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Daniels? Hey, Eric Daniels?
He’s so hot, it feels like he’s walking through the—
valley of the shadow of death
—desert. In the middle of the day. It’s oven hot. And he’s sweating something terrible. His clothes stick to his skin, itching him, making it hard to move.
One foot in front of the other. Quickly. That’s how we travel through the desert.
It’s so hard to move. He tries to run. He’s got to get somewhere fast. But the sand is very soft, almost like jelly, and his feet keep sinking in to mid-calf. The dune he’s trying desperately to climb begins to collapse. He slides back down, sinking deeper. There’s no shade from the fierce sun. The sand’s up to his knees, his thighs, his hips.
A snake has bitten his hand and it hurts really bad now. The fangs had gone in right there in the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. It’s swelling up into a useless club. He knows he’s got blood poisoning. He needs the antidote. Damn rattler. He tries to make a fist, but it’s useless. He can’t use his hand at all.
Why am I running?
“Daniels?”
He opens his eyes, and the glare of the desert sun winks out. The heat and the pain remain, however. He’s sweating, profusely. His clothes are soaked.
“Thirsty,” he manages to say. His voice comes out little more than a whisper.
“You’re running a fever,” Gilfoy tells him. He hands him a bottle and some pills. “Swallow these.”
“How long have I been out?”
“All night. It was pretty quiet for the most part, except that we lost two more on watch. And I think we might have a new problem.”
Even as he says this, Eric hears the shouting. Someone’s angry. Others are trying to calm the shouter down, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
“Same asshole as last night?”
Gilfoy nods. “How are you feeling?” he asks.
Eric tries to sit up. He’s hungry. His stomach is painfully empty, hurting more than the fever and the ache in his wrist. The phantom ache below his wrist. “Like crap. Weak. They still out there?”
He knows it’s a stupid question. If the undead had gone away, Gilfoy would have said so.
“Goddamn it! Let me go!” the angry man bellows. His voice echoes inside the warehouse.
“What is it this time?” Eric asks, tiredly.
“I need to get home to my family! They don’t know where I am! I’m leaving and you can’t stop me!”
“Fucking Sicilians,” Gilfoy mutters. He’s only half joking. They’re safe as long as they’re inside the warehouse, but they can’t hide out in here forever, and the man’s shouting is only keeping the dead close by.
“Aren’t you Sicilian?” Eric asks him.
Gilfoy shrugs. “Florentine,” he says, as if this explains everything. “Believe me, I’d love nothing more than to scream and shout about this, too, but it won’t help. It’s only making things worse than they already are.”
He opens another bottle and taps out a couple more pills for Eric. “Painkillers. Take ‘em while we’ve got ‘em. We’re running out of everything, so we can’t stay here much longer. No food already. And as soon as there’s no water left, people are going to start rioting.”
Eric chuffs. “Let him go then. As long as he’s shouting, they won’t leave. They can outwait us.”
“I think we should make a run for it, too. You up for another drive?”
“I will be. What’s your plan?”
“A few of the others got access to the roof overnight. They’re reconning the area to see which roads are blocked.”
“Anyone try signaling for help?”
“They started a fire, burned some pallets up there, but there are plumes of smoke rising from all over town, with a major blaze somewhere to the southeast. The air was pretty thick with it last night, masked the stars. And you could see the glow in all directions. As for emergency services, I haven’t heard a single siren since yesterday morning. No Stream still, either. I don’t think it’s going to come on anymore. Arc’s dead. We’re on our own from here on out.”
Eric struggles to his feet. Gilfoy doesn’t offer to help. He’s learned since yesterday the man is too proud to ask for it and too stubborn to accept it when it’s offered. Eric wavers for a moment, as if trying to decide if his legs are going to hold him up. Gilfoy braces, ready to catch him if he stumbles. But Eric manages to stay upright. He grabs the jacket he’d pulled off the body of one of the casualties from last night’s battles and drapes it over his shoulders. They’d started off with a group of about forty, but within hours five of them had died from bites and had to be dealt with before they turned. Gilfoy and another man, a grocer at a local supermarket, had done the deeds. Among the victims had been a young boy of about ten who’d been separated from his parents somehow. Gilfoy had cried for an hour afterward.
“The question is how we’re going to move thirty-plus people through hundreds of infected.”
Eric shakes his head. “That’s the wrong strategy.” He clenches his teeth against the shivers wracking his body. After a few seconds, they subside. “We need to move them first, not us. They’ll stay right where they are outside our door and keep trying to get in unless we provide them with a reason to move elsewhere.”
“Draw them away? How?”
Eric nods. “I’ll show you. We need to get to the roof.”
“I think you had better eat something first. And rest. Sit tight for now. We’re not going anywhere just yet.”
“That rope there,” Eric says, pointing to the coil on the floor. “Can you fashion me a sling?”
“You’re not fighting.”
“If this works, I won’t have to.”
“You wanna give me a clue?”
“I know how they think— well, if you can call it that. They’ll eventually forget what they were doing. But memory, or whatever it is that they use in lieu of it, is more durable the more recently they died, and we need them to forget sooner rather than later.”
“How do we do that?”
“By distracting them. Otherwise, we could be looking at them out there for days, maybe even weeks. It all depends. We have to give them a new memory to work on, one that’ll displace the one of us entering this warehouse here.”
Gilfoy loops the rope over Eric’s shoulder and beneath his arm before tying it off. “Well, we haven’t got a week. We don’t even have days. At best, we might last till nightfall, but after that...”
“Nightfall?” Eric thrusts his elbow toward the disturbance at the other end of the warehouse. After that, once everyone figures out they’re stuck here for another long night, it’ll be anarchy. And the most loudmouthed of them all will insist on being put in charge. “I doubt we’ve even got that long.”
* * *
In the end, it’s decided that four of the men will attempt to break through the line where the undead horde is thinnest— after the distraction. Eric had argued for trying to break through at the building’s front entrance on the side opposite the alley. “There’s more room there to maneuver around,” he’d reasoned. “More open space to defend ourselves.”
The shouting man, whose name is Peter Fortini and whose face has not blanched back to its normal olive-tone from the purple of outrage since his outburst this morning, has by the force of stubborn determination rather than persuasion convinced the rest of the group that the alleyway is the better option. “I say we get the cop car,” he’d argued, beckoning for Officer Gilfoy’s keys with his fingers, as if he expected to be obeyed without question. “And then we do what you two should’ve done last night, which is plow them all down, mash them into the pavement like so much road kill.”
“If I’d done that last night” Gilfoy snapped back, “I would’ve run you down and a dozen others like you, too.”
But Fortini was beyond listening to reason by that point. “I mean, what good are iron battering grills and bulletproof windshields if you’re not going to use them?”
“They’re not bulletproof.
“Maybe not, but they’re a lot more zombie-proof than pretty much anything else we’ve got right now.”
Neither Gilfoy nor Eric had bothered arguing with the man after that. He was clearly not interested in hearing differing opinions, or listening to reason. So, to shut him up, everyone just agreed to do things his way. Unfortunately, it didn’t shut him up. And no amount of shushing him seemed to get it through his thick head that his bellowing was drawing more undead to the building and getting them worked up outside.
Eric stands to the side as the four strongest and most able bodied men — Fortini, Gilfoy, and two brothers, Alex and Andrew Mayville — position themselves near the rolling door they’d all used to gain access to the warehouse yesterday. They’ve got whatever makeshift weapons they can find or were able to improvise. It’s mostly an assortment of metal rods and large screwdrivers. Gilfoy had refused to bring out the shotgun in the trunk of his car, knowing there wasn’t enough ammunition and the noise would only make the situation worse. He also didn’t want Fortini to get his hands on something that deadly, worried he’d turn it on the living if things didn’t go his way.
A second group of people have gone up onto the roof and are making their way toward both ends of the alley. They plan to throw whatever they can find onto the road below so the noise will draw the undead away from the door.
With the lull in Peter Fortini’s shouting rampage, the zombies have finally stopped trying to force their way through the corrugated metal door. They can still be heard moaning outside, however, and every once in a while one of them will bang against the walls, startling the group. The relative quiet does little to calm the frayed nerves of the survivors inside. They all feel like they’re sitting on ticking time bombs just waiting for them to go off.
From somewhere outside, they hear the first faint shouts. Then come the muffled sounds of large items crashing to the road through the walls on the other end of the building. Peter immediately reaches for the door handle, but Eric steps over and puts his hand on the man’s arm. “Give them a couple minutes to start moving away,” he whispers.
“We don’t have minutes!”
“Quiet!” Hank hisses, glaring at them.
“Or what? You’ll shoot me?”
One of the Mayville brothers shushes him.
Peter waits less than a minute before he abruptly yanks the door open. It flies up with such force that the handle slips out of his grip. The door thuds to a stop barely a foot over their heads. He immediately steps out onto the loading apron. “Clear!” he loudly announces. The three others step out. The undead haven’t gone far enough. Alerted by the loud rattle of the door opening, they’ve already turned around and are coming back.
“Fuck!” someone cries. “Too fucking soon!”
“Close the fucking door!” someone in the back shouts. Someone else screams.
Gilfoy shoves Peter in the back, forcing him out into the middle of the alleyway. He stumbles and falls. Gilfoy immediately spins and swings the heavy wrench in his hands at the head of the first zombie he encounters. Its head explodes. Blood sprays in a wide arc across the alley. The thing falls. Peter gets back to his feet. He turns around, his eyes wide with panic. He’s lost his screwdriver. He starts to run back inside.
The undead charge after him.
“Get back out there, you son of a bitch!” Eric says, snatching the man’s arm as he passes. But Fortini’s senseless with panic by now, his bravado completely evaporated. He doesn’t hear; he can’t think. “Damn it! Get back here!” Eric shouts. The man tears out of his grip and flees into the darkness inside the warehouse.
“Goddamn it!” Eric yells. He steps out into the alleyway, and bends down to snatch the screwdriver off the ground. The world spins when he tries to stand upright again. He nearly trips. Thankfully, his head quickly clears. He wades into the fray.
The Mayville brothers are right in the thick of it, swinging their weapons, taking out the dead. Their clothes are already streaked with fresh blood. The air is red. Bodies are piling up.
Eric’s first kill is very nearly his last. The screwdriver becomes wedged in the eye socket of an undead that was once an elderly female. She’d died wearing a tight fitting jogging suit with a leopard pattern and a necklace strung with obscenely large pearls. Half of her left arm and neck are missing, gnawed away as if the zombie that had gotten her had a very tiny mouth. Maybe it had been a child. The front of her jogging suit sports a bib of crimson. The backside is covered in shit and sags below her hips.
The dead thing leans into the screwdriver trying to get to him, listing like a barge about to sink stern over bow. Her bones creak and her hair bun suddenly unfurls, sending hair in a cascade over her face. Eric tries to hold her up, but she takes another step and her weight shifts, twisting his wrist at an awkward angle. He lets out a cry, slips around behind her, adjusts his grip, and yanks up as hard as he can, snapping her neck.
As she crashes to the ground, the screwdriver finally comes free with a wet squelch. She lands hard on her shoulder, shattering the joint. A piece of her collarbone breaks through the skin of her neck. Fresh blood spouts out of the wound, arcing up and into Eric’s face.
He doesn’t wait to see if she’ll get back up. He plunges the screwdriver into the base of her neck and wrenches it to the side. The dead woman’s limbs go slack. It takes another second or two for her jaws to get the message and stop their chewing motion.
“Get back inside!” Gilfoy shouts into his ear. He grabs Eric’s shirt and hauls him to his feet. “Gimme that! You fix that door. It’s stuck and we need it down!” He’s gone before Eric can respond.
More infected have reached the opening and are entering the warehouse. The living, including Peter Fortini, have fled deeper inside.
Eric shoves a dead aging gentleman in the back. It falls face-first onto a metal loading zone sign, slicing its skull right down the middle. He grabs the pull chain with his one good hand and tries to force the door to close, it won’t budge. “Chain’s bound up on the gears,” he shouts.
Another infected stumbles in. It hisses and lunges. Still gripping the chain, Eric pulls himself up, plants a foot on the thing’s chest, and launches it back through the door. Dizziness passes through him like a tidal wave. He tries to hold on. He can feel himself dangling, his grip loosening.
An engine roars, then the police car that had been parked inside with them screeches to a stop beside Eric. Gilfoy’s behind the wheel. “Get in!” he yells.
“The others—”
“Too late! Get in!”
The undead press forward. They’re already on the hood. One grabs onto the lights on top and tears them off.
“Where are the twins?” Eric gasps, trying to untangle the chain from around his arm while remaining on his feet.
“Gone,” Gilfoy says. “Hurry!”
There are more dead coming. Eric doesn’t see any more survivors inside the darkened warehouse. He figures they’ve all probably gone up to the roof by now.
With a final glance out into the alleyway, Eric releases the chain and staggers over to the car. He snatches at the door handle and manages to get it open. He falls onto the seat. Gilfoy reaches past him and slams it shut, trapping the fingers of a young woman who’d crawled onto the hood.
She lowers her head over the windshield and opens her mouth. Her lips are ruby red, and Eric distantly thinks she was pretty when she was alive. Now, with the blush of death on her skin and her eyes turned black, she’s terrifying to behold.
Hank guns it, spinning the steering wheel to the right as they exit the warehouse. The young woman slides toward the driver’s side. With her hand trapped, she’s stuck on the windshield. Another swerve, and she slides back and off Eric’s side. He hears the bones in her fingers snap. She hangs on, still dangling outside his window. She paws at the glass with her other hand. Eric shoulders the door open and she tumbles to the road. He catches a glimpse of her in the mirror, rolling on the pavement. Her arm looks horribly dislocated. Her fingers are a tangled mess. She gets right back up and starts coming after them.
“The brothers?” Eric asks again.
Gilfoy shakes his head. “Didn’t make it.”
“We have to go back for the others.”
“We will,” Gilfoy promises. He regards Eric for a moment, and there’s no mistaking the lie in his eyes. Or the barely restrained terror. “But we have to get you to a doctor first.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. You’re pale as a ghost and burning up.” He nods at Eric’s stump. “I felt it when I shut the door, the heat coming off your body. You’re not going to survive another twenty-four hours without help.”
