Dead City - 01 (6 page)

“We ought to find the nurse’s office,” I said. “If nothing else, maybe they have a phone. We could call somebody.”

“Who?” His voice sounded like it was coming through liquid.

“9-1-1, I guess. Maybe they can get an ambulance to us. Or tell us what to do for you.”

“Maybe,” he said, but it looked like he didn’t really care.

I guided him through the utility room and into the hallway.

It was dark, and it was obvious that whatever was happening to the outside world had also happened here. Trash was everywhere. A few classroom doors hung open haphazardly. Disorder reigned.

I looked down the banks of lockers to the end of the hallway, where it split into three directions.

“Here, come on. I think it’s this way.”

We took the hallway to the right even though I didn’t really remember how to get to the office. The front doors led directly into the cafeteria, I remembered that much, but I wasn’t sure where the office was from there.

In most elementary schools the office is right there in the front, but I remembered this one was different. I thought it was on the other side of the gym, so I worked that way.

The hallway in front of the office was littered with loose-leaf paper and large pieces of office furniture toppled over at odd angles.

One of the overhead light panels was dangling from the ceiling by a tattered rope of electrical wires. I watched it spin in a lazy circle like it was the center of the world, and I wondered how in the hell it had fallen down like that.

Carlos groaned something.

Off to the right, coming around into the hallway from another direction, was a man in brown corduroy pants and a collared shirt. He was dragging a bleeding stump that used to be his leg across the floor, smearing the tile behind him with gore. His neck was broken, his head bent over at a disgusting angle. A huge red knot had swelled up from the other side of his neck.

Behind him were five more zombies.

I let Carlos rest against the wall while I loaded a magazine and chambered a round.

With my flashlight up, I walked toward the lead zombie in the brown corduroys and shot him. Once he was down, I stood over his body and shot the other five, single-tapping each one to the forehead.

When the last one fell, I went over to the glass doors of the office and tried to pull them open. They were locked.

“Damn it. This place is killing me.”

I pointed my flashlight into the office and poked the light around. I was right about to turn around and get Carlos when I saw a flash of green pant leg and a brown boot below it.

Whoever it was had seated themselves behind a desk, but I couldn’t see anything besides the leg and the boot.

I kept the beam on the leg, waiting.

Suddenly, a Hispanic man with straight black hair and very brown skin peeked around the corner of the desk. He smiled at me, and in the bright white light of the flashlight beam I saw his teeth sparkling like veiled diamonds.

Chapter 6

“Hey Carlos, there are people inside here.”

He made a weak, strangled noise, and I turned the flashlight on him. He had pulled himself up against the wall and he was holding his side, muffling his coughs with his shoulder. It seemed like he was trying to hide from the light.

He was slipping, and it worried me.

I tapped on the glass doors of the office with the butt of my flashlight. The man in the green pants didn’t want to stand up. I guess he thought he was safe as long as he stayed in his little hiding spot.

He probably figured if he waited there long enough, I would just go away.

“Come on,” I said as patiently as I could. “Come over here and unlock the door.”

He shook his head.

“Open the door,” I said, like I meant it.

I brought the flashlight back and made like I was going to break the glass with it.

That made him sit up and take notice.

He raised his hands as if to say
okay, okay
and came over to the door. Looking back at his hiding spot, he turned the key.

When I heard the bolt click, I pushed the door open.

“Thank you,” I said, and moved around him into the main reception area.

The place was a mess. Office equipment was everywhere. There were books and papers and notebooks strewn across the floor.

The school’s mascot must have been the cougar, because there was a large fake bronze statue of one laying on its side beneath a plaque that said, THIS IS A BLUE RIBBON SCHOOL.

I nudged a picture frame out of the way with the toe of my boot. “Where’s the nurse’s office?”

He didn’t answer.

“Where’s the nurse’s office?”

The look on his face wasn’t exactly a helpless one. It was more neutral than that, like he just wanted me to leave.

“No English.”

“That figures,” I said.

There was a hallway on either side of the wall behind the cougar. Both hallways disappeared into blackness and I knew I didn’t have the time to go exploring.

“
Médico
,” I said. “
¿Dónde médico?
”

He gave me an uncertain shrug. I knew I wasn’t saying it right, and it frustrated me that he wouldn’t at least try to meet me halfway. He was going to make me fumble through it.

I pushed past him and went to the corner where I first saw his pant leg. Four more people sat there, tucked into a narrow aisle between the desks and the wall.

One of them was an older man, dressed in the same green landscaper’s uniform as the first man, and the other three were women dressed in gray housekeeping outfits.

I looked down at them and they looked back at me with completely neutral expressions on their faces.

I showed them the palms of my hands in a gesture I hoped they would take as friendly. I wanted to say something to put them at ease, but I didn’t know the words to say in Spanish. About the only thing I knew how to say was to ask for their license and insurance.

“Do any of you speak English?”

All I got was the same blank look.

There was no used dragging it out. I made my way down the hallway, glancing in all the offices until I found the one labeled NURSE.

Only a few of the cabinets had anything useful in them. There were some more latex gloves, some bandages, and some antibacterial soap, but very little else.

There was a phone on the wall and I tried that, but all I got was a strange electronic squelch that sounded like I had called a fax machine by mistake.

I tried the operator.

I dialed 9-1-1.

Hoping against hope, I even tried calling home, but I got the same weird noise each time and finally gave up on it.

I stuffed some of the latex gloves in my pocket and headed back up to the front.

The four silent ones were still hiding behind the desk. The first man was standing near the door, looking up and down the hallway.

“Do not lock this door,” I said to him. I pointed to the door. “Don’t lock it.”

He didn’t look like he understood.

I walked into the hallway and found Carlos was still leaning against the wall. He was coughing, and there were wet lines of black fluid around his lips.

“Hey,” I said, shaking his shoulder gently. “Carlos, can you hear me?”

His eyes were speaking volumes about how much it hurt.

“There wasn’t much back there. Just some children’s aspirin. I got some clean bandages, though. I’m gonna change this one because it’s soaked through.”

He turned his face to the wall as I unwrapped the bandage on his arm.

The wound was much worse.

The first time I cleaned it the wound looked dirty and mean, but at least it looked like a wound.

It didn’t look like that anymore. It had festered and changed from the white and pale red of a fresh, deep cut, to a sickening yellow and black crust. If I hadn’t known better I’d have said it had been festering for days, not just an hour or two. It actually looked like it was decaying while it bled. And it stank of rotting meat.

If he had been more aware, he would have heard me force the bile back down my throat

I changed the bandage as quickly as I could and gently put his arm back down at his side.

The hallway had been quiet while I worked on him, the only sound coming from the swinging light panel as it rotated on its wires, but now I heard something new coming from farther off.

Even before I could separate out the elements of it, I knew it was the sound of footsteps sliding across the tile somewhere off in the dark ends of the hallway. I let out a deep breath of frustration.

“They’re coming again. Can you hear me, Carlos? We have to move. They’re coming again.”

I slid a hand under his shoulder and tried to lift him, but there was no strength in his legs.

The man in the landscaper’s uniform was standing by the office door, watching me, and I called over to him to come and help me.

He didn’t move.

“Help me, damn it.”

He shook his head. “
El está enfermo
.” He seemed horrified I had even asked him to help.

“Come here and help me.”

He shook his head again and stepped back. “No.”

From behind me I could hear the footsteps getting closer and I knew we only had a minute or two at the most to get going.

As I watched him back up toward the office I got so angry I stood up, drew my gun, and pointed it at him, muttering something under my breath about him being a fucking little coward.

“Get over here and help me,” I said, closing the distance between us.

He stared at the gun, and for the briefest moment I’m pretty sure he was thinking about running the other way.

But he didn’t run. He nodded and walked over to where Carlos sat against the wall. Together we lifted him up and carried him over to the office.

“We have to get out of here. It’s not safe. Entiendes?”

He didn’t understand.

“Más muertos,”
I said, pointing down the hallway. “We have to go.”

That much he understood.

“Do you have a car? Maybe a truck?”

Again, I got that puzzled look.

“A truck, damn it. You know—” and I made a hand gesture like I was steering a car, “—a truck.”

He nodded.
“Sí, una troca. La escuela tiene una troca
.”

Glory hallelujah, now we’re getting somewhere.

“Great.
¿Dónde?”

He pointed toward the corridor Carlos and I had taken to get to the office.

That wasn’t good.

I didn’t remember seeing anything down there except classrooms, and that was the same direction the footsteps were coming from.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“¿Cómo?”

I pointed down the same hallway. “
No. No troca. Muertos. Mucho muertos
that way.”

“
Sí
.” He nodded at me like we were speaking the same language.

I shook my head at him. I didn’t understand.

He pointed at me, and then at my gun. He pointed down the hallway again and made like he was shooting a gun.

“Oh,” I said. “I get it. You’re fucking insane.”

There was no way in hell I was going to go down that hallway with those things while he and his friends made for the truck.

“No,” I said, showing him an empty magazine from my belt. “
No más
bullets.
No más
.”

It takes a trained poker face to cover up the realization that you’re completely screwed, and he didn’t have it.

Seeing that empty magazine melted all the smugness from his face and I didn’t need to speak Spanish to know exactly what was in his mind.

He swallowed a lump down his throat.

“What about that truck?”

“¿La troca?”

“Yes,” I said.
“Sí.”

His eyes went down to his feet. He looked back at the office. The others were standing up at the windows now, watching the two of us argue.

Finally, after he couldn’t stall any more, he pointed down a hallway that led past the office and toward the back of the school.

It was the opposite direction he had pointed out to me the first time.

“You were going to leave me here, weren’t you?” I said.

He looked at me blankly.

I was pissed, but I didn’t let it show. I pointed to the hallway. “Go on,” I said. “Lead on.”

Just then his gaze shifted to the hallway behind me and his eyes got big.

I knew that look.

I turned just enough to see two zombies entering the main hallway in front of the office.

He almost dropped Carlos in his hurry to back away.

“Hey.” I reached across Carlos’s back and grabbed the man’s shirt.

He tried to pull away, but I held him tight.

He looked at me pleadingly.

“No,” I said. “You help me with him.”

“No, señor, por favor.”

The zombies behind us shuffled closer. The one in front was close enough that I could see the blood-stained floral print running up the side of her skirt. The heel of her left shoe had come off, making her clop and scrape the ground with each advancing step.

I didn’t move and I didn’t let up on my grip. I wanted him to know I meant business.

“Señor.”

Clop and scrape, clop and scrape.

“Okay,” he said at last, and put his shoulder under Carlos. To his friends he said,
“Octavio, vamos a la troca.”

The others were gone in a flash. They poured out of the office like runners at the gate and went down the hallway so fast we could barely keep up.

We followed them through the hallway to the gym, where we made a right and then a quick left again.

When we came around the corner we nearly ran into their backs. They had stopped, and were staring at a sight almost as gory as the one I had seen under the tree.

Maybe as many as twenty zombies were on their knees, eating arms and legs and other unidentifiable bits of human detritus.

The floor was awash with blood.

Beyond them was a doorway, green metal just like the gym doors, and I guessed that was the way out. It might as well have been on the other side of the ocean, though. There was no way we could reach it.

One of the women gagged.

“¿Señor?”
the second gardener said to me. He pointed his finger like a gun, hopefully.

I shook my head. “
No más
bullets,” I said.

He said something to the others, quietly, in Spanish, and I guessed he was telling them we had to leave. The others backed up, but not before several of the feeding zombies looked up.

A few of them got to their feet.

“Let’s go,” I said, and we all turned around and headed back the way we came.

But that was a bust, too. There were six or seven zombies coming our way, and I could see more behind them.

“Señor,”
the gardener said, and I caught the obvious implication that this wouldn’t be happening to him if I had left him well enough alone.

We were caught at the bend in the hallway, only a short few feet from our escape.

Carlos groaned and tried to make me drop him.

“Not a chance,” I said, and tightened my grip on him.

He winced and stopped fighting.

Just then we heard somebody whistling. All of us stopped and looked at each other. It was a carefree, lilting sound—one high, one low, over and over.

We heard it again, and that time I placed where it was coming from. I looked beyond the feeding zombies and I saw a man in a white, short-sleeve collared shirt and brown slacks.

Our eyes met. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and nodded to me.

Then he whistled again.

A few of the zombies turned around to face him. Calm as could be, he walked over to the wall and banged on it with his fist.

That got the rest of the zombies looking at him, and while the others and I watched, dumbfounded, he yelled at them, baiting them with his own body away from the door that led to the truck.

He walked slowly backwards, making sure they followed him around another corner at his end of the hallway.

As the last zombie disappeared around the corner after him, my little party ran for the door. It had a little slit window in it, looking out on a small courtyard.

I tried to get a good look, but it was too dark to see much beyond some vague hulking shapes that looked more or less like a truck and some machinery.

“La troca,”
Octavio said to me.

I nodded to him and then helped Carlos take a seat along the wall.

I propped the door open and poked around a little with the flashlight.

The truck was right where they said it would be. It was an old white dualie one-ton, a big Ford F350.

The trailer wasn’t hooked up, which was good, and most of the equipment was out of the way, so it would be fairly easy to get the truck out of the courtyard.

There was a dark pile of mulch near the front of the truck, and beyond that was a hurricane fence like the one Carlos and I had climbed.

A few zombies were on the other side, alerted to our presence, I guess, by the movement of the flashlight beam. They were slapping the fence with slow, incessant slaps.