as I stepped around Lance, who saw my face and took a worried step backward.

I stopped in the doorway, staring. If I had known how enduringly the memory of that moment would burn itself into my mind, I would not have gazed upon that nightmare as long as I did. I would have closed one eye, sighted across the top of my carbine, and taken six quick shots. Then I would have stepped out of the room, walked back to the Jeep, driven back to the cabin, and gotten blackout drunk.

But I didn’t know, then. So I looked.

There were four of them tearing at Bob, two more on Maureen. The old couple were almost unrecognizable, faces ripped apart, clothes rent asunder, blood splashed on walls and bed sheets and standing in puddles on the carpet. The undead had opened Bob up from chest to groin and pulled out his intestines, munching on them like plump sausages. A little girl who could have been no older than ten gnawed dutifully at the flesh of his left forearm. Maureen lay face down, the two creatures astride her ripping strips of skin and muscle from her back to reveal the red-soaked curvature of ribcage beneath. After a few seconds, one of the undead—a young woman, maybe early twenties—looked up and noticed me. Sunlight from the bay window threw off golden flashes from a diamond engagement ring on her left hand, the same hand clutching a ragged, half-chewed loop of Bob’s small intestine.

Her white-gray eyes locked on me, lips curled back from bloody teeth, and she let out a rattling, gargling hiss. Blood droplets and a piece of half-swallowed gore expelled from her mouth and bounced on the floor in front of her as she began to rise.

“Not today, lady.” I raised my carbine and fired twice. Lance cursed behind me as the narrow confines of the house amplified the reports to ear splitting volume. I took a moment to fish a pair of earplugs from my vest, put them in, and took aim again.

The sights seemed to line up of their own accord, red dot centering over the forehead of the nearest infected. A minor flex of my index finger spattered the king-sized bed with a coat of blood and brain matter. The other four began standing, mouths open, hands reaching. I aimed and fired until only one infected remained, a teenage boy, maybe only a year or two younger than I was at the time. I calmly removed the spent magazine, inserted a new one, and raised the weapon level with the creature’s face. Its eyes never left mine as I pulled the trigger and watched it fall.

I looked down at Bob and Maureen, pity and anger burning the backs of my eyes. After all they had seen, all they had lived through, all the love they had shared, all the Christmases and Thanksgivings and weekends, the children they raised, the grandchildren they doted on, after all the years they had spent working and saving to afford this house on the lake and retire in comfort, after all that life, this is where it ended—on the floor of this bedroom, dying screaming in the maw of mindless monstrosities.

Putting a bullet in each of their heads was, up to that point in my life, the hardest thing I ever had to do.

There was a bathroom down the hallway. I leaned over the toilet and heaved up everything I had eaten for lunch that day. When I finished, I rinsed my mouth with water from the sink, stepped outside, and found Lance waiting for me. His expression was carefully blank.

“We should head back. Your stepmother is probably worried.”

“Yeah.”

We left.

*****

Lauren and Sophia tried to talk to me, but I ignored them.

The bottle of Woodford Reserve was in the cupboard where I left it. Three fingers’ worth went into a tumbler, which I carried outside and sat down in one of the Adirondack chairs near the lakeshore. I sat with my eyes closed, face turned up to the afternoon sun. I heard footsteps crunch behind me as Lauren followed me to my chair.

“Caleb, what are you doing?”

I took a sip of bourbon and said nothing. The burn was a comfort against the cold, slick knot rolling in my stomach. The tastes of honey, smoke, and charred wood competed for territory on my palate. I began to understand why Mike liked this stuff so much.

“What happened back there? I heard gunfire. Are Bob and Maureen all right?”

My eyes opened when a cloud drifted over the sun, its puffy shadow casting the lake in semi-darkness. A small group of ducks swam by, squawking at one another. What was the word for a group of ducks? Gaggle? No, that was geese.

“Caleb, look at me when I’m talking to you.”

But geese are only a gaggle when they’re on the ground, right? I was pretty sure once they took flight they were called a skein. Why they were called one thing on the ground and something else in the air, I had no idea. Probably some scientist’s idea of a joke. It bothered me I could remember what a group of geese in flight was called, but not the correct term for a gathering of ducks.

“Do I need to have a talk with your father when he gets home?”

I tossed back the rest of the bourbon in one gulp and waited for the burn to fade before speaking. “You do whatever the hell you feel like doing, Lauren. Right now, it doesn’t make a good goddamn to me.”

Her shocked silence was a physical thing I could feel prickling at my back. “Young man, you do not talk to me like that.”

I stood up, rounded on her, and threw the tumbler past her head. It whipped a lock of auburn hair backward before shattering against the cabin. “I AM NOT A FUCKING CHILD!”

She went still, eyes wide with fear. I stepped closer until our faces were less than a foot away. “Ever since we got to this cabin it’s been nothing but ‘Caleb do this, Caleb do that.’ ‘Go clean the guns, Caleb.’ ‘Go cook dinner, Caleb.’ ‘Tidy up the cabin, Caleb.’ ‘Clean up everybody else’s mess, Caleb.’ ‘Try to keep your father and stepmother from tearing each other’s throats out, Caleb.’”

I stepped closer, only inches away now. “I am telling you, Lauren, no more. I am sick of this shit. I am not your employee. I am not your slave. I am not at your beck and fucking call. I will not do all the goddamn dirty work around here while everyone else pisses their pants looking for excuses to stay out of your way. I refuse to walk on eggshells around you any longer. I’m tired of playing middleman between you and Dad because you’re both too goddamn immature to just talk things out like adults are supposed to. And if I kill a shitload of infected, and have to see the mutilated corpses of two people who were alive just this morning, and I want to have a drink afterward, you are hereby informed that I am no longer under any obligation to explain myself to you, or to anyone else. I’ve done a man’s goddamn work around here, and a man’s goddamn fighting, and when those two men broke into our house and tried to rape you that time, I did a man’s goddamn killing. So from now on, you will damned well treat me like a man, and I don’t want to hear any more of this stupid wait-till-your-father-gets-home bullshit. You’re done telling me what to do. You’re done treating me like I’m fucking twelve. You’re done taking me for granted and ordering me around like a goddamn butler. You and everyone else. Do I make myself clear?”

Lauren stood absolutely still, tears standing in her eyes. “Caleb …”

“Yes or no question, Lauren.”

She looked down, twin streaks coursing down her face leaving glistening trails across the borderland of black circles under her eyes. “Yes, Caleb. I’m … I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want to hear your apologies.”

“I know Caleb. But you have to understand, it’s been hard. I don’t know what to do, or what to think, or-”

“Do you honestly believe you’re the only one having a hard time?”

She looked up, startled.

“Do you think you’re the only one scared? The only one confused? Are you fucking blind?  We’re all scared, Lauren. The whole goddamn world is falling apart. There are walking, flesh-eating monsters out there. Lance and I just killed damn near a hundred of them not ten minutes ago. They tore Bob and Maureen apart like dogs on a side of beef.”

Her hands went up to her mouth. “Oh my God …”

“Yes, Lauren, that’s right. Bob and Maureen are dead. Those things were still feeding on them when I found them. They tore them apart, Lauren. They ate them alive. Lance and I were lucky to get out of there in one piece.”

“Hey, Caleb.”

I looked up to see Lance standing on the back porch and hissed in frustration at the interruption. “What?”

“Stop shouting,” he said.

I blinked at him. “I’m sorry, who fucking invited you to this conversation?”

His eyes hardened. “Calm the hell down and look behind you, kid.”

“What?”

He pointed at the lakeshore to the north. “Look.”

I turned and looked where he indicated. At first, I didn’t see anything. Then I cupped my hands around my eyes to reduce the sun’s glare and saw a rippling, undulating movement against the shore in the distance. I could make out no details; it looked like someone shaking a giant blanket in the wind.

“The hell …”

Lance stepped down from the porch, stopped beside me, and handed me a small pair of binoculars. “Here.”

I glanced at him, then brought the glasses up to my eyes. After turning the dial in the middle a time or two, the picture came into focus. It took a few seconds to realize what I was looking at, and then a plug popped free from my chest, and all the anger and frustration that had possessed me just a few short moments ago drained away. In its place, a coldness started in my hands and face and spread until it engulfed my limbs and froze my thoughts.

“Holy shit,” I said shakily.

“My sentiments exactly.”

Lauren came over to stand on my other side. “What is it?”

I handed her the binoculars, unable to speak. Much as I had done, her eyes narrowed in confusion for a moment, then all the color drained from her face.

“They’re headed our way,” Lance said.

My voice came out high and weak. “Do you think they heard me?”

Lance shrugged. “I’d say it’s a possibility.” He started walking away. “Come on, kid. We have work to do.”

Numbly, I did as he said.