Текст книги "Preservation"

Автор книги: Phillip Tomasso

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter Fourteen

I tried to ignore the hooked needle Gene threaded. As he used a lighter to sterilize the tip, Kia knelt beside me. I smiled or tried to. I took quick shallow breaths in anticipation of the discomfort headed my way.

“I was in my house when all of this started to happen,” she said. Talking to me was meant as a distraction. I think I preferred being stitched in silence, but wasn’t in a position to argue the point. “My husband and I. We’d had dinner, and were watching television when we heard sirens outside. There were police cars and fire trucks. About seven houses down, the place was going up in flames. Everyone was outside watching. You know how neighbors are. We weren’t any different. Thing was, the bizarre thing was, I didn’t recognize a lot of the people. They were everywhere. They came out of everywhere.”

I felt like a human quilt as Gene slipped the needle through my skin. The area was raw, and it felt more like a dagger being jammed into my side. “There we go,” he said.

“Look at me,” Kia said, and took my hand. I squeezed it tighter than expected when Gene tugged on the thread and pulled it through before dipping the needle into the next part of flesh. “The people were drawn to the flames it seemed. They reminded me of like, I don’t know, fireflies or something. I noticed that some of them just didn’t look right. They had bite marks, and peeled back skin. They looked like they were rotting. Their skin was purplish, and pasty, and that was when they started attacking the firefighters. Just, they just, went right at them. Tackled them. The fire hose dropped. It went wild. It sprayed everywhere with just tremendous force. It pushed back a lot of the…of those things,” she said.

“They don’t seem to like water,” I said.

Gene nodded. “We’ve noticed. Too bad we’re going into winter and not spring.”

“The police had their weapons drawn, but they hesitated. I mean, the idea of shooting people at the fire, it was all surreal, even to the officers on scene there, I guess. And my husband, he tried to help. He went after the fallen firemen, and tried to get those things off of them. He did, too. He got them off, but the guy he’d saved was apparently beyond help. And then they were on him. They got my husband and I just stood there, watching. They bit him and kept biting him, and…”

I pursed my lips as she cried. I didn’t have comforting words. There weren’t really any to share. “How did you get away?”

The needle hurt like a motherfucker. I couldn’t watch the work Gene did. While I didn’t want Kia’s distraction, I found it worked. Only I didn’t like seeing her this upset.

“Got away just barely. When the police started shooting, when they finally realized something was very wrong and opened fire on these things, on the zombies surrounding us–one of them yelled for me to run, to get out of there. I didn’t want to, you know. I wanted to help my husband. I didn’t go to him. I don’t think he was dead. But I ran. I left him. I…”

Now she squeezed my hand. Her shoulders shook in time with her sobbing. “It couldn’t have been easy,” I said. It was the best I could offer.

She tried to smile; fought to regain composure. “It wasn’t. It hasn’t been for any of us. And I’m sure it wasn’t for anyone in your group, either.”

I thought of Cash. I missed him. My heart felt so empty. “No. It hasn’t been.”

“We have water,” Allison said. She stood beside Kia and me, looking back and forth at us. “You guys okay?”

“Just taking his mind off Gene’s needlework.”

“It helped,” I said. “Thank you.”

#  #  #

“So they learn?” Kia said.

We sat at two tables in the cafeteria. There was indeed a lot of food. We’d prepared a meal of grilled cheese sandwiches and tater-tots. We used napkins and kept the food on trays. The tots were crisp and golden brown, and actually, so were the sandwiches. The flavor was amazing, even brought back childhood memories of similar lunches in similar cafeterias when I had been a teen.

“It’s what I’ve come to learn,” I said, after I’d explained my reasoning behind my assumption. I picked up a tot and drove it through a pond of ketchup and popped it into my mouth. As I wiped my fingers on a napkin, I said, “But I don’t know what that means.”

“Could mean a number of things,” Melissa said. She held a triangle wedge of her sandwich in one hand and a couple of tots on the tines of her plastic fork in the other.  “I was thinking about this earlier. What if the vaccinations infected people, but wear off after a certain period of time? You know almost like it is a virus inside the vaccination. So the things out there,” she pointed at a wall with the sandwich wedge, “are, essentially, you know, sick.”

“And then what?” Gene said. “They become normal, human, again? Slowly, but eventually, they get better.”

“I haven’t seen any evidence of anyone getting better,” I said. “Have you? Has anyone?”

No one nodded. Kind of killed the theory; made it useless without something to support the idea, other than mere wishful thinking.

“What about the people they bit, would they become human again, assuming it was a virus?” Allison said.

“I was thinking about why some are fast and some are slow,” Megan said.

“Did you know Megan worked at The Living Dead Museum? It was created not long after George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was filmed here. Right here in Butler County,” Andy said.

Go figure. “Didn’t know that.”

“I do. I mean, I did. But what I was saying, what I was thinking was, the problem with a zombie is that it’s dead, right? Reanimated flesh. Like what Frankenstein did with his monster. Brought a corpse to life, right?”

I thought it was rhetorical. When Megan didn’t keep talking, I verbally agreed.

“Okay, so what happens to a body the longer it is dead?” she said.

“It decays,” Charlene said, and dropped a tot back onto the paper plate on her tray.

“They do. That’s right. But until they’ve been embalmed, there is all of that blood in them. And if blood isn’t circulating, it’s pooling. So if a dead zombie is chasing people, sure, at first it’s fast. Eventually, that non-circulating blood is going to catch up with it. It’s going to all sit in the thing’s legs, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“So, rigor mortis sets in. It’s what makes them slower,” she said. “But not just slower. It also means they are decaying. Ever wonder why you can stab them in the skull so easily? The bones are far more brittle. If they were healthy, there’s no way I’d of been able to push a pocket knife, or even a hunting knife into the brain as easy as I have.”

“That makes sense,” Allison said. “I mean, that really makes a lot sense.”

I nodded. “It does.”

“But will they turn normal again?”

“I don’t see how they can. They’ve died. They’re dead. A better question might be, will they just eventually stay dead? Maybe the rigor mortis will stop them, and hunger and time will kill them, again, but for good,” Andy said.

“I still don’t understand why there aren’t more survivors, or government action, or military involvement,” Robert said. “I can’t believe that you guys are the last of New York, and we’re the last of Pennsylvania. That’s just, I don’t know, it seems impossible. Improbable. It all happened too fast to wipe out billions of people. Right? Or am I wrong? Am I missing something?”

“I agree,” Michelle said. “So none of us got the flu shot. There’s got to be more like us, people who are against it. Hell, the Appalachian area alone has got to be filled with people who didn’t get the shot.”

“There are probably a good percentage of people who didn’t get the vaccination, but have they survived not getting bitten, too? How many planes have crashed, or trains derailed, or cruise ships sunk, or are floating aimlessly about on the oceans?” Gene said. “Forget the military, they get vaccinated for everything. Those shots probably killed our armed forces in days. Days.”

And the military had a heads up, too. Just not a timely warning, unfortunately. I still suspected there were more military and political groups around, alive. It was a guess, of course, but seemed likely. “We have to assume pockets of people are all that is really left. Maybe pockets per county or town. Maybe only thousands of people per state, but not much more. I don’t know,” I said. “It is pretty mind blowing.”

“So, I want to get this right,” Gene said. “Your plan–what you guys want to do–is go to…Mexico? That’s what you were saying, what you want? To cross the border because you think it will be safer there?”

I nodded. “It was my initial thought. Poorer countries didn’t vaccinate their people. It’s really all I was going with. I mean, this all came out of nowhere, I heard something on the radio…”

“Radio?” Gene said.

I shook my head. “That was days ago.”

“But they’d still have zombies. Travelers, and people that were vaccinated, and then people who were bitten, too,” Andy said. ”That country isn’t infection free. Or do you think it is?”

“They would have zombies, too. No doubt about it. But less than what’s happened here in our country. And the wall we built to stop illegals from sneaking into the U.S., could now be used to keep infected Americans out. You’ve got the wall and the Rio Grande as a natural border. The things hate water,” I said, but remembered the zombies aimlessly fell from the bridge over the Genesee River when we’d climbed onto the Coast Guard vessel. They didn’t know enough to stay away from the river, despite not appreciating water. If they learned, however, it might not happen again.

“But why leave? Why risk crossing the country to get there, when we have everything we need here?” Andy said. He spread his arms wide and looked around the cafeteria.

“He’s right,” Gene said. “This place is great, but it isn’t going to last. And hiding here, it’s not going to rid the country of the millions of zombies. We’d just be biding time until we eventually ran out of supplies. And we would run out of supplies.”

“We’ve got months’ worth of food,” Robert said.

“Exactly. Months. Then what? Then what do we do? Raids? Visit Costco and Sam’s Club?” Gene shook his head. He reached for his wife’s hand. “Chase has a point.”

“But Mexico?” Megan said. She sounded doubtful. I shared that doubt, but wouldn’t admit as much.

“Look,” I said. “I wasn’t telling you this to convince you to come with us. I was just telling you what we were thinking, explain what we’d been trying to do. That’s all. Nothing else.”

“You don’t want us to go with you?” Gene furrowed his brow, narrowed his eyes.

“That’s not what I mean. You want to come with us, that’s fine. There’s safety in numbers, and the work can be more evenly divided.” Thought about clearing a building, or making that run through a Costco or Sam’s. Everyone takes a turn, makes it better than just Dave and I always doing it.

“I know you weren’t,” Gene said. He looked at his wife, and she nodded. And he nodded back. “I’ve got a bus.”

I closed my eyes. We didn’t need a bus. We needed to travel a few thousand miles. We needed another plane. A bus was shit, a shit method of transportation.

“No,” Melissa said. “It’s not like you’re thinking. It’s a school bus.”

I was glad my eyes were closed, because when I rolled them, no one saw. The fact that guy had a school bus really didn’t make that bus any better, any more attractive an offer.

“Their right,” Megan said. “I’ve seen it. It’s a converted school bus perfectly designed for the apocalypse. If Romero had seen this thing, he’d of used it in one of his movies. It’s even got one of those cattle scoopers on the front, you know – like the ones you see on trains? They clear the tracks of animals and well, shit, anything, so the train can chug right along.”

“Thing will destroy any cars blocking the road. Destroy them.” Gene smiled, grinned really.

I looked at Allison, Charlene, and then at Dave.

Dave cocked his head to one side. “Let’s see what this thing looks like.”

“Good.” Gene clapped his hands together. “Great.”

“All right,” I said. “So where is this monster masher of yours?” I asked.

“Well, see, that’s where there’s something of a problem,” Gene said, his smile gone, his shoulders deflated. “It’s not here.”

“It’s not here.” I ground my teeth. Seemed like a school would be a perfect place for a school bus, but maybe not for a school bus with a cattle scoop.

“No. It’s not.”

I shouldn’t have to ask the next obvious question. Gene didn’t get the idea. It was his turn to talk, and reveal the location of his school bus. “Gene,” I said. “Where is it?”

“Home.”

“Home,” I said.

“I was at work when everything started. I called Melissa, like I always did at the end of a day, you know, for a ride home.”

“He doesn’t have a license,” Melissa said.

“I can drive. I drive fine. I know how to drive.” Gene shook his head. “But, I lost it. Couple years back.”

“He drives fine, sober,” she said, and smiled at her husband, as if drunk driving was cute, and their little inside joke.

“And about the time she came to pick me up, hell was breaking lose all over town. Sirens blared. Cops running this way and that. We didn’t know that it was zombies eating people. We had no idea what was really going on. When she got here, there was a ruckus going on over on the main road, fire engines and trucks had the road all blocked.”

“Thought it was an accident, cars smashed all together, someone was trapped,” Melissa said.

“So she came in,” he said.

“And we never left. We followed all kinds of reports and started locking the school down. Knew we had to make this place as safe as one of them underground bomb shelters. Our home is that way, too. End of times, and all that. People used to laugh at me, stocking supplies and weapons. I just always believed in being ready for anything.”

“No one’s laughing now,” Melissa said, and placed an arm around her husband’s waist.

No one is left alive to laugh, I wanted to say. “Gene. How far away do you live?”

“Across town,” he said.

“I’m going with you,” Charlene said.

“Honey, I didn’t say I was going anywhere,” I said.

“I’m going, too,” Allison said.

I looked over at Dave, and he nodded. “You know I’m going. Don’t need to hear me say it.”

Gene nodded. “Well, kids, looks like we’re taking us a field trip.”

I needed to accept that Charlene was no longer a baby. I couldn’t help recalling her days in kindergarten…

#  #  #

If it had just been the first day of school, I don’t think I would have received a talking to. Instead, because I worked nights, I drove my daughter to school each morning. She had been in kindergarten and I didn’t want her on a bus with kids in first, second and especially not third grade. I knew the innocence wouldn’t last forever, and school was one of the first places to pick away at the sheltered wall her mother and I had built, but I was going to hold on to what I could for as long as possible.

We’d leave the house a little early, hit McDonald’s for a couple of hash brown orders and juice, and get to school just ahead of the buses. We’d park in the visitor’s lot, and wait for kids to get off the buses. She didn’t like to be first and I didn’t want to leave her alone in a classroom waiting for her friends, so hanging out until the buses arrived was fine with me. Then I’d carry her through the front doors.

She would talk my ear off the entire time. Usually the conversation revolved around cartoons, toys, or wanting to get a dog and why she’d be an amazing pet owner. How she’d take care of it, feed it, walk it, and wash it.

We’d smile and wave to staff as we entered the school.

On this particular day, Charlene’s teacher met me at the door to the classroom. “Good morning, Mr. McKinney.”

“Ms. Wingfield,” I’d said.

“Can I have a word with you?”

I set Charlene down, gave her a kiss and a hug, and a little encouragement to go into her class. I waved to her as she finally crossed the threshold. “What’s going on?” I said.

“I think it is time you stop carrying your daughter all over school.”

I’d cocked my head to the side. “I’m sorry?”

“You daughter needs to walk to her class. At this point, I don’t even think you should be walking her to class. You should say your goodbyes at the main door. She needs to begin developing some independence. You carrying her everywhere prohibits that from happening.”

I had to search her face for a smile, certain it had been a joke. When there was no trace of anything humorous in the grim expression she wore, I almost lost it. I wanted to go off on her, ask her who the fuck she thought she was. Charlene wasn’t always going to want me carrying her, so while she did, I sure as shit was going to. Was as easy as that.

“I’ve talked about this with your wife,” she said.

Talking about it with my wife, did little–no, did shit–to influence my thoughts. I may have noticed when I spoke I was a little louder than I intended to get. “She carry her down to class, too?”

“No, Mr. McKinney, she does not.”

“So she agrees with you?” I said. My hands were in my coat pockets. This was a good thing. I think if Ms. Wingfield saw my fingers roll into fists, the confrontation might have gone from bad to handcuffs fast. “Nah, I get it. I see what the two of you want. We’ll see how it goes. Can’t promise anything.”

“She needs to learn, Mr. McKinney. The question is, are you carrying her to class each morning because she wants you to, or because you want to?”

I clucked my tongue. “You know what, Ms. Wingfield? You have a great day,” I said, turned and walked away, back down the hall, toward the front-center of the school. Something needed punching. I just had to keep my cool until I was off school property.

By the time I reached my car, started it, and left the parking lot, I realized something I fought to admit.

Charlene needed to start walking to her classroom on her own. She did not need me carrying her to the door. The other kids in class would catch on, and make fun of her. She’d be remembered as the girl who had her daddy carrying her everywhere. Wasn’t as terrible as the kid who was bound to shit his pants in class, but I didn’t want my kid having to wear any labels.

#  #  #

“We’ve talked it over,” Andy said. He stood with both his hands in front of his stomach. His fingers twirled around one another, and it seemed to take a large amount of control not to make eye contact with any of us.

“Talked what over?” Gene said, and took a step toward Andy.

Behind Andy were Megan, Michelle, Robert and Kia. Like Andy, not a one made eye contact. “We’re not going.”

“You don’t have to,” Melissa said. “The six of us are going to get the bus. You wait here.”

“You guys can get some of the supplies together. Food in boxes, some of the medical stuff from the nurse’s office. Meet us by the back bay door,” Gene said.

“No.” Andy shook his head from side to side. “You’re not understanding me, us. You’re not understanding us, we’re not going with you on the bus. We don’t want to go to Mexico,” he said.

“No offense, Mr. McKinney,” Robert said.

I held up my hands. “None taken.”

“This is ridiculous,” Gene said. “We’ve been together since the start. We’re a family. I don’t want us to split up. We need to stay together.”

“Then stay with us,” Kia said. “There’s no reason to make a dangerous journey across town to pick up your bus, and then travel in it across the country just to cross a border. We have no proof Mexico is any better off than America. None.”

“It was just something I heard,” I said. I didn’t feel defensive. These people had as valid a point, if not more, than my notion to cross into Mexico. “Only thing I keep thinking is that we need to keep moving. Staying in one place seems more dangerous, but that’s just me. My thoughts. Mexico might be a million times worse off than the U.S. But it is something, you know? It’s forcing us to do something.”

Kia nodded. “I know and I respect your thinking, Chase; your decision. But it is not mine. I think it isn’t that bad here. I’m staying at the school. Everything we need is here. Everything.”

“Those supplies will run out,” Melissa said.

“And I’ll worry about that when it actually happens,” Kia said. “We have the weapons that you had in the trunk of your car, and they’ll–we can keep those weapons, Melissa, Gene? Can’t we? You’re not taking back all of those weapons?”

Everyone tensed. I saw hands tighten on rifles.

“They’re yours. Everything here, it’s yours. The bus is stocked. Prepped. We’re not taking anything from you. I wouldn’t do that. But, Andy, you’re sure?” Gene said. “I am not comfortable leaving you. I’m really not.”

Andy looked at the people behind him. They each cast a silent ballot with a slight nod. “We are,” Andy said. “We’re going to be okay.”

“I don’t like it,” Gene said to Melissa, like they might be the only two in the room.

I understood the man’s sense of feeling torn. “Gene, I think you guys should all talk. It’s something we can discuss in the morning. I would never want to be the one to come between you and your family. The road is going to be very dangerous. At some point, we may have to leave your bus because of things blocking the way. This is not going to be an easy journey.”

Not an easy and maybe not even a smart journey. This school wasn’t so bad. It did have everything, and was close enough to surrounding woods that eventually hunting for food and other supplies might not be as deadly a task as it was currently. Maybe we all needed a night to think things over.

Gene nodded, wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “You’re a good man, Chase. And I agree with you. I do. It’s very late. We should get some sleep, and in the morning, we can talk more. That sound alright?”

“Yes,” I said. “Sounds fine.”

“We’ve set the gym up like a mini-hotel. We pulled cots from the nurse’s office, and gym mats to use as beds, and separated the gym with play props for borders,” Melissa said, and smiled. “It’s not so bad.”

“I’m sure it’s not,” Allison said.

“Andy has sentry duty. Walks the halls, keeps an eye on things. It’s a one level school, but it’s spread out over a lot of land. We take turns doing this each night, using a rotation. Everyone has a turn,” Gene said.

“Good system,” Dave said. “I think I’ll stay up with Andy. Get a feel for the place.”

“That’s not necessary,” Melissa said.

“I want to, though. As long as it is alright with you, Andy?”

“I’d love the company.”

Gene clapped his hands. “Sounds like a plan then.”