Drink in case of Emergency (7 page)

             
Scott could see that the anger was back now, and he couldn’t blame Justin. Chris always seemed to do this in high stress situations. He just emotionally disconnected, as if he just wasn’t mature enough to handle what was going on, so he chose to participate at a distance. As a roommate, it made him impossible to argue with.

Justin whirled around. “Whatever, my hall closet then.” Justin pointed to the television. “You done trying to find CSpan or whatever you were doing? And stop eating the popcorn, if she is a zombie, we don’t know what turned her. It could have been something she ate or drank.”

             
“So now she is a zombie?” Tyler asked, spinning away from the window.

"I don't know! It's just the word you were using.” Justin was losing it, his anger making his right eyebrow twitch.

“Well I don’t disagree that she might be a zombie. But I don’t think it was the popcorn.” Chris sat up, tossing the TV remote control towards the coffee table as he rose. It collided with a box of kleenex and both fell to the floor. “Unless a very large number of people ate this popcorn last night.”

“I give up.” Justin sank into the now empty couch.

“Every TV station is coming up blank. Nobody is answering 911. We haven’t heard or seen anyone else outside. No cars on the road, nobody out walking their dog. This is definitely widespread, even if just locally.” Chris summarized his point as he walked toward the front door. “It’s possible that it’s just in our area, but there’s really no way to know for sure right now.”

Someone had to take charge, to come up with a plan. Chris might be great at coming up with creative solutions, but this needed some pragmatism. Scott heard himself speak up as he tossed the cordless phone onto the couch.

“Well, we can’t call the cops.” Scott tried to suggest the next logical step. “I guess we’ll just have to go to the station and tell them what happened. If this really is a widespread problem, the one woman in your closet is going the be the least of their problems.”

“We can take my car.” Tyler offered, “But I hope we don’t get pulled over…I might still be drunk.”

Four friends filed out of the front door of Tina’s small, one story ranch style home and back into the painful morning sunlight. The chirping of birds was more noticeable now. They walked in pairs, Justin and Tyler in front, Scott and Chris bringing up the rear. They moved slowly back toward Justin’s apartment, frequently looking nervously over their shoulders. Chris was the first to break the silence.

“Well...this is fuckin’ weird.” Scott chuckled a bit at this comment, but Justin and Tyler, in front, were distracted by the surroundings. Justin felt his heart pounding in his chest, his brain feeling woefully inadequate to deal with the situation that was presenting itself. He didn’t have time to break down at the idea of the end of the world right now.

“We’ve been spotted.” Tyler nervously nodded toward a small red brick house across the street. “The curtains left of the door just moved.” A moment later the front door of the house crept inwards, and a figure stumbled out of the door and into the morning. The figure rose to stand. His fogged over, dark eyes locking on the four, fast moving shapes in the morning sunlight. The figure appeared to be an African American man in his late fifties, gray hair coming in around his temples. He wore a navy colored bathrobe and gray pajama pants.

Having slept through the first zombie encounter, this was Justin’s first glimpse of the creatures. He felt an uneasy fear creep up his neck as he saw the man’s jerky, exaggerated movements. The man was back on his feet and moving toward them.

“Fuck. Run.” Tyler took off and a fast jog toward his Stratus, Justin and Scott following closely behind him, and Chris following a few steps further behind. Tyler slowed to pull out his key fob and quickly pressed the the unlock button with his thumb 3 times while running. Justin reached the car first, pulled open the front passenger door and climbed inside, slamming it shut behind him and promptly hitting the lock button for safety.

Tyler and Scott were running around to the driver’s side of the vehicle, which was further to reach, and closer to the man from the red house who was now stumbling into his side of the street.

             
Scott pulled up on the door handle to find it locked. “Open the fucking door.” He screamed in frustration, daring a glance over his shoulder to see that the man was now twelve feet from him. The door clicked as Tyler hit the unlock button one more time with his keyfob, and both driver’s side doors opened and slammed shut simultaneously. Another moment later Chris piled into the rear passenger side and the engine of the Stratus roared to life.

             
“Gogogogogogogogogogogogo!” Justin called from the passenger seat as a pale hand pressed into the drivers side of the windshield. Tyler shifted into drive and peeled out of the parking space, leaving the zombie neighbor stumbling into the empty street behind them. Justin turned back and saw the zombie on it’s hands and knees, lifting its head to watch the car speed away.

             
The Stratus whipped around the corner and down three blocks before Tyler slowed. He was coming up on Claimont Road, which was typically a busy intersection, especially at this hour of a Friday morning. At the present moment, there wasn’t a single car moving on the road besides their own. A few cars were parked along the edges of the streets, and twice they saw what looked like the results of low speed traffic accidents. One red Ford truck had crashed through the glass pane of a storefront, and a small yellow VW beetle looked like it had sideswiped a couple of parked cars before crashing into the rear end of a third.

             
Justin felt his heart rate slowing back down, the immediate danger behind them. In the moment of fear, he had forgotten how badly his head hurt, the pain was starting to make itself known again.

             
Tyler slowed and stopped at the normally busy intersection, which was now silentl. The only thing Justin could see moving appeared to be a young woman across the street from them. However she moved with the same slow, uncoordinated movements they had seen from the man they had just ran away from.

Tyler paused, the car’s engine humming softly. All four friends stared at the woman as she turned toward the stratus and shambled in their direction. They stared for almost thirty seconds, the weight of what they had seen thus far crushing in on them.

The whole town had changed. Everyone they interacted with on a daily basis was now gone, replaced with a zombie shell of themselves. Again, it was Chris who broke the silence.

“No radio.” Chris pointed from the back seat at the radio dials on the dashboard. It was turned to ‘104.7 Kool-Water: Oldies to tap your feet to’. The volume was turned up to somewhere between “rockin’ out” and “mind numbing”. Despite this, the radio was silent. No loud static from a missing channel, just the hum of a silent signal came forth from the speakers. All the silence was starting to wear down on Justin’s frayed nerves.

“Let’s just get to the police station, I’m sure someone there must have an idea of what’s going on.” Scott said quietly, almost in a whisper. His eyes never leaving the woman whose shambling had brought her within twenty feet of their vehicle. Tyler eased the car through the intersection and onto Claimont road. As the car accelerated westward, away from the intersection, the woman began shambling in the same direction. Within a few moments, her steps began to slow, and then stop.

Ten minutes and five miles away, the blue Dodge Stratus slowed to a stop approximately one mile away from The Middleton Police Station. The drive was a quiet one, only a few words shared between the four passengers. Each looked silently out the window at the world frozen in time around them.

Scott continued to try his cell phone during the drive. Every couple of minutes he would fumble with the phone, mumble something under his breath and sigh in frustration.

Chris sat silently, looking out the window at the city lying silent. Was the world going to be stuck like this, forever? He thought to himself, pondering what a future civilization would think when unearthing the remnants of our culture, frozen at this one unceremonious Friday morning.

Tyler had his eyes focused on the road, driving at a steady pace and swerving to avoid the few zombies stumbling into the street. Twice he had to change their route to avoid larger groups that had congregated in the middle of the street.

The swerving back and forth was not helping the nausea that each friend felt to some degree.

“Dude, just run ‘em down.” Chris mumbled from the backseat, as Tyler swerved to miss a blonde woman who appeared to be in her mid 30’s, wearing navy blue nursing scrubs.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone.” Tyler responded distractedly, accelerating after the woman was avoided.

“I don’t think it counts as ‘hurting’ anyone if they’re already dead. At least the Tina didn’t really seem to bleed much when she gashed her arm crawling through the window.” Chris was looking out the window again, eyes unfocused as he watched his memory of the older woman, purple gel oozing out of wounds that should have been crimson. He felt a roll of queeziness in his belly that was unrelated to the alcohol working out of his system.

“We don’t know if this is permanent, or if it’s just a temporary thing. They might get better.” Justin joined back into the conversation. “It makes more sense to avoid them, just in case.”

“Besides, we don’t want to fuck up the car. I know they don’t seem to be moving very quickly, but if we get stranded in a group of them, we might be screwed.” Scott suggested, having finally put his phone back into his pocket.

“Fine, we won’t kill zombies or the stratus, unless we have to.” Chris conceded, not seeing the point in arguing.

“I won’t kill the stratus. I’ve only got two more months of payments left until it’s mine, free and clear.” Tyler tapped the dashboard affectionately. “I don’t know if I could kill anyone, either. Even if they might be a zombie. They still have a family. And just as much right to live as anyone else.”

“You’d be surprised,” Chris whispered, facing the closed window, keeping the rest of his statement to himself.

When push comes to shove, you’d be surprised at just what you’re capable of.

****

“Now what the fuck do we do?” Justin’s words sounded hollow in the front seat, as four hearts sank.

The stratus slowed to a stop two blocks from the police station. The scene before them looked like a warzone. The majority of the cars lining the street had deep gouges along their sides. They had clearly they had been sideswiped, hard. It wasn’t hard to find the culprit.

Two cars were tipped upside-down, blocking the street, smoke slowly rising from their undersides. At least three dozen zombies moved about, some slowly shambling, while others moved at what might be considered a comfortable strolling pace. The faster ones moved with purpose toward one of a few small groups of clustered zombies. These groups of five or six zombies were crouched over, each group huddled over a body lying prone. All four friends had seen enough movies to know what was happening. Feasting.Tyler felt his stomach lurch at the sight.

             
“Well, clearly the police station isn’t a safe place to start. By the looks of it, someone else already tried that idea.” Scott pointed at the two vehicles blocking the street, but his eyes were fixed on the group of zombies pulling out what he assumed were entrails from a body. He felt a moment of detached fascination as he wondered what it would feel like to be disemboweled.

             
“That could have been like the other cars we saw crashed. It’s like a lightbulb went out on the whole town. Someone flicked a switch and suddenly everyone falls asleep, no matter what they were doing. Then they wake up as zombies.” Tyler was putting the stratus into reverse as he spoke, checking his rear view mirror and backing up slowly.

“It doesn’t look like that’s what happened here. Do you know how fast you have to be going to flip your car in the city? It’s not like country roads where a ditch gives you a headstart to rolling. You have to be going fast.” Scott, ever the scientist, Chris thought. “All of the other cars we saw just seem like they coasted into whatever was in front of them. These two were going fast and hit something hard in order to flip like that.” Scott locked eyes with Tyler in the rearview mirror. “Besides, we haven’t seen them eating any of their own yet. I have feeling that the breakfast they are enjoying was the drivers.”

“So we think it happened all at once, whatever it was.” Chris noted, his voice full of detached observation, his eyes glued to the blood bath before them. “Just not to us?” Chris added rhetorically before going on. “Maybe some kind of conspiracy theory government secret weapon poisoning confidential cover up?”

“Did you just throw together a bunch of big sounding words?” Justin commented. “I mean, I’m not disagreeing. Clearly, something has happened in our little town.” He gestured out of the windshield as he said this.

Tyler had reversed the car into a side street and pulled forward to drive in the opposite direction of the police station. Justin spoke from his spot in the front seat. “My original question still stands. Now what the fuck do we do?”

“In an emergency, your first job is to get yourself to safety.” Scott stated in a scripted tone, and paused before continuing. “After you are safe, then you find out the nature of the emergency, and respond accordingly.” Tyler felt like he had heard these statements before, but he couldn’t put his finger on where, when Chris responded.

“Really Scott, you think the Wilderness Scouts’ guidelines are going to help us out in a zombie apocalypse?”

“Still, it’s not a bad idea,” Justin chimed in, trying to cut off an argument before it began. “Should we go back to my place and lie low?”

“No offense, Justin,” Chris began. “But a hundred and forty pound woman just successfully broke into your place on her first try. I don’t know if your place is exactly a fortress.” Tyler piled on.

“Besides, there’s already one inside. If we have to defend your place from a horde of them outside, I don’t really want to have to worry about the one that’s in the closet too.”

“Fine, not my place, where should we go then?” Justin went back to his original question.

“My aunt and uncle have a nice place out in Campbell.” Scott offered, referring to the ritzy suburb of Middleton. “It’s a fourth floor condo, and my Uncle probably has one or two guns, he was in the Army for ten years when I was growing up.”

“Do we really want to be stuck on the fourth floor if we have to evacuate a building?” Justin complained.

“There’s a fire escape that runs down the outside of the building, so it’s a safe way down.” Justin went silent at Scott’s response, and everyone began looking out of the windows again, watching the broken world pass them by.

“Any other ideas?” Tyler shouted from the drivers seat. Hearing sighs of resignation, he turned the car around and began driving East, toward Campbell.

****

Thirty five minutes later, Tyler slowed the car in front of a large stone building. Scott had remembered when his Father’s sister, Mary, had moved out here with her husband, Richard. His dad always called Richard ‘Dick’, just never to his face.

Mary and Dick had moved into the large, luxurious condo right after it was renovated. The building had once been a furniture factory, until it was updated into condos a decade ago. Scott remembered wondering what Dick did for a living, that he was able to afford such a fancy place to live. It had three bathrooms, which seemed to adolescent Scott like the very definition of wealthy living.

The four bedroom, two and half bath was located on the fourth floor of the five story building. Scott had visited his Aunt and Uncle at least twice per year since then, usually just for holidays. Last time he was here had been for Christmas. He had gotten buzzed on eggnog while listening to his Aunt tell embarrassing stories of his father from when they were growing up. There had been snow on the ground, and the building was buzzing with life back in December. Today the brick building seemed cold and lifeless, like everything else they had seen today.

The car’s engine idled for a few moments, before Chris spoke up. “Ummm...Scott?”

“Yeah, this is the place. Let’s go.”

“Maybe...maybe you should wait in the car. Let us check it out first?” Chris offered. Scott’s head still pounded from the hangover that was coming back stronger than ever. Why on Earth would he stay in the car? His Aunt wasn’t going to let some strangers into their apartment, especially not with all of the weird things that had been happening. Dick might, but only because he would see it as a chance to take out a threat face to face, instead of waiting for a potential threat to come back in the future.

There was a pause in the car, as Chris exchanged a look with Tyler and Justin in the front seat. Scott felt his frustration grow. “What the fuck are you talking about? Why shouldn’t I go first?”

“I don’t want to make you worry, Scott.” Justin began, pausing, as if he was unsure what words to choose as he moved forward. “We’re just not sure what we’re going to find up there. I don’t know if it’s something you want to see.”

Scott finally understood. “You think whatever this is got them too?” He saw the confirmation on Justin’s face. “No. If we’re all alive then they have to be too. I mean. It’s got to be a genetic thing or something.” Scott threw the words out, even though he didn’t fully believe them himself.

Justin exchanged one last pleading look with Tyler, but it was Chris who spoke up this time. “How about this: Justin and I go in first, and you and Tyler take up the rear.” Scott could hear Chris scramble for a reason why this was a good idea. “Because, you know the building better than any of us, so you’d know the best way to get out if we have to run in a hurry.”

Chris’s reasoning felt cheap and greasy on Scott’s exhausted and hungover mind, but he was too overwhelmed with everything that had happened to argue. “Fine. Let’s just hurry up and get in there. I really need some aspirin.”

Climbing up the stairs to the front doors, the four friends encountered their first obstacle. There were two sets of doors, one open, one locked.

The first door led into a small lobby area, filled with a few uncomfortable chairs, the mailboxes for the building, some fake plants as well as an intercom system next to the inner door. This inner door was situated next to a large window for security measures, so those coming out of the building could see into the lobby before leaving the safety of the secured hallway.

Chris and Justin, taking the lead as planned, walked directly up to the inner door, and Chris pulled on it. The door rattled against a lock. Ignoring them, Scott walked to the intercom system, and pushed a small button labeled “Unit 504.” Unheard in the lobby, but five floors above them, a loud buzzing rang through the silence in Unit 504.

Scott pressed the button two additional times, waiting for the familiar squawk of the intercom system being activated, or the buzz of the door itself being opened. In addition to the audio of the intercom, there was also a small digital camera that took video, which was displayed on the intercom screen of the unit you buzzed.

Despite the buzzing and the photographic evidence of their nephew waiting on their figurative doorstep, neither Mary nor Dick pressed the button to unlock the building’s security door. It was at this point in time when Scott began to feel the first fingers of doubt creep into his mind.

“Maybe they’re just not home right now?” Chris offered, trying to stay optimistic. Scott felt his own optimism dieing by the second.

“Do you have a key, or know of another way in?” Justin said as he tried pulling on the door handle again.

“No. They always buzzed me in before.” Scott’s voice fell, following his mood at the current predicament.

“Hey, someone’s coming.” Tyler said, looking through the glass and into the secured hallway. Justin and Chris came to his side, while Scott was studying the intercom system, hoping with his last bit of optimism if it might be broken.

“Fuck. Change that. Something is coming.”

****

             
After joining Tyler and Justin to look down the hallway, Chris felt his blood run cold for the second time that day. The secured hallway was well lit, and the glass pane showing into it was crystal clear. Because of these facts, there was nothing to obscure what was coming down the hallway, directly towards them. The sight was the most terrifying thing that Chris had ever seen.

             
The figure that moved down the hall was moving differently than the zombies they had seen earlier. It was moving differently, but somehow still the same. Chris realized with fear that it was moving in the same jerking fashion, but with significantly more poise and grace. He said a silent prayer to himself.