Clickers vs Zombies (24 page)

“Good Christ, no, he doesn’t want to start anything about it,” Richard barked. He turned to Max, angry. “You need to shut the fuck up.”

Max had responded in kind. He’d almost leaped over to Richard. “Oh yeah? Well fuck you!”

“Will you both shut your traps?” Paul had said. “Jesus fucking Christ on a moped, if anything hears us in here, we’re dead meat.”

“You better listen to your homeboy,
ese
,” Sparky said. He leaned against the wall casually, a slight grin on his face. He was cradling that black assault rifle as if it were something sexual. “Whatever the fuck those things are—zombies, monsters, whatever—they got ears. They’ll hear us and try to break in here.”

Melody had clutched at Richard’s arm. She’d been clearly afraid, on the verge of tears. Richard had tried to assuage her fears. Sparky had noticed the exchange. “She your little sister?”

Richard had nodded. “Yeah.”

“And what about you two?” Sparky had motioned to Paul and Mary.

“We’re siblings,” Paul admitted.

“Which just leaves dick head over here without a family,” Sparky said, acknowledging Max with a slight smile.

Max muttered something under his breath. If it was meant to taunt Sparky, the gang banger either didn’t hear it, or he didn’t care.

“Whatever,” Sparky said. “Listen, I don’t want to fuck with you kids tonight, you know what I’m sayin’? Whatever the fuck is happening outside, it’s some serious shit. You want to hang out with me down here and hide from those fucked up things, that’s cool. But you can’t be fightin’ with each other and shit. And you can’t be sayin’ shit to me, you understand?”

“We’ve got to be cool,” Richard said, directing this to his sister and his friends, his mind racing, already figuring the gang banger out.

“You’re right, homie,” Sparky said. “We all gots to be cool. Can we do that?”

Richard nodded. He sensed Melody and his friends nodding and murmuring in agreement in the darkness of the basement. Across from them, Sparky had sighed and shifted position. “Cell phones aren’t working for shit now, but if anybody gets a signal, let me know. In the meantime, I think we should just hunker down and wait for this shit to pass.”

And that’s what they’d done. Aside from some discussion among themselves about what to do, within full earshot of Sparky and not really caring that he could hear them, Richard and Paul had taken over the discussion and talked Melody, Mary, and Max into sitting it out in the basement for now. The battle that was being raged outside—they could hear gunfire, explosions, screams, and other sounds from blocks, even miles away—continued to filter into them. That was enough to keep them down here for the night. The other concern was the lack of cell phone coverage. “If Dad heard us say we were in Sunken City, he’ll come up here,” Richard had said.

“What if those things got him?” Melody had asked.

“We can’t consider that right now,” Richard had answered.

As they’d talked, Sparky said nothing. He’d hung back on his side of the basement, observing, listening. Finally, when the discussion was over, they’d settled into waiting it out.

At some point during the night they’d taken turns dozing. Richard told Melody she could sleep if she wanted to and for a while she did, her head resting against his right shoulder. When she woke up she whispered to Mary. The two girls cried at one point, their sobs muffled as they comforted each other. Paul had moved over to be near Richard and told him if he wanted to doze a little bit he could—Paul could keep watch. Richard took him up on it and managed to sleep lightly for a few hours. When he woke up, there were explosions in the distance.

Everybody had gotten up at the concussive reports of the explosions. “What the hell is that?” Max had asked, his voice trembling.

“The oil refineries in Long Beach maybe?” Paul said. Melody and Mary had turned their cell phones on, and in their glowing light Richard could see their frightened expressions. Even Sparky looked a little freaked out by it.

“Maybe.” They’d listened to the sounds for a while as smaller explosions erupted in the distance.
It has to be the refineries
, Richard had thought.
What else could it be?

Now it was ten a.m. The air was heavy with the smell of smoke. Wherever it was coming from, it was strong enough to seep into the basement.

“If shit’s on fire, it might spread this way,” Max said, his voice low, humbled. Last night’s verbal dress down had taken him down a peg or two.

“Maybe we should head upstairs and see where it’s coming from,” Richard suggested.

Sparky was standing at attention cradling his rifle, looking up at the ceiling as if trying to see through it to the deserted street outside. “Yeah, that sounds like a plan. Let’s go.”

They headed up the stairs with Sparky in the lead. After getting the door open, they moved slowly down the first floor hall to the staircase that led upstairs. It wasn’t as dark up here as it was in the basement, and the windows that looked out to the street were still boarded up. They headed up to the third floor quietly and once in the clean apartment they moved to the windows that overlooked the street below.

“Well, something’s on fire, that’s for sure,” Sparky said.

Amid the typical blue sky Southern California was known for, there were big splotches of dark smoke that were drifting from the east. It was hard to tell where the fire originated from unless they looked out a window on the other end of the building. Paul exited the apartment and headed to the apartment opposite this one, which was sparsely furnished with rotting furniture and bore the evidence that squatters had taken temporary residency. “Wow! You guys should see this!”

The others left the apartment and entered the unit Paul had drifted into. Paul was standing in what had presumably been the bedroom, looking out the large window that looked out over San Pedro to the north and Lomita and Long Beach to the south. About ten miles to the distant south, in what Richard was positive was Harbor City and North Long Beach, the oil refinery that was located just south of the 405 freeway was on fire.

“Holy fuck, will you look at that,” Richard breathed.

“If Dad can drive up here to get us, how’s he going to get past
that?
” Melody asked. She looked transfixed by the fire. From this distance it appeared something had bashed into one of the large oil tankers—that giant Clicker, perhaps? Flames shot hundreds of feet into the air, billowing thick clouds of black smoke. The smoke was so great in size and density that it practically covered the entire South Bay and South Central Los Angeles area. It was now starting to drift southward toward the beach, which was evident by the tendrils of smoke that was beginning to seep over Sunken City.

“He’ll get here,” Richard said, trying to soothe his sister’s fears.

“I hope so,” Melody said.

From behind them, Sparky was messing with his cell phone. “Still no service,” he said. He looked up from his phone, his features solemn. “I hope your old man can get up here.”

Richard was thinking about this when something fell to the floor in the room behind them.

Everybody froze. Richard’s heart was lodged in his throat. His belly felt like lead. “What was that?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” Sparky said. He was instantly alert. He cradled his assault rifle, his finger brushing the trigger guard.

Melody grabbed Richard’s arm again, melting against him. With the four friends huddled in close formation, Sparky stepped out of the room to see what had made that sound.

Foothill Boulevard, California

When Augustus finally regained consciousness, the first thing he noticed was the sunlight on his face. It had been night when he blacked out.

He sprang up quickly, expecting something to come at him. Then he realized where he was and what had happened. His breath was held in his lungs and he released it in a long sigh as he sagged in the plush leather seat of the limousine.

God, I’ve been conked out all night
, he thought. He looked out the tinted windows of the vehicle, noting that the street was completely deserted now. The chaos that had erupted yesterday was no more. The zombies, the crab-monsters, all were gone. He wondered why the limo driver hadn’t come back for him. The zombie had unlocked the doors from outside when it took Marion. Why not come back for him and do the same?

Marion…

Augustus whined, low and mournful. His body trembled as he thought of her. His ears began to ring and his face felt flushed. He put his head between his legs and breathed deeply until the spell had passed.

“Oh, Marion,” he sobbed. “I am so sorry…”

Augustus inspected his surroundings more closely. His senses were garbled, not on track. They felt sluggish. The last thing he remembered was Marion being dragged off into a grove of trees by one of those zombies. Augustus had rushed to her rescue but had been driven off by another zombie. He’d seen what they were doing to people in that grove of trees. They’d been torturing those poor people…raping them.

Augustus shook his head in disgust. How could the dead rape the living? It didn’t make sense. What was powering these creatures? In all his studies on past life regressions and the afterlife, the one thing he learned was that the soul always yearned for peace. It didn’t seek death and destruction, the pain and suffering and degradation of other living things. So what was going on here? He remembered his intuition from the night before, that another entity was inside the corpses. What could it have been? The only thing that came to mind was an explanation his daughter, Susan, would have been quick to supply. Demons.

As Augustus looked out the window trying to gauge his surroundings, he tried to put everything in perspective. He didn’t subscribe to a Judeo-Christian worldview like his daughter, but he did believe in negative supernatural forces. People like Susan would call those forces demons, but Augustus and people who practiced New Age spirituality preferred to think of them as negative energy forces. The amount of psychic energy a human being expels and holds is greatly influenced by that individual’s personality and mood, by the acts they commit, the way they carry their lives. People prone to committing horrible acts or dwelling on the negative often exude bad energy. People who worked at positive things often exuded positive energy. Augustus had always lectured that it was important to live clean, and to always portray a positive energy. When a person died, that positive energy—the spirit—could go forth and work its magic or it could be reborn in another human being. However, if a person with negative energy died, the life force lived on as a malignant force. Augustus had been called in as a consultant on so-called haunted house cases. Most of those cases had to do with the negative energy—the spiritual residue of a person who had lived an unhappy or negative life—remaining in the house.

Truly evil people, however, sometimes left a psychic energy that was very malignant. This energy could wreak havoc on the living in a way that led most people to believe that demons were present.

Whatever had happened here, it wasn’t just a huge giant case of bad psychic energy. This was something far worse.

Augustus reached into his pocket for his cell phone. He pulled it out and saw that it was still turned on. There was no cellular signal. Cursing, he put it back in his pocket and moved toward the front of the vehicle. The partition that separated the driver from the passenger was still open and the front seat was empty, the doors shut and presumably locked. Augustus looked out the front windshield at the empty street in front of him. His first thought was for his children. Were they okay? Were they able to get out of California? Was this mass chaos and destruction limited to California or was it global? Augustus was pretty sure it was global; he was beginning to remember the news reports yesterday afternoon as they were speeding down Foothill Boulevard toward the airport. Whatever had happened, it had happened fast. And those things…

Clickers. That’s what the media had called them. Thinking about the path of destruction they’d carved, August was lucky to be alive.

Augustus cast another look around and gripped the handle of the door.
Marion,
he thought.
I’ve got to find Marion.

He opened the door to the limousine and stepped outside cautiously. The first thing that hit him was the smell. It was the stench of smoke from a dozen fires underlined with a chemical scent and something else…

Death.

Augustus turned to the grove of trees where those things had taken Marion. That area seemed deserted now. He stood there for a moment, trying to let his senses guide him. Right now he could feel nothing. He detected no vibration, no negative energy. All he felt was a vast emptiness, yet at the same time he sensed something was out there, something old, so old it defied human perceptions of time; it was older than anything in the universe, and it was powerful and it knew all worlds, had amassed an army of similar beings under its power, and it was here on this world to overtake it, to overrun it, to destroy it, and when it was finished it was going to move on to the next world, no, the next
version
of this world, and it had to be stopped, it had to be taken down, had to be—