Running with the Horde (18 page)

             
I followed the noise of voices and activity through the kitchen and into a living room. This was the place they had waited to die. Three sleeping bags lay in a row in the middle of the room on beige carpeting facing an old television. It reminded me of playing camp out inside the house with my father when I was little.

             
The middle bag was occupied by the boy I’d heard sleeping during my weird zombie remote viewing experience. The man was kneeling beside the boy trying to coax him awake by softly slapping his cheeks and saying his name. Sam, who looked to be a few years older than Jacob, wasn’t having it as he numbly pushed his father’s hands away and mumbled in his sleep.

             
Jacob was cramming toys into a duffle bag, it was clear he intended to do some serious playing wherever it was we ended up.

             
“Jake, you can’t take them all, just your favorites,” his dad said rubbing his hands over thinning hair.

             
“But, daddy, they’re all my favorites,” Jacob replied as he ineffectively tried to shove a big red fire engine into the overstuffed bag.

             
I walked over to the man and knelt down next to him. I put my hand on the boy’s forehead. It was hot.

             
“So I am not a doctor but he’s obviously got a fever. What else is wrong with him?” I asked.

             
“It started a few days ago. A bad cough and some vomiting, the fever. Said his throat hurt. I don’t know, maybe strep throat? He’s had it before.”

             
He starting tearing up. It’s awful to watch a grown man cry, I studied Sam’s forehead to give him time to compose himself.

             
“We’ve been on the move for weeks. Came down from Saint Bethel. Stopped here so Sam could rest. The last two days were bad. Those…things caught our scent and we had to run pretty hard. I had a car for a while but wrecked it. Damn lucky I didn’t kill my boys,” he glanced over at Jacob and back to Sam.

             
“I can’t lose him. I just can’t,” he whispered, “I lost Amy. She’s my wife…was my wife. I couldn’t tell them. I told them she’d gone ahead of us and would meet us at Disney World,” he looked at me sheepishly when he said this. “The boys always wanted to go.”

             
Made sense to me.

             
“What’s your name?” I asked.

             
“Mark. Mark Nestler,” he said this like he was confessing a crime.

             
“Mark, it’s very nice to meet you and your boys. I‘m George. But listen, we don’t have a lot of time. We need to get moving. You get Jacob and his toys. I’ll carry Sam and we can get out of here.”

             
“But he’s sick!”

             
“I know he is but we’ll have a better chance of helping him get better when we get out of here. You’re gonna have to trust me, everything will be okay,” I said.

             
“You can’t know that,” he said in a fierce quiet voice.

             
I held his gaze for a moment, my eyes burning with confidence.

             
“Mark, maybe I can know,” I said.

             
Something in my eyes convinced him and we got moving. I wrapped Sam up in his sleeping bag and hefted him into my arms like large baby. Mark gathered up Jacob and his bag of toys and we headed out.

             
“Anything else important to you in here?” I asked.

             
“Oh hell no!” he said.

             
Jacob looked at him like he was on strike two.

             
“Sorry, Jake. Where to, George?”

             
“Just across the street,” I said as I navigated us through the slew of dead bodies. “We’ve got to see a dead man about a new car.”

             
That’s not funny, George,” said Mark

             
No. No it wasn’t.

Chapter 30

“Funhouse”

             
Sam was passed out in the back seat of the Equinox while I collected my stuff from the trunk. Mark and Jacob watched me sort through key fobs until a car one row over beeped out two friendly honks to let us know it was open.

             
“What happened to the steering wheel on that one?” Mark asked as we made our way to another new Equinox.

             
“Not sure,” I lied without looking at him, “Must have been faulty from the factory.”

             
“Weird.”

             
“I know, right?” yes, I know I am told old to be saying that.

             
With Sam laying in the back and Jacob buckled in behind me, we started out. I thought of heading back to my house because there was food there and these guys were hungry. But I decided against it, medicine for Sam would trump food for the group as a first priority.

             
Mark and Jacob joined Sam in slumber almost as soon as we hit the road. I made my way slowly south heading no place specifically, listening to one grown man and two little boys snore. I decided I liked that sound. We averaged only about ten miles per hour on the smaller highways and city streets because they were so congested. Roving packs of the undead paid us no mind after an initial glance.

             
We crossed over Moore Lake and I remembered my ice-cold lake bath with Daisy with a sad smile. I hoped she was doing okay.

             
Rolling under the I694 overpass for the first time in daylight, all I could see up there were cars, trucks and vans going nowhere ever again. It was jammed up good. The freeway would not be an option this close to the city. I imagined I94 was just as bad if not worse.

             
I didn’t have a particular city in mind to start my search for Daisy but I figured Minneapolis was the most logical place to start with, it being the biggest city in the state. This meant driving by the Swanson complex about a quarter mile ahead.

             
Bummer.

             
My pulse quickened involuntarily as we drew nearer. I played Frogger with cars on the road while I stared at the landscape growing in my eyes to the left. Black smoke billowed into the sky, the remnants of a large fire. The entire complex was gone, just an ash heap and rubble were all that was left of the condos. Some sections of the wall were still upright and zombies stood motionless here and there against the backdrop of the noon-day sun.

             
It wasn’t all that stunning to see it in ruins. It had been well fortified but the people that lived there were riddled with cancerous craziness that rotted them from the inside out. I wondered if anyone had made it out alive. It was surprising to find I hoped they had lived and maybe had come to their senses regarding their approach to life.

             
I remembered a drug store up on the right and thought it would be as good of a place as any to get some food for the boys and look for medicine for Sam. I pulled into the mostly empty parking lot alongside the broken doors and put the SUV in park. I woke up Mark, who’d been dead to the world, he was instantly alert.

             
“What’s wrong?” he hissed, looking everywhere at once.

             
“Nothing. Calm down,” I whispered harshly, “I’m going in there to look for food and medicine. I need you to drive in case anybody comes while I’m inside.”

             
“Anybody?”

             
“You know what I mean,” I said tersely, opening the door to get out. His claw-like hand gripped my forearm so tightly it hurt.

             
“You’re going in alone?” he asked incredulous.

             
“No I figured Jacob could keep watch out here while Sam sleeps and you could come with me. He can shoot a gun right?” I asked.

             
He looked at me like I’d grown a third eye in the middle of my forehead. I pried his hand off my arm.

             
“Yes, Mark, I am going in alone. That’s our only option. I’ve been doing this by myself for a while. I’ll be fine. If it gets hot out here, you take off and come back for me if you can. If I’m not out in fifteen minutes you take off anyway and don’t come back, you hear?”

             
“Yeah, okay. Well…watch yourself in there,” he muttered as I climbed out.

             
I grabbed my pack and my flashlight and made sure my gun clasp was shut tight on my hip so it wouldn’t fall out.

             
“Will do, Hondo!” I said with a smile.

             
He gave me the finger as I headed inside.

             
The store was mostly trashed inside and harboring three zombie looters. I wondered briefly which of them had turned the others. Had the initial zombie caught them completely by surprise while they were raiding the cigarette locker? I asked one of them what I should get for a boy who might have strep throat. She didn’t know. Ha-ha.

             
A skirmish of some sort had knocked an entire row of shelves over so the aisle formed an off kilter letter A. The floor was full of goods, mostly chips and candy. I filled my pack with as many different kinds as I could, not knowing what Sam and Jacob liked for snacks. I went to the checkout area and grabbed some more bags then headed for the coolers. They were mostly empty but a variety of beverages remained. I took them all except for the milk.

             
I brought the food and beverages out to the SUV, I was inside for maybe five minutes and there were already a handful of zombies making a beeline for the car. Mark hadn’t noticed them yet. I sent them away with a thought. I put the bags on the front seat and told him I was going back to check the pharmacy.

             
Sam was sitting up looking like hell and hacking up a lung. He had no clue where he was or how he’d gotten there. I could hear him growling questions to his father as I headed back inside. He seemed like a grouchy old man for a seven year old but then I wasn’t used to being around children, sick or otherwise.

             
The pharmacy looked mostly untouched. I had to jump over the service counter to get into it. It was dark but my flashlight picked up a trail of blood that led further back into room where they kept most of the medicine. I followed it back between shelves to the rearmost corner of the room and found my prizes, two zombies. One had a white lab coat on while the other wore a filthy jogging suit.

             
Both were trapped by a large rolling cart. Judging from appearances, it seemed the jogging suit had turned had the lab coat. He had clubbed her repeatedly with a golf club but not before it was too late.

             
It looked like the lab coat guy had been living in the pharmacy. I found a dirty sleeping bag and the remains of old meals. Perhaps he continued to wear the lab coat for warmth or maybe to retain a sense of normalcy in his day to day life. Some things are hard to let go of.

             
Taking way too much time, I searched the entire pharmacy. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Mark had to take off. I found pharmaceutical manuals and lots of different powders and pills but they meant nothing to me. I looked for bottles of pink fluid in the bin of prescriptions. I found one but it didn’t look right and I was pretty sure it had spoiled so that was a no go.

             
I glanced at the lab coat guy. Oh, how I wished he could help me find something! So many different choices, I was frustrated. I sat down on a little stool. Maybe I could just bring Sam some cough medicine if they had any left. That wouldn’t help cure strep if that’s what he had. I looked again for penicillin but I didn’t understand how they had things organized. As always, I was running out of time.

             
The jogging suit girl was on her belly looking at me through a space in the cart because her legs had been smashed to hell. The lab coat guy was standing there staring at me, his eyes milky white in the beam of my flashlight.

             
Maybe I
could
ask him.

             
I moved the cart aside, took the lab-coat guy by one bony arm and led him to a second stool opposite mine. The other zombie scuttled past me on her elbows only to get trapped again by the counter. I stilled her with a thought so she wouldn’t distract me. I sat down, closed my eyes and concentrated until I linked with him.

             
The power wasn’t anywhere close to what I experienced at the trailer park but it was still a surprising jolt that sent shivers through my body. I didn’t want to see through his eyes, instead I wanted to see if I could access his memories. My father hadn’t left a book of instructions and I had no idea if I could do it. I had to figure it out on the fly.

             
Mental imagery seemed to be the way to interact with the undead. I was sure it wasn’t the only way I could’ve done it but it was working for me so I stayed with it. I pictured his rotting face, he was in his late 50s with watery green eyes tinged with red. His gray stringy hair was worn fashionably in a comb over. A long, hooked nose dominated his face. Liver spots and deep bloody claw marks from ear to chin gave him character. His pencil thin lips held a permanent grimace. He reminded me of a creepy clown, I told that face I wanted inside.

             
In my mind, his face began to stretch and morphed into a very creepy rendition of a funhouse entrance.

             
As I stumbled back surprised and more than a little afraid, the vision wavered until I steadied my heart. His mouth opened wide and just kept stretching until it was a doorway. Black as an empty cave.

             
Was this really my interpretation of how to get inside someone’s mind? If so there might be something wrong with me.

             
In for a penny in for a pound,
I told myself as I walked up a set of red steel stairs made to look like a tongue.

             
I stopped at the mouth of the…mouth. It was too dark in there and I could hear skittering sounds and machinery inside.

             
“This isn’t right,” I said aloud to no one in particular.

             
In response, purple and pink bulbs turned on with a florescent buzz and dimly lit the way into the dark corridor. As one would expect to find inside a funhouse, little neon-green arrows let me know which way to go.

             
Safety first!

             
Carnival music, recorded screams and laughter started playing over loud speakers as I rounded the first corner. The music was too much for my frayed nerves.

             
“No to the music!” I called out.

             
It ceased immediately as did the laughter but the screaming continued. Evidently that wasn’t recorded.

             
“Turn the music back on!” I commanded.

             
Just the screaming was way worse than the carnival music. When it started again I could almost pretend I wasn’t in the mind of a long dead zombie pharmacist.

             
I don’t know how much time passed while I made my way through the maze of the man’s mind but it seemed like I had been in there forever. My funhouse illusion took me through room after room made to look like workstations. Each one filled with a combination of alien-looking computer technology and some kind of rainforest jungle growth that almost seemed to be alive.

             
It was all interconnected. Slimy, thick vines interacted with the whirring machines. Indecipherable data displayed on screens and scrolling tickers in various places.

             
The music and laughing died away on its own. Even the screaming became softer. The entire place smelled of ozone and composting vegetation. It was humid and dank.

             
The electric blue energy I’d become so familiar with danced and sparked throughout the whole works.

             
As I moved through each workstation, I noticed the neon arrows had been replaced with a label written in English for my convenience. I moved through rooms entitled; Cardiovascular Center, Nerve Nook, and Respiratory Room and on and on. I found the alliteration disturbing and wondered again why my mind added that touch.

             
Some of the rooms had little or no activity maybe just the occasional pulse of blue light from otherwise dead or sleeping machines and vines. Others, like the Prey Portal, were writhing with activity.

             
I stared intently into this room trying to make sense of what I was seeing. The screen displays were changing, converting to English. Other screens showed two rapid heartbeats and one slower heartbeat all in green.

             
On the largest monitor, data scrolled by on a ticker:
Registering three heartbeats in the immediate vicinity. Pursuit required. Pursuit override.