Time of Death Book 2: Asylum (A Zombie Novel) (24 page)

He looked put out again, which pissed me off
more than I'd like to admit. Some people hold a special place in
your heart, but Striker, he held a special place under my skin.
Like a fucking rash. I felt the strong urge to gouge out his
eyeballs, but went with my patented sneer instead.

"Like a hundred years ago, the Ringling
circus guy moved to Sarasota and bought up a bunch of land. He
built the Ca' d'Zan mansion and a huge museum for all the crap he
collected. It's called The Ringling Estates. There's been a lot
more added, and it's a little community of attractions that was
open to the public."

"Okay," I replied, satisfied, and a little
shocked by his informative response.

"As I was saying," he sniped back at me.
"We'll enter through the gate on Bay Shore and head straight, past
the circus museum and follow the road all the way to the mansion.
Asylum posts sentries at the mansion gate, and there is a stone
wall around the entire place, all the way back to the water. So the
only point of entry is that gate."

"What about the rest of the grounds?" asked
Jake.

"They keep it pretty clear of deaders from
what I've seen, but I wouldn't let your guard down. The estate is
surrounded by trees but no fence or wall to keep anything out. I
don't know how many of the buildings they've cleared. I've run into
their people a few times out scavenging, and from what I hear, if
you want to stay there, you need to contribute. There are no free
rides at Asylum."

When he said the last sentence, it was almost
like a veil of darkness had dropped, shrouding his features. It
more than a little concerned me, and another stab of fear wrenched
my gut.

"What aren't you telling us?" I asked.

Striker held my gaze long enough to make me
squirm with discomfort. "Just be careful," he replied, not willing
to open up in the slightest. "Remember safety is just an illusion,
and never let your guard down."

Thanks, Captain Cryptic, I thought. My inner
snark quieted when he began moving toward the decorative wall. I
say decorative because, while very pretty, it was only three-feet
high and didn't look to be too effective at keeping out the
riff-raff. I swung my legs easily over the barrier and stood in a
weedy space between it and a wall of trees that spanned as far as
the eye could see in either direction. He and Jake transferred the
bikes to the cramped space, leaving us little room to maneuver

When Striker hefted his weapons, Jake, Meg,
and I followed suit with BB, Spike, and The Penetrator. I noticed
Jake had replaced his screwdriver with Vinny's Ka-Bar, the one he'd
extracted from the zombie, and I wasn't sure if it was born of
sentimentality or if he just considered it a better weapon.

"This close to the estates, the undead aren't
usually heavy, but stay alert. They'll never stop gravitating to
where the food is," Striker whispered.

Without words, he motioned for Jake to pull
back the greenery and slipped through first, scouting for undead in
the immediate vicinity. After only a few seconds, he stuck his hand
through and waved us forward. I followed Meg, stopping only to look
at Jake as I passed. He looked to be holding up as well as could be
expected after losing his brother, but there was a glint to his
eyes that hadn't been there before. Something wild. He blinked, and
when his eyes reopened, it was gone. Had it ever been there? Or was
I just being hyper vigilant? I stuck that question into the mental
note for later bin and continued through the brush, with Jake
following after pushing the bikes.

The street looked the same as it had the last
time. Cars had been pushed aside to leave space for a single
vehicle to pass and the road was littered with debris, presumably
items dropped by people at some point in the last few months. The
familiarity of the scene did nothing to calm my nerves.

One big difference, and one I was content in
noticing, was the lack of dead faces pressed against the shop
windows. So the scenery had been downgraded from creepy to just
plain eerie.

A lone zombie stood on the sidewalk across
from us, immobile until our presence alerted it that food was
nearby, and it moved in a straight line in our direction. Taking
the path of least resistance halted its forward progression when
its way was blocked by a car. If it had any deductive reasoning, it
would have walked another few feet to the small opening between
vehicles. Instead it stood there, bouncing its rotund belly against
the passenger door of the beat-up Honda Civic and reached for us
longingly.

"What are you doing?" I asked Striker, who
walked toward the zombie with intent.

"Getting rid of it."

"Why?" I asked. "It can't get to us."

He kept walking and replied over his
shoulder, "It will follow us."

I chastised myself a bit for not having the
foresight to realize that tidbit of information. He was right. It
was a now or later kind of situation. The wall of trees behind us
made me uneasy, and I couldn't stop envisioning a dead hand
reaching through and grabbing me. The thought made my skin crawl,
and I instinctively moved forward. We followed Striker into the
street and waited. Jake made to follow him, but I laid my hand on
his forearm gently to hold him back.

The undead's milky eyes tracked Striker's
approach and it shifted its efforts in the big man's direction.
When Striker crossed through the opening and onto the sidewalk, it
turned and walked toward him, meeting a quick death at the end of
his blade. He wiped the machete on the zombie's shirt and returned
to where we stood.

"How's your head?" Meg asked with
concern.

"I'm going to have a fuck-all of a headache
for a few days, but I don't feel sick or disoriented anymore," I
told her.

"Small favors," she commented. Daphne took
the opportunity to grumble her displeasure from inside the bag
around Meg's shoulder and I noticed, for the first time, the strain
that extra weight was putting on the tiny girl.

"Here, let me take the little stinker back,"
I offered, taking the carrier and slinging its strap across my
chest.

"Ready?" Striker asked, and he moved before
any of us could answer.

I felt like Dorothy following the yellow
brick road. Only instead of Oz, we were apparently headed to the
circus. We even had Toto. I looked down at the damaged bag, barely
intact enough to zip halfway and did a little internal movie
quoting. We're not in Kansas anymore, Daph.

Chapter 15: My Dog's A
Racist

"Do you smell that?" Meg asked us.

I took a big whiff, getting a nose full of
the salty tang of the sea. "I don't smell anything but ocean."

"Exactly!" She exclaimed, showing her teeth
in a big smile.

My forehead crinkled in confusion before it
dawned on me; for the first time since Sanibel, the air wasn't ripe
with decay. I took this to be a very good sign and gulped in
another deep lungful of fresh air. Meg's giddiness was contagious,
and I parted my lips in a smile.

"Oh, God that is so nice," I said, earning a
glance from both men. I didn't realize until I heard the sentence
that it sounded a bit erotic, and I felt my face flush from
embarrassment.

Meg giggled. "Well it's not that nice," she
teased.

We stood in front of a tall archway made from
stone. A wall made from the same material spanned both directions,
giving the appearance that the opening was ornately carved from the
barrier. The freaky organized chain of cars continued down Bay
Shore much like the street we'd just left, but this road was more
congested with vehicles since it had a third lane in the center for
various turn-offs.

Jake squeezed my hand, a little too tight for
comfort, and I fought back a wince. "We're almost there," he said.
I looked up at him and smiled, finding the wild look had returned.
The tiny muscles around his eyes were rigid. He caught himself
under my scrutiny, and his eyes softened with conscious effort. My
brows knitted together at the perplexity of this new development in
his affect, and he leaned in and planted a chaste kiss on my lips,
pulling back with a sheepish grin.

There was something not right with my
husband, some demons roiling inside. I knew it, he knew it, and he
knew I knew it.

Striker interrupted our silent interaction
with a clearing of his throat. "Move out."

We walked beneath the grand arch into a
cement courtyard. There, directly in front of us stood a gift shop
with automatic doors. The interior was dark, and the doors didn't
open when we stepped onto the pad. A tall window to the left of the
useless door was the only thing not in pristine condition. Small
holes the size of a bullet stippled the glass. Around each hole,
spider web cracks looked like exploded fireworks on the reflective
surface and distorted my features.

Striker went left, urging us onward through a
gap between the wall and shop, and we went around the structure.
Narrow paved walkways, large enough for golf carts or compact cars
to traverse, led away from the building, one to the left and
another straight ahead. Sure enough, a miniature parking lot was
tucked to one side and a lone golf cart on blocks instead of tires
inhabited the small concrete jungle.

"This way," Striker said, pointing his hammer
to the path directly in front of us. On both sides of the trail
were manmade ponds filled with stagnant water. We continued on,
walking single file, apprehensive of what lurked beneath the
surface.

A cluster of geometrically-shaped buildings
caught my attention as we passed. I read the building names aloud,
feeling like we were taking the grand tour. "Tibbals Learning
Center. Original Circus Museum and Store. The Banyan Café," I
recited absentmindedly. My stomach growled at the thought of food,
reminding me that I'd only eaten a couple protein bars and a cookie
in the last two days. I'd finished the last of my bottled water at
the estate's entry and fought away the fear of finding the mansion
empty and the very real possibility of dehydration.

The smell of death was in the air again,
which meant a zombie, or zombies, were nearby. I knew the others
caught the scent when their faces scrunched up in disgust, so I
kept quiet.

On the left was an intricate maze of stone. A
plaque read Mable's Rose Garden, and it was the most beautiful
thing I've ever seen. Without a landscaping crew, the rose bushes
had grown until they overtook the pebbled path. Unfortunately, the
sweet scent was tainted by the increasing smell of rot.

"Whoa," I breathed. "This place is amazing."
I took one more fleeting glance at the garden and jogged a few
steps to catch up to the group.

In front of us there stood a wrought iron
gate amidst another large wall of concrete. For every twenty-foot
length of wall, a pillar stood tall. On top of each pillar was a
Spanish style light fixture. We had located the offensive aroma of
zombies, and I stared slack-jawed, taking in the ingenuity of
Asylum's residents.

* * *

Bear traps had been set back from the iron
gate, staggered in a pattern that left little room to maneuver
without a steel trap clamping down. There were ten traps in all,
and each of them held the limb of an undead within their triggered
jaws. The zombies were truly dead, each suffering a killing blow to
the head. At the foot of the gate, two more corpses lie on the
ground, each missing a foot severed at the ankle. Since two of the
traps held only a foot in their jaws, it didn't take a genius to
figure out the metal teeth had cut all the way through the rotted
flesh and snapped the brittle bones. Flies buzzed the corpses, and
every now and then one would get curious and fly at me. Each time
it happened, I lashed out wildly with my arms, sickened by the
thought of one of them landing on my skin after feasting on the
dead flesh.

"Who goes there?" asserted a male voice.
"Striker? Is that you?"

I don't know why I expected Striker to be a
stranger to the Asylum residents, but it was a shock to hear the
recognition in the other man's voice.

"Yeah, Vance, it's me," he called to the
voice. I still couldn't find the body belonging to the speaker, and
it was making me tense. "Busy day?" he asked, referring to the
large number of zombies caught like bugs in a spider's web.

"Always is, man. Hang tight for a couple
minutes. Jasper should be back to cart these pus-bags away any
second." The still disembodied voice had impeccable timing, because
I heard the electric hum of a golf cart zipping down the paved
path. The cart came around the bend, and I saw a chunky man stuffed
behind the wheel.

Jasper, I deduced from the other man's
statement, brought the cart to a stop and squeezed his bulbous
belly out. "Hey, Striker!"

His voice was not what I expected. Jasper's
body was that of a grown man, but his voice was oddly childlike.
The more he spoke, the more I suspected he suffered from a
developmental delay. He strode right up to Striker without fear and
raised his hand. Striker reciprocated, and let Jasper slap him with
a high-five. I made eye contact with Meg, who shared the same look
of bewilderment.

"What the fuck?" She mouthed at me.

I gave the universal I don't know shrug in
answer.

"Jasper," Striker replied by way of greeting.
He smiled at the man-child, yet another thing completely
unexpected. "How goes it, big boy? What's new?" Wait a minute. Did
he just tousle this guy's hair? And did he sound genuinely happy to
see him? The foundation of everything I thought I knew about
Striker crumbled and I was back to square one again.

"Not much! Just doin' my job." If sentences
could somehow come with emoticons, Jasper's would be displaying a
big happy face with an abnormally wide smile.