An hour later, Sally was sitting up and talking a bit. She drank some juice as Wendy did her best to clean her wound. She was loaded with over-the-counter painkillers and seemed to be doing OK. The bus was still parked in front of the store. Wendy wasn’t any closer to a solution.
“Wendy, I’m scared.”
“I think you will be OK. The wound is clean and patched up.”
“No, I’m scared of the crash. I can feel it coming.”
Sally looked genuinely scared, as if she had experienced what was coming already. Being forced to go cold turkey was sometimes used as a punishment for the girls, but the threat of it was usually enough to keep them in line. Sally looked far more scared than Wendy had ever seen her, and she had seen Sally face some scary shit. Wendy worried about her friend. She might have to take Sally somewhere away from where they were to scream and sweat and cry. Already she could see that a good number of the dead were coming. She’d seen firsthand what they would do to a living creature. Somehow she thought if given the choice, Sally would rather be torn apart and eaten by other humans than suffer cold turkey.
“Hey, honey, how much stuff was left in that CVS?” Sally was looking older than her twenty-six years. She’d started dancing at sixteen and started doing heroin shortly after. “I’ve been using the tar, the Mexican shit.” Black tar heroin was an especially potent form of heroin from Mexico. “I’m really afraid.”
“I’ll stay with you. I will help you. The eaters are coming. We need to find another store and a safe place to chill. Well, not chill…”
“I know what you mean, girl.”
Wendy drove them away, scared for her friend. She couldn’t imagine what the captured girls had coming. At least Sally had her to help her through.
“We need to hurry,” Sally said. “We need to be settled soon, somewhere really safe, and before that I need to get a bunch of shit. It’s been almost ten hours since I last used.”
23.
Cooper woke with a start and was glad he’d used his belt as a safety harness. It stopped him from rolling off the platform. From twenty-five feet up he could see far. The ditch was filled with the dead, and none seemed to have escaped. They completely filled the ditch for as far as he could see. He climbed down and headed north.
He covered many miles nonstop in the day, making it all the way to where the 101 met the 85. He was tired, but today was actually an easy one. He was just south of the most populated area, and from here on it would be hard to move safely. There were likely very large groups of the dead just north of where he was. He wanted to rest as best he could tonight in preparation for the coming challenges, find food and water as well.
The sun was almost down as he headed to a housing development off the highway. It looked new, as it wasn’t too large and was surrounded by a vast open area. As the population grew, new houses were built on the edges of the city and this was the southernmost edge of the city. He had just walked through miles of nothing to get to this point. It felt like the edge of civilization. He left the highway, cautiously looking around.
The wall that should close off the subdivision was unfinished and stopped a few houses from where he was. The houses were mostly unfinished, and there were no lights on in them or on the streets. As the sun dropped lower, he could see just how dark this area would become. Already the deepening shadows made it hard not to stumble and trip at every step.
As Cooper walked, the sun continued to fall, the wind picked up, and the world began to cool down. By the time he made it to the edge of the development, the sun was behind the distant mountains and the cold night was upon him. He cautiously walked between houses, the darkness making it very hard to move. Construction sites were always littered with trash and debris. He pictured boards with rusty nails protruding underfoot, or worse, tripping on the uneven ground and falling on one. Who knew what else lay in the darkness just waiting to injure him.
He tried the doors, and the first one opened and in fact had no doorknob. He wanted to find a house that had a knob, one that was locked, with windows, and was unoccupied. Toward the center of the development the houses were more complete; windows were open on the second floors but not the lower, and the doors were shut.
He continued on to the northern end of the street and stopped suddenly to listen. It wasn’t sight or sound that stopped him in his tracks; it was the smell that hit him like a rock in the face. The stench of decay and putrid rot filled his nose almost as if it were a solid wall. He slowly took a few steps backward, silently turned, and went back down the street to the center of the development. He knew what he would likely find in the stench-filled dark. Moving or not, there were a lot of dead people around, and that meant there was nothing for him there. He found a house that was still under construction but had all its doors and windows locked. He found a ladder on the side of one of the other houses and carried it over as quietly as possible.
He pulled the ladder in after himself, the slight clanking setting his teeth on edge. He listened for a bit with his head out the window, but all was quiet. He made his way to the bathroom and tried the faucet, and water gushed from it. He drank deeply, stuck his head in the basin, and rinsed off all the sweat and dust. He splashed his face as he drank more water. It felt great and relaxed him. He stretched out on the floor of what was to be the master bathroom of the house and fell asleep.
§
Cooper thought it was rain that woke him, but the soft clatter, thumping, and moaning built to a roar. He was halfway to the window when he realized it was the dead. He walked slowly and peeked out. The dead packed the space between houses and surrounded him. Other windows showed much the same picture, the dead as far as the eye could see. Even the large space between the highway and the house was filling up with shambling corpses. There had to be thousands of them. He heard glass break downstairs as the press of bodies pushed against the panes. A zombie would eventually get pushed into the house, and the others would follow.
He thought that maybe he could wait it out. He had water, and he felt semi-safe because he could get to the attic and the door was heavy and lockable. There wasn’t room in front of the attic door for enough of the dead to gather and push it down. But if he stayed, he would be trapped. He heard more glass breaking. He ducked down the stairs quickly, and it looked like they weren’t on the verge of falling into a window, but it was still a possibility given all the windows and the number of the dead milling around outside.
But the smell was overpowering, and that was really the deciding factor for him. He never got used to it. It clung to him, invaded his body, and made him feel as if he were breathing in physical particles of rotting flesh. Even in the closed house, the smell was unbearable. He backed up the stairs and quietly closed and locked the bedroom door.
He must have attracted the dead when he moved the ladder. All it took was a few to attract a few more. The gathering crowd would get louder and attract even more in a chain reaction. This was a massive crowd, and for all he knew it was getting bigger. He wanted to leave but didn’t see anyway out other than waiting for the dead to wander off.
Then he remembered the whole reason they were here to begin with, noise. He just had to make a noise at a distance and draw them away. He could do that with his silenced pistols. He pulled one out. The silencer reduced the power of the bullets, but they would still travel a good distance and with enough force to make some noise.
He had four bricks of ammo. Each held five hundred bullets, but still he didn’t want to waste them. He stepped back from the window and knelt down. Being farther back from the window helped further suppress noise. He’d read about how real snipers operated, and the first thing he remembered was that they didn’t hang out of windows and off the edges of buildings.
He lined up a shot at the house farthest away and fired.
Click
. Nothing. He knew he would have to experiment, but he had no idea how far the bullet had gone. The throngs of the dead masked all sound and made it impossible to see any signs of where the bullet had landed. Without that knowledge, he could fire all his ammo and never know where the bullets were going.
He knew that bullets could travel a mile or two, depending on many factors, so these were probably making it to the end of the street, which was maybe a quarter of a mile away. He arched the pistol up a bit and fired. Nothing again. He fired again but a little to the right of the house, compensating for a stiff breeze that almost always blew through the valley. This time he thought he saw a small movement on the roof. Was that where the bullet hit? He aimed again, a little more to the right. He had used four bullets, and even though he had several thousand he knew how fast things like ammo ran out. He fired again.
The chain of events was spectacular. The bullet struck a large plate-glass window above the front door of a house, and it shattered. The glass fell, shattering more and making a noise loud enough to attract most of the zombies close to it. They all surged toward the house, and things began to thin out around Cooper’s temporary residence. He fired again and hit the frame of the window. He couldn’t hear it, couldn’t see it until he pulled out his scope and looked. But it must have made some noise; the dead were more riled up.
After about ten minutes, a few drifters were still milling around. He reloaded as he waited. He decided he could make the highway and went downstairs while the dead were mostly preoccupied. He held both pistols at his sides. He opened the back door and raised his arms.
Click. Click.
A neat hole appeared in a woman’s forehead, and she dropped to the ground. Less than a second later, a man in a suit missing his lower jaw dropped. His left eye gone.
Cooper was at the grass that bordered the highway, guns still up.
Click
. A kid dressed in filthy rags that looked to be a sports uniform fell.
Click. Click. Click.
A large naked fat man startled him by moving quickly. He put three shots in his head. A waste of ammo, he had to watch that in the future.
Click
. Another man in a suit with his shirt open and untucked fell.
Click
. A woman in a suit blouse with no dress or pants on fell. They must have wandered over from a nearby business park.
Cooper was almost to the highway. He looked back and saw he had a few fans, not too many. He kept moving across the grass and down the highway. He was free from the dead for now.
24.
“Those were gun shots!”
Lisa shushed Ana and squeezed her arm. In the dark closet the noise was muffled but unmistakable. “Shotgun, I believe. We have to be quiet. We may be in here for a long time.”
“OK,” Ana whispered.
It was less than a day after Cooper left when both girls were sitting in Lisa’s house, talking and eating from cans by candlelight. Ana had slept a long time but not quite as long as Lisa, who had fallen asleep shortly after Cooper left and had woken up only a few hours earlier. Ana was less guarded with Lisa, and they chatted about their lives prior to the breakout of Euphoria-Z, basic background stuff. They had just finished eating when they heard the first screams. Lisa ran out and came back quickly. They were under attack and had to hide.
“You know they are going to find us in here if they look,” Ana whispered. “We really need to get out of here.”
The closet was almost completely dark. Lisa was silent for a moment. “I know. You should get out of here.”
“Not without you. Come on.” Ana stood and opened the door to the closet and crawled around the room. “Is there a way to sneak out of here?”
Lisa was pulling herself up off the ground, using the bed for support, “Yes, it’s how I got stuck in a car and almost died. I will get you caught. You should go.”
Ana ignored her, took her hand, and pulled her out of the room.
The girls went out the back of the house and heard the sounds of shouting coming from the street. Male voices were cursing, telling everyone to come out or die like their friends.
The wall was eight feet high. It seemed excessive for a development way up on the hill. Ana had already run up the ladder leaning against the wall and straddled it. She was reaching down for Lisa, feeling very exposed on top of the wall.
“Give me your hand.” She looked around nervously.
“I don’t know about this. The last time I tried this I rolled down that hill all the way to the bottom and had to hide in a car.”
Ana looked briefly down the steep hill. It was a long way to the bottom. She tried so hard not to picture Lisa rolling down it. Her face twisted in an involuntary smile. She just hoped it was dark enough to hide it. “Come on, we don’t have time to screw around.” She waved her hand at Lisa.
Lisa took hold of her hand and carefully climbed up the ladder. It squeaked and rattled, and Ana was sure everyone for a mile could hear it. She held on to Lisa’s hand, worried she was going to get pulled off the wall. Lisa made it to the top of the ladder and sat on the wall. Ana caught her breath.
A loud crash startled them, but they sat still. The flicker of flashlights in the house came to the back door, and both girls held their breaths, hoping whoever it was didn’t see the ladder leaning against the wall. The light paused for a moment, then whipped around and was gone.
They heard crashing from the next house as the door was kicked in there too. How many people were here? Were they taking prisoners or just supplies? They girls sat on the wall in the dark, waiting for the people to get far enough away so any sound or motion wouldn’t give them away.