Dead and Dead Again: Kansas City Quarantine (29 page)

“What are you doing?” Calvin
demanded in a hushed whisper.

“He said abort, that means clear
out and scrub the mission,” she hissed back.

“Not in this case. We still have to
pick them up. It just means abort that particular escape route.”

“Oh, right.”

“Yeah…” Gus eventually said in his
best Bill Lumbergh imitation. “If it’s not too much trouble…we’re gonna need
you at the
back
entrance. Yeah, and you might as well go ahead and plan
on fighting through here too, ok? That’d be great, thaaanks.” Then in his own
voice he added, “This doesn’t look good. We might be stuck here for a while,
Scoot. Unless you can find a way to get us down.”

“Damn it. You’d better find us a
way back there,” he spat at Felicia.

Ignoring the ‘noises off’ order, the
beautiful actress pulled out wide and turned the vehicle through the ocean of grasping
dead, leaving a morbid wake of crushed and twisted limbs and gore spreading out
behind. She yanked the wheel, slammed on the gas and spun them tight between
the smoking wreck and the corner of the building and into an only slightly smaller
sea of death. The waves quickly became harsher than the ocean they had just
left, at least for a few very noisy seconds. The first wave of the dead sea broke
across the bow of their craft and the seas calmed as Felicia guided them through
the worst parts with full sheets to the wind, and both turrets firing broadside
and windshield washers going full-speed. The Hedgehog rocked and shuddered over
the gruesome whitecaps, between the open gates and into the much emptier back
lot of the station. “Any port in a storm, right?” she quipped.

 Zombies trickled into the lot
through the wide-open gates. Shufflers, Moaners and Gimps wandered around outside
the fence and covered the field as well as the parking lots of the neighboring
buildings. The building was now literally surrounded by zombies and many more
were pouring in from somewhere.

“Jesus,” Boomer said again. “It’s
too tight. They’re getting on the car. Found a downside to the nail guns…we
can’t finish the ones who won’t look at us,” he warned everyone. “Gotta do something
fast,” he suggested.

“Felicia, Tripper, we need to go
out there,” Calvin snapped at the other two.

“I’m on it,” Tripper called,
flipping open the back door and leaping out. One of the leather straps on his
boots caught on the bumper and pulled him up. But his plant foot was standing
in a dark puddle of ex-humanity and he crashed face-first into the pavement.

“I’m ok!” he called out, jumping up
and swinging his bat into a balding elderly man with a baby blue Sporting KC
jersey, crushing its skull with one blow.

“Let’s try to get a fifteen foot
cushion between the Hedgehog and the dead coming in off the street,” Calvin
panted. “Tripper, you take the north side, over there behind the building.
Felicia, you and I will try to get to the gate and clear it.”

 “Ok,” Felicia replied shakily and
opened her door without further discussion. “Coming out. Don’t shoot me, Joel Sweetie,”
she cooed at Joel.

“Roger that, my queen.”

Although scared, she was feeling
pretty invincible. The nice big blacksmith guy had given her a lightweight
chainmail dress and she had picked out a thing the man had called a Lucerne
Hammer, a long pole as tall as she was with three weapons at the end: A hammer
head near the tip; a standard spiked tip; and a Cornicello style spike opposite
the hammer head. She decided to just call it Freddie, because it looked wicked
like that
Nightmare
guy.

Clutching Freddie firmly but
loosely, she jumped out and ran around the vehicle to the driver’s side. The
stench of roadkill clogged her senses, but she didn’t’ have time see what
caused the smell. With a scream, she swung Freddie’s Cornicello over the top
and into one of the zombies crawling on the hood. The snaked blade punctured
the base of the skull of the dead guy, and she gave it a twist to make sure it
stirred up the brains a bit, yanking the coil free just before the body could drop
and rip the blade from her grasp. She did not throw up. And for that she was
grateful. She was not, however, grateful for the flood of dead-guy juice that
sprayed onto her armor from Calvin’s side of the hood. Revulsion left her
gaping in horror across the vehicle.

Across the hood, Calvin danced back
and forth, sweeping zombies from the hood and windows with his axes as if he
were cleaning snow with an ice scraper and he was late for work—blood, bones and
brains flew in all directions from his frenzied chopping. At this point she
would
have stopped to vomit if she thought she could do so without becoming lunch for
a dozen Gimps. Instead, through an incredible force of will, she breathed
deeply through her mouth behind the plastic face shield, gagging but keeping
everything down.

Both turret gunners dropped
Shufflers around the walkway so the stranded couple could descend. Gus and
Scaggs were keeping their zombies at bay with the light weapons the smith had
given them. Between the turrets, Gus and Scaggs, the team was fighting an even
battle against the incoming zombies. It was the trio of Tripper, Felicia and
Calvin that tipped the scales.

Tripper swung his bat like he was fighting
for a spot on the bench. The first of the half-dozen dead on the North side didn’t
have much of a chance. This zombie was the first man in a suit they’d seen
since the event had begun, wearing an ugly brown polyester blend with a gold
tie.
Probably even worked today,
Tripper empathized with the poor dead
guy, before bringing his bat across to slap at a fastball and popping the skull
like a water balloon. Something flashed on the man’s chest and he glanced down
and read a small black tag with gold writing that said ‘Director of something’,
but the something and the man’s name were obscured by dried flesh.

“Hmph.” He Hmphed. “Should have
taken a day off, man. Not that you’d be alive, but at least you would have been
dressed better.”

A shadow loomed over his shoulder
and Tripper spun quickly sending a left-handed uppercut at a highball that
shattered the jaw and consequently the neck of a mindless eating machine that used
to be a teenage boy in a powder blue KC ball cap.

“Slider! Sorry kid. You gotta pitch
better than that to keep Trip Grissom from taking it to the house,” he said,
watching an imaginary ball sail out of the lot.

Stepping forward and choking up, he
sent a blast to the side of a small Hispanic man in an SKC jersey who was so
old the disease probably hadn’t changed his look very much at all. Trip pulled
up short as the bat contacted the side of the man’s skull. There was a pop and it
dropped, but there was no blood.
If only I could do that every time. Wait,
is he dead?
With a sigh, Tripper swung at one in the dirt just to make sure,
spilling brain goo all over his new leather boots.
No time for Mr. Nice Guy
where the dead are concerned. That’s how people get killed,
he thought.

Without speaking or planning, Calvin
and Felicia advanced side-by-side, but far enough apart not to overlap swings
or drench each other in too much gore. The pair grunted and huffed as they fought
to the edge of the back lot and delved into the mass of dead pressing in through
the open gates. With the nail guns shooting over their shoulders and taking out
the more energetic dead, the Leapers and Moaners that were still out of reach,
the pair of armored warriors slowly progressed to the fence. The pair separated
a few feet from the street and each fought their way to one of the tall,
rolling gate halves. It took even longer to pull them together with each
pausing intermittently to dispatch two or three zombies, enough to make room to
pull the gate another foot.

Already fatiguing, Calvin shattered
one skull with a downward swing of his right arm, jabbed the spike tip of his
other axe into another zombie with the left and was already swinging on a third
face with his right arm again. Decaying flesh and blood that stunk of
three-day-old roadkill clung to the chain links of his armor.

Everyone was disgusted with the
constant slaughter.

“How did those old time warriors do
this?” Calvin breathed. “This is sickening. And they fought for whole days
sometimes. I’m worn out after a few minutes. And
our
enemy isn’t even fighting
back.” He also fought a constant battle for breath.

“You’re doing alright,” Tripper
told him. “And I’ve got motion cameras in the car filming this so the girls can
watch us later. Maybe we’ll be famous one day.”

“You’re more likely to film me
falling down and being ripped to pieces. Athena will enjoy watching some zombie
shucking my armor like I’m a crab,” Calvin panted.

“Nah. If it gets that desperate,
I’ll come help,” Tripper assured him.

“If that’s an option, why aren’t
you already here?” Calvin huffed.

“You said you wanted me to clear
the north side.”

“I don’t see any more dead over
there,” Calvin wheezed, taking a second to glance over his shoulder.

“Just wait a second,” Tripper told
him, and on queue another zombie walked out from under a walkway on the southwest
side of the building. “See. Every time I think I’m done, another one hobbles
out.”

“Where are they coming from?”
Calvin panted, sliding the bar across the gate as the last zombie died…again.  
Died
again…Dead again. Damnit. We have to figure out a better way to say that,
part of his mind complained bitterly.
Why won’t they just stay dead like
they’re supposed to?
Both he and Felicia leaned back on the heavy chain
link gates for a breather, high-fiving each other with a heavy clank of their
weapons.

“There,” Tripper closed a little
access door in the fence around the electronics shack underneath the tower,
wondering how the dead managed to think their way through the half-sized
hatchway.

Calvin walked the fence quickly,
not finding any holes. Felicia gave him a thumbs-up from the other side. “I
think we’re secure over here.”

“Why are they even around the
tower?” Felicia wondered aloud.

 “Must be something about the radio
waves that is drawing them…or something,” Gus suggested.

In his defense, he was a little
distracted as three gigantic former Chiefs fans picked that moment to lumber
across the walkway to where he and Scaggs stood.

“Watch out!” Scaggs shouted,
spearing one in the eye with an actual spear. She watched in fascination as the
body sank to the walkway and slide off into the pit below. Two others continued
to lurch towards them.

“Hmm. The bigger ones usually fall
off,” Gus noted, before he lunged in to drive his own spear into another brain.

Scaggs finished off the third by
stabbing the opposite eye from her last victim.

“And left again,” she said.

“What?”

“Gotta change eyes,” she explained
to Gus. “Otherwise it’s too easy. Uh-oh, uh-oh, no, no, no, no, no!” she begged
as the big dead guy didn’t fall off the platform as she’d planned, but instead
tilted straight at her, onto her, driving the spear deeper into its own head as
he fell. Unable to hold the weight, she was buried underneath the hefty corpse,
only one arm free to wave for help, silently promising to give proper thanks to
the beautiful Greek god for making the plastic face shields as malodorous,
sticky fluids coated the mask. Without the face shield and powerless to protect
herself, she would have already been zombified.
That’s assuming the disease
isn’t transmitted only through saliva or something,
she corrected her
internal narrator.
But I don’t want to find out first-hand.

“Guster!” she screamed.

But with a yell, Gus charged the
other two Joggers stumbling up the walkway. He called the faster ones Joggers
because they looked like first time joggers at the end of their route, and they
didn’t have much balance…and the first ones they’d seen were in jogging suits.
It took only two pushes with the butt of his spear to knock them into the pit
below. The immediate danger gone, he rushed back to Scaggs and tried to pull
the big corpse off her. Then he tried to push it off, but it barely moved and
he could hear her grunt out a pained breath as it rocked over her. Failing
that, he attempted to roll it off by lifting one side only.

“Well, this is just instant Karma,”
Scaggs muttered, trying to crawl out from under the putrid, oozing corpse as he
lifted, but no matter what he did, too much weight remained firmly on top of
her. “Guster! Get it off of me now!” she screamed. “It’s dripping its juices on
me!”

“I’m trying,” he called
desperately, finally stepping back and taking a quick glance to make sure the
walkway was clear.

It was.

Dropping to one knee and grabbing the
huge dead man’s left arm, he threw it over his shoulder, grabbed it with his
other arm and then half-turned and fell over with his entire body, rolling to
the ground pulling the big body with him until it was laying halfway off the
walkway. Scaggs staggered to her feet, pulling off the face shield and then her
helm and vomiting from the stench and pieces of dead flesh as she peeled chunks
away. Gus twisted out from under the man and pushed him the rest of the way off
of the walkway to splat fifteen feet down in the pit under the tower.

“Man, how can those things start to
smell so fast?” she asked, wiping bile from her mouth with a clean rag she
pulled from a pouch, removing tears with the other side of the ‘kerchief’ as
she looked around for her spear, which she found laying right behind her.
“Doesn’t it usually take days for a corpse to start to stink like that?” she
asked, slamming the helm back onto her head and fumbling with the snaps, but
her shaking fingers were unable to fasten them.

“Yet another in a string of the
mysteries that is zombie science,” Boomer said over his mic. “Hey, it ain’t
theoretical no more, am I right?”