Dead Series (Book 3): A Little More Alive (6 page)

Billy’s fingers
coiled around the grips. “I got your back. I do.”

He let go and
Billy popped the magazine, examined it and slapped it back in before racking a
load and pointing the gun at Paul’s face. Instinctively, Paul unsheathed his
sidearm and aimed for Billy’s nose. “The fuck you doing?!”

Billy tucked his
chin into his chest. “Get down!”

Paul ducked and
Billy fired a round over his head. Spinning, Paul saw an elderly lady hit the
tiles with a double thud that rattled the pots and pans on the wire shelf.
Blood, thick and tar-like, ran from a hole beneath her hairnet to the floor.
The white apron tied around her blue dress was covered in red handprints and
gave Paul the chills. He looked up from her bloodstained rubber gloves to meet
Billy’s wide eyes. “Thanks.”

Billy nodded and
followed him out into the cafeteria where at least a dozen corpses were still
on their feet. Outside of a man wearing an electric company coat – caught in
the wrong place at the wrong time – the dead were all military and all hungry
as hell.

“Paul!”

He turned to find
Rebecca leaning against a wall, trying to hold the veins and tendons inside her
bleeding wrist.

“One of them got
me!”

Before he could
respond with something that didn’t even matter, someone grabbed him around the
neck. He could smell the rot on the person’s breath just before his windpipe
closed. Could feel the bone poking through the fingertips digging into his skin.
A gunshot rang out, so loud it doubled his vision. Ears muffling, he turned to
see Billy lower his newly acquired weapon. He gave Paul a quick wink before
turning and shooting two older officers about to rip into Curtis. Curtis stared
at Billy with a beleaguered look wrenching his face, momentarily paralyzed
until Stephanie’s cry for help pulled him across the room.

P
aul and Curtis stared up at the ceiling, studying the vent
door hanging from its hinges in the women’s restroom. Amazement pulled on their
faces like gravity because this was just as impossible as everything else.
Corpses walking the Earth. Sophia dead. And stragglers using the ventilation system
to access the mess hall. It was a recipe for depression if ever there was one
but they didn’t have time for distractions like grief and crying. Not with this
mess on their hands.

Paul’s eyes fell
to the dead woman crumpled in front of the double sinks. “They’re getting smarter.”

“Yeah, but the real
question is, how smart will they get?” Curtis whispered, afraid more were still
up there.

His gaze rose to
the broken vent again. It was so surreal, it took his brain a few clicks to
catch up with his vision. “Looks like it gave under their weight. They got
lucky this time.”

“When they start
wearing night vision goggles, we’re really screwed.”

“The good news is,
I bet they actually have some of those in the armory we can put to good use.”

“Some RPGs would
be nice.”

“We take everything
we can carry at dawn, grab some quick target practice right by the truck, and get
the hell out of here.”

Curtis arched a
sandy blond eyebrow at him. “You think it’s a trap?”

“Colorado?”

“They know we have
weapons. We told them we were here.”

“We have to be
ready for anything, but at this point, we also have to assume Brian was telling
the truth. We can’t just let them die. We need them.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Paul tipped his
head back and stared at the dangling vent door again. Part of the ceiling around
the vent had broken under the girl’s dead weight, sending her crashing to the
floor and throwing back the floodgates for the fiends crawling close behind. “How
did we not hear them come in?”

“And why is that
vent so fucking big?”

“Jesus Christ.”
Paul rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Just when I think we’re getting a leg to stand
on...”

Curtis studied the
dead woman on the floor. She was young and had a big dent in the side of her
head from where she met the concrete floor after a headfirst fall. “Yeah, this just
upped the ante a little,” he said, taking a step back from the blood pooling
around her head.

Exhaling a weary
breath, Paul shifted in his bloody Adidas, sidearm jiggling against his right
leg. “How did they even know to come in this way? I mean, how is that even
possible? They’re…braindead.”

“I’m starting to
think it’s all an act to lure us into a false sense of complacency.”

“You may be right.”
Rubbing his chin, he blurred the dead woman’s mushy head into an inky blob.
“Reminds me of this guy who hid in the attic of this house we crashed at somewhere
in Texas”

“The Chevelle guy?”

He nodded. “The
guy was definitely still firing on a few cylinders.”

“Wendy said he
almost killed you and then you almost killed her and your butt-buddy, Dan.”

“I didn’t almost…”
Paul blew out an irritated burst of air. “Sonofabitch snuck up on me when I was
taking a nap.”

Curtis wiped blood
from his face and flicked it onto the broken mirror above the sinks. “Things
are like rats. They’ll find a hole to get in.”

“We should pack up
and get the hell out of here right now before they come in through a cellar
door or something we don’t know about.”

Curtis checked his
watch. “Sun’ll be coming up in a couple hours. We should wait for the light.”

Paul sighed and
turned back to the woman at their feet. Curtis was right. It was too dangerous
to go anywhere in this world at night if you didn’t have to but the clock was
ticking for that family in Colorado and who knew how many more ways there were
to get inside the mess hall. The place was huge and just as foreign to him as
all the other haunted houses and go-kart tracks they’d squatted at over the
past month.

“What’re we going
to do about Rebecca?”

Hanging his head,
he stared at his shoes. Beecher’s Grocery whisked through his tired mind, sending
a stabbing pain into his side. The twisted irony of the whole thing did not
escape him. “I don’t know,” he said, walking away.

“Yes, you do, Paul.”

He stopped and
slightly turned his head before continuing out into the cafeteria, where it was
quiet and smelled like gunpowder and dead. Calvin sat in a far corner on the
floor, slowly rocking Maria’s lifeless body in his bloodstained arms while
Rebecca sobbed at a table with a towel pressed against her wrist. Curtis was
right about her too; there was only one thing they could do to help her now and
it sent a cold shiver running down his spine. Stephanie watched him from the
other side of the room, long dark hair hanging in her face as she calmly
reloaded her gun.

“You want me to do
it, boss?” Billy whispered, standing off to the side with a foot resting on a
chair. The police utility belt they took from the dead fat cop in Oklahoma was
back on his waist and Paul barely looked at him as he passed by.

His legs were so
numb it felt like he was gliding on an airport moving walkway and the closer he
got to Rebecca, the more he wanted to turn and run. Wendy watched him slog by,
looking away from his heated glower because this was her fault and she fucking
knew it.

Stopping in front
of Rebecca, his pulse thudded in his ears. The tablecloth of blood turned his
stomach. “How are you?”

Looking up at him,
fresh tears darkened the grime hiding her colorless face. Blood gathered around
her arm on the table, running to the edge and dripping onto the floor.
“Fucked.”

Pulling out a
chair that scraped too loudly in the quiet sucking the air from the room, he
sat down and clasped his hands together. “Can I take a look?”

She hesitated
before pulling back the towel.

Paul tried not to
grimace but it was impossible not to when he saw the mangled mess of severed flesh
and nerves. It was a wonder she was even alive. If the virus didn’t get her,
which it surely would, she would most definitely bleed out without immediate
medical attention. His gaze landed on the open first aid kit on the table. Band-Aids
and hydrogen peroxide. That was their medical care now and it was almost funny.

She pressed the
towel back over the wound, blood pooling around her feet. “I’m scared Paul.
This is really bad.”

“Everything is
going to be fine. I promise.”

“He came out of
nowhere. I didn’t even see him until it...”

“I know, I know. Just
sit here and relax for a second. I’m going to get you some water.”

She chuckled,
eyelids heavy and glassy like she just rolled in from an all-nighter.

Rising from the chair,
he put his head down and trudged across the mess hall, curling his hands into
fists as he went. “Can I talk to you?” he whispered without slowing.

Wendy followed him
into the kitchen, stopping in front of a lifeless walk-in cooler. Kneeling
down, he took the gun from the dead Guardswoman before standing tall and
getting in Wendy’s face. His breath washed over her in warm waves, anger
constricting his pupils.

“What the hell was
that out there?”

Her brow creased.
“What was what?” she whispered back.

He pointed to the wall
of ovens separating them from the others out in the cafeteria. “You had that
shot on Rebecca.”

“No, I didn’t,”
she replied, taking a step back and tripping over the dead lunch lady’s legs.

He grabbed her
hand and stopped her fall, yanking her hard against him. “I saw it, Wendy. You
had a clear shot on that guy and didn’t take it.”

She tried to push
away but he held on tight. “Paul, I didn’t have a clear shot and those things
were almost on me.”

“Bullshit!” His
face twisted in the dim light of a nearby lantern. “You let her get bit.”

A perfectly played
shell-shocked expression slipped over her face. “Why are you doing this?”

“Why are you?” He slammed
a fist down on a metal table, rattling some dirty silverware. “Did you think
Rebecca was going to get in the way of your little fantasy?”

“
Fantasy
?”

“Yeah, you know, the
one where you and I ride off into the sunset together at the end of the day.”

“Paul, I don’t
know what…”

“You know exactly
what I’m talking about!”

Flinching, Wendy
tried pulling free and he yanked her to his lips, kissing her hard and wet. She
tasted like cinnamon and it turned his stomach. Drawing apart, he stared into
her blue pools, chest undulating beneath his t-shirt. “Is that what you want?”
he whispered, holding her against him.

Wendy stared up
into his brown eyes, stunned and unnerved, mouth gasping for air.

“Answer me!” He
shook her by the arms. “Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” she replied
in a breathless whisper.

Pushing her away,
antipathy curled his lips at the corners. “Too bad, because that’s never going
to happen between us. Never.”

She took his hand
and he yanked it free. “Paul, didn’t that night on the boat mean anything to
you?”

“Yeah, it meant that
I can’t handle my tequila anymore.”

“No.” Faintly, she
shook her head, eyes misting over. “You take that back.”

“I will not take
it back! There is as much between us as there is between Rebecca and I. Which
is nothing!” He cringed with his rise in volume and lowered his voice. “You
just fucked up, big time, Wendy. You really did. That’s the equivalent to
murder.”

Aghast, she
studied him for signs of deceit in the thunderstruck silence that came next,
bottom lip quivering like the fluorescent light above the sink. “If I would’ve
shot that guy, I would have hit her.”

“Bullshit!” He
stormed across the kitchen, tucking the dead woman’s gun into the small of his
back and snatching a bottle of water. The gun strapped to his thigh banged
loudly against the edge of a metal counter as he rounded the corner and went
into the cafeteria. The mood darkened along with the lighting, slowing his footsteps
to a crawl. The heavy silence left a far-off ringing in his right ear that grew
steadily louder. His eyes snagged on Calvin, who was still sitting in the
corner holding his dead wife, painting her bloody face with salty tears – as if
they could magically bring her back to life like some childhood legend.

Paul went closer,
ignoring the eyes on him as he crossed the room. His gaze flicked from Calvin
to the heavyset woman lying a few feet over. She was dead and bloated, her skin
stretching her fatigues.

“I shot both of
them.”

His eyes jerked to
Calvin.

“I killed her.”
Stroking Maria’s blood matted hair, he forced a smile into his cheeks Paul
could never lift. “I killed my beautiful wife.”

Crouching down,
Paul rested his arms on his knees and hung his head while Wendy and Stephanie
talked about something in hushed voices across the room. “I’m sorry, Calvin.”
Calvin stroked his wife’s hair, staring at her like Paul didn’t exist, tears
dripping from the bottom of his glasses onto the jagged hole in her face. “It
was an accident, Calvin, and nobody’s fault.”

He finally looked
up, smeared lenses magnifying the anger in his eyes. “Don’t you do that. Don’t
you try to make me feel better right now because I don’t deserve that.
She
doesn’t deserve that.”

Staring blankly
back, Paul dropped his head and blew out a frustrated breath. “I wish I had
time for a bigger speech but I don’t, so I’m going to get right to the point.”

Calvin’s eyebrows
went down.

“I’m going to need
you to come with us tomorrow.”

He stopped
stroking Maria’s matted hair. “Please tell me you’re not serious right now.”

Paul spoke slowly,
leaving zero room for misunderstanding. “I’m going to need you to get us into
that armory in one hour, and then I’m going to need you to help us save that
family in Colorado.”

His face folded.
“I’m not leaving! Are you insane? I’m staying here with her.”

Paul scanned
Maria’s ashen skin. She looked sound asleep and if she was lucky, she’d never
wake up again. “Maria’s gone and you damn well know she’d want you to help that
family.”

“The hell I do,
man! I’m done helping people because I can’t even help my own fucking wife!”

Wendy and
Stephanie stopped talking and Paul could hear his pulse banging away in the
hollow of his neck. He swallowed dryly. “I’m sorry about your wife. I really am
but this isn’t a request.”

Calvin jerked his
chin to Paul’s coat lying on a nearby table, shaking more tears onto Maria’s
sleeping face. “You think that badge gives you any kind of power? It’s not even
real. I got news for you, Debbie Downer, you’re not a cop!”