Undead (24 page)

Dave could not help thinking that Dorsey would do better not to ever let his son get his hands on a gun, but he figured he had best keep his mouth shut and accept whatever help the Dorseys were willing to give. He leaned the rifle against the wall by the door, not wanting to take personal responsibility for placing the weapon in the son’s hands; whatever Dorsey did with it was his own business.

“You can leave the baby here,” Mrs. Dorsey volunteered. “Reckon I can take care of it till you get back.”

His rifle loaded, Mr. Dorsey hit the clip with the heel of his hand to make sure it was firmly seated. Then he chambered a round and clicked on the safety. “Like I said, I’ll let ya have an ax and a knife—and the car. You leave the baby with us. We’ll take care of it best we can.” He was thinking that if Dave did not come back nobody would ever find out about the Trooper his son had killed, and it would be an easy matter to find some way of disposing of the baby.

Under a fusillade of gunfire, the remaining glass in the windows of the Miller farmhouse was being shattered to bits.

The barrage continued, the house surrounded by armed men firing away, concealed behind trees and shrubs. The men were members of Sheriff McClellan’s posse. They had come up on the house in their search of the area, not knowing what they’d find, had heard noises and issued challenges. In reply they had received a burst of gunfire and had run for cover. One man had been hit in the arm and was being attended to by a medic.

From behind a tree, Sheriff McClellan cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Come on out of there or we’ll burn you out!” To emphasize the Sheriff’s words, a few more shots rang out, peppering the house. The posse had it surrounded on all sides.

The Sheriff yelled again. “Hold your fire, men! Give ’em a chance to make their minds up!” He peeked around the side of his tree, aiming his own rifle at the front door of the house.

For a long moment, all was still. Then, from inside the house a voice called, “Hold your fire! Don’t shoot!”

“Step on out with your hands high!” the Sheriff called.

He waited. There was the noise of the front door being unboarded, then the door swung open with a creaking sound and the leader of the gang of boys with bows and arrows stepped out, his bow slung over his shoulder and his hands held high above his head. Other boys followed, their hands held high also, having left their weapons inside the house.

McClellan lowered his rifle, knowing the rest of the posse would keep the boys covered, and stood with an exasperated look on his face. “Jesus Christ!
Kids
. What next? Step on over here, Robin Hood—okay men, frisk ’em and handcuff ’em.”

The posse was made up of policemen and civilian volunteers. One of the men in uniform stepped up beside McClellan and said, “We better move through the house—see what else is in there.”

The Sheriff nodded his head in approval, and the man whose suggestion it was rounded up a few other men and led them up the front steps and into the house, the men proceeding cautiously with their weapons ready.

Some of the posse members had shoved the gang of boys against the wall of the house and were pushing the boys around, searching and handcuffing them. McClellan watched this activity approvingly. Some of the boys looked scared or ready to cry, especially the younger ones, but the leader had kept his composure, a wry sarcastic look on his face threatening to erupt into a smirk. While he was being frisked, he eyed the Sheriff over his shoulder and spoke defiantly. “You can’t arrest us. We didn’t do nothin’. We saw this house, there were no
things
around, so we came in to hide.”

McClellan took time to give the boy a hard look before answering. “Yeah? What were you doing in there?”

The boy spun around as his hands were being grabbed and roughly shackled by two posse members. “There’s dead people in there, but you can’t pin it on us. We didn’t do it.”

“Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t,” McClellan said, his voice even and noncommital. “Right now we ain’t got time to find out. But you’re in plenty of hot water. It’s for damn sure you were tryin’ to
rob
this place.”

“Rob a bunch of
dead
people?” The boy smirked, looking at McClellan as if the Sheriff were an idiot, almost snickering at the end of his question.

“Dead people have relatives sometimes,” McClellan said. “Ever occur to you what’s left in here belongs to
them
?”

One of the men who had gone in to check out the house burst through the doorway yelling, “Sheriff! Hey, Sheriff—there’s a couple of dead girls upstairs—both with spikes in their heads. And I wouldn’t swear to it, but it looks up there the way it looked after my wife had a baby.” The man stopped in his tracks in front of McClellan, a perplexed look on his face as though he had said something incredible.

The Sheriff merely shrugged and shook his head. “Well, I guess any goddamn thing’s possible,” he mused aloud. “Come on, boys—let’s finish up here and move on to the Kingsley estate.”

One of the posse members finished shackling a boy and said, “Those rich bastards ought to be okay. They could afford a small army to protect their place.”

“Just ’cause they could afford it don’t mean they got it,” McClellan said, and stuck a cigar between his lips and lit it. He took a long drag. He expected to meet up with emergency vehicles out where the dirt road joined the highway, then the posse would be transported to the Kingsley place.

Dave had found that Mr. Dorsey’s old car shimmied uncontrollably if he tried to go faster than forty miles per hour. On the open highway it would have been preferable to go faster, but Dave had to content himself with the slower speed. This made him briefly aware of an irony: that he might fail to save the Miller girls or the Kingsley family simply because of a decrepit old car that couldn’t go fast enough. Dave floored the gas pedal angrily and watched the needle climb to fifty and past it. The shimmy did not subside, as will happen sometimes, but merely got worse and worse. When Dave eased off the accelerator he had to wait through decreasing vibrations until the needle got down below forty again. He gritted his teeth against his impatience, and tried to think of what he would do once he got to where he was so eager to get.

Beside Dave on the front seat were the butcher knife and ax that Henry Dorsey had given him. He would have liked to have had a rifle, or at least a revolver. It was not going to be easy trying to capture or kill three fully armed men. The best way would be to attempt to surprise and disarm one of them, then use a captured gun to take the other two.

Dave thought of the baby in the Dorseys’ care. He supposed the baby would be all right. Mrs. Dorsey would take good care of it. She seemed to be the sanest one of the family. The old man was driven by fear and a single-minded determination to protect his own kin at whatever the cost to others, and the son was not worth thinking about except to watch out for the kinds of harm he could do by accident. In normal times, Dave thought, the Dorseys would not be bad people. They probably wished only to stay by themselves most of their lives, tending their poor farm and eking out a living, attaining the measure of dignity and self-respect that comes with being self-sufficient. Under normal circumstances, they were probably kind and decent, if a bit hardened by the severity of their mode of existence. That hardness would help them survive the present emergency; so far they were doing okay, keeping themselves alive against odds that were truly frightening. It was more than a lot of people could do. But they had killed Martinelli, mostly as the result of panic and short-sightedness. His partner’s death was pointless, meaningless; it should not have happened to Carl, especially after his having survived so much. His death seemed unreal and unbelievable, like most deaths, only more so because it was a death without a purpose.

The countryside was so bright and sunny, it was hard to believe this was not a normal day. The sun had completely burned off the early morning fog. It was almost noon. Remembering that there would be a Civil Defense broadcast on the hour, Dave switched on the car radio and tuned the hum down so it would not be quite so disturbing; there would be nothing but a hum until the Civil Defense broadcast came on, as all regular programming had been discontinued. Outside of the subtly ominous buzz on the radio, a constant reminder to Dave of the sort of news he was waiting to hear, he could almost deceive himself into believing there was nothing much wrong, it
was
an ordinary sunny day and he was simply out for a quiet, leisurely drive in the country.

Suddenly he saw a corpse in the road and had to swerve to avoid running over it. In swerving the car, he caught a glimpse of its head and torso flattened by more than one set of tires. It was one of the humanoids struck by John Carter’s truck in the early morning darkness eight or nine hours earlier. Since then, other vehicles had run over it, either not seeing it soon enough or deciding it wasn’t worth avoiding. It was a grotesque bloody mess in the middle of the two-lane blacktop.

Braking fitfully as he came out of his swerving skid, Dave spotted a break in the metal guard rail on the right side of the road. He rammed the brakes on Dorsey’s car to the floor, found that the brakes began to hold though it took a long time to stop, and pulled over to the side of the road to have a look. He armed himself with the ax and tucked the butcher knife under his belt. Then he got out of the car and approached the break in the guard rail, gaining a view of a rather steep embankment and a State patrol car smashed against a tree. He immediately recognized the patrol car that had once belonged to him and Carl; he confirmed it was the same car after reading the numbers on the license plate. There did not seem to be any movement or threat of danger in the immediate vicinity; nevertheless Dave kept his weapons ready as he worked his way down toward the wreckage.

He found Wade Connely dead in the car, and the body of a humanoid in the weeds nearby. Both Wade and the humanoid had had slugs blasted into their brains. Dave spent some time searching the surrounding brush for other bodies which might have been thrown clear of the wreckage. He did not find any traces of the Miller girls, though he searched carefully through the undergrowth, and he assumed that they had probably survived the accident. If they had not survived, Carter and Flack would have put bullets into their brains, as they had done to Wade Connely. Or would they? Dave silently thanked whoever had done it, and continued to wonder about the sisters. Perhaps the girls had not survived the accident and their bodies had been taken away by the other men.

Dave looked at Wade’s mangled and mutilated body with a mixture of pity and disgust, the disgust fed by the knowledge that Wade had died wearing Carl’s uniform. Reaching past the body, Dave took the car keys out of the ignition, searched the passenger area and the trunk of the car for any weapons that might have been left behind. As expected, there were no such weapons; Carter and Flack had been careful enough to clean everything out. Dave put the car keys in his pocket. One benefit of the accident, he realized, was that now he would not have to contend with Wade any longer, just Carter and Flack. His chances of taking them by surprise were increased.

With renewed strength brought on by a surge of hope, Dave got back into Henry Dorsey’s old car. After a few tries, the engine turned over. Dave pulled out onto the highway, resolving to keep his eyes open for additional bodies in the middle of the road. He switched the radio back on, having turned it off before starting the car to give the ancient battery a better chance to do its job. Nothing but a low hum came from the radio. Dave looked at his watch. It was nearly twelve-thirty and he had missed the Civil Defense broadcast.

He kept the car at forty, driving down the road following Mr. Dorsey’s directions. In three more miles, if Dorsey was right, he should be able to spot the country club and golf course.

Inside the luxurious mansion, three people lay bound and gagged in different areas of the elegant living room. Each had been tied to a large piece of furniture, additional insurance for their captors that they could not wriggle toward one another and try to undo each other’s bonds. Roped to the heavy brocade-covered sofa was Gordon Kingsley, a highly successful executive in his early fifties, a large man, but paunchy due to too many business lunches and too few hours in the plush exercise room of the clubhouse he owned. From beneath bushy gray eyebrows, he tried to keep his eye on his wife and son.

Elvira Kingsley, a handsome woman a few years younger than her husband, lay tied to one of the legs of the grand piano. She had maintained her slim figure, and her hair was carefully dyed to a natural deep brown. Tied to an overstuffed easy chair was their son, Rodney, a sandy-haired boy of ten, nervous and high-strung. They were alone in the room, three trussed bodies scattered about on antique carpets, waiting.

The Kingsley family had felt relatively safe inside their mansion, because of extensive security measures which had always been present. The windows were protected by a grillwork of ornate wrought-iron, a feature incorporated into the original design of the building to discourage burglars or kidnapers. Mr. Kingsley had also had an elaborate and expensive alarm system installed that was hooked up to the Sheriff’s office. The heavy oak doors were fitted with substantial locks, chains, and steel brackets and bars, the latter protection added in the beginning of the present emergency. Two armed guards with trained German shepherd dogs had afforded still additional protection, the dogs and men having been hired from a professional security agency to patrol the grounds and guard the house, day and night.

John Carter and Flack had driven the truck onto the grounds of the Kingsley estate. Just inside the entrance gate, they stopped the truck, leaving the Miller girls lying in the back, and got out. They began to walk toward the distant house. One of the two security guards saw the uniform and walked over, hoping for news of what was happening outside the estate. As soon as he came within range of the two men, he and the dog were shot, Carter and Flack killing with one bullet each. Then they ran back to the truck and sped down the tree-shaded road to the main house. Carter spotted the other guard and dog, and the grisly scene was played again. Taking advantage of the uniform, Carter hailed the man, and then he and Flack finished off both guard and dog. They arrived at the front door of the mansion and as soon as the maid had let in Trooper Carter and Deputy Flack and led them to Gordon Kingsley, they pulled their guns and demanded that everyone in the house be ordered into the living room. At gunpoint, the Kingsleys allowed themselves to be tied up, and had to watch as their maid and butler were shot. The two bodies were tossed on the lawn.

Now mother, father and son were bound and gagged in their own living room. From other parts of the house they could hear the sounds of Flack and Carter opening closets, going through drawers, looking for items of value. In the living room the TV was on, Carter and Flack having entered during the middle of a Civil Defense broadcast. With frightened eyes, the captives twisted their bodies to look at the television. On-screen was Reverend Michaels, explaining why he and his people believed the dead had to be spiked.

“God alone has the power over life and death. He has promised to call us all on Judgement Day. The rising of the dead prematurely is the work of Satan, defying the power of the Lord, punishing humanity for being weak and sinful. It is we who have failed God and have given the Devil this unholy power over Him. It is we who must repent and give power and glory to the Lord. We are part of His flesh, one with His body, and because we have been weak we have weakened Him…”

The broadcast continued, Reverend Michaels’s words penetrating the hearts and minds of the prisoners on the floor, filling them with dread and fear of their impending fate.

Dave Benton turned off the engine to Henry Dorsey’s car, got out, and closed the door gently. With each mile, he prayed the heap he was driving would last one more. But the battery seemed to be in good condition, and he hoped there was enough gas to get him out of here if he had to make a hasty exit. He could not count on being able to capture Carter’s truck or commandeer one of Kingsley’s fleet of cars, and this shuddering pile of ancient parts was all he had.

Dave looked around him. He was at the end of the long Kingsley driveway, about a quarter mile from the house. Armed with the knife and ax, it was his intention to work his way closer from here. He kept off the gravel driveway, walking in the shelter of the shadows from a row of evenly spaced maple trees. Two rows of trees ran the length of the driveway, keeping it in perpetual shade. Because of the curve of the driveway, Dave could see only a corner of Carter’s truck, which was parked close to the house. The house looked quiet, and he could see no sign of Flack or Carter or the girls. Nobody seemed to be on guard outside. The two bandits must be pretty confident of themselves, he thought. Moving quickly and cautiously, keeping to cover where possible, Dave worked his way toward the mansion. He moved out of the trees and stepped behind a tall shrub, giving himself a better view of the expansive front lawn, meticulously landscaped and trimmed.

There were ghouls on the lawn, at least half a dozen of them, gathering together, meandering around in little groups, as if gaining courage to attack the house. Dave shrank back behind the shelter of his shrub, and a shudder went through his body. One of the ghouls appeared to have some sort of uniform on. Perhaps it was Carter; perhaps he had been killed in his attempt to gain access to the Kingsley grounds. But no—it was not a State Trooper uniform; it was more like the uniform of some type of security guard—and with a pang Dave realized that was probably what it was: a guard killed by Carter and Flack when they had attacked the house.

Dave heard footsteps on the gravel, and he spun around to see a humanoid crossing the driveway, moving painfully, headed his way. This humanoid was also dressed in the uniform of a security guard. The guard had been killed by a shotgun blast, part of his chest having been blown away along with the bottom part of his chin, so that the front of the uniform was a bloody mass of ragged cloth and blasted, riddled flesh. A fragment of jawbone with its lower teeth hung uselessly from a relatively intact upper jaw. Still the thing was driven by an urge for live human flesh and continued to come at Dave blindly, its face ghastly, bloodless and white, its eyes popped partway out of their sockets by the force of the shotgun blast that had made it one of the walking dead.

Terror filled every cell in Dave’s body as he prepared to receive the force of the thing’s attack, knowing he had to vanquish it somehow without calling attention to the struggle, without alerting either the other ghouls in the middle of the lawn or the men inside the Kingsley house. He had only seconds to steel himself as the dead creature moved slowly toward him, its lungs rasping and groaning eerily in painful accompaniment to its awkward movements. Dave stood his ground, forcing himself to wait until the thing was almost upon him, reaching out a bony hand to clutch him by the throat. Then Dave swung the ax as hard as he could and hit his target, cleaving through the dead skull. With a last groan and a splatter of brains, the dead thing went down with a heavy thud and did not move at all. The ax blow had been strong and true, destroying the brain centers activating the fiendish humanoid. Dave needed to look at it only a second to realize it would get up no more. Then he peered frantically out across the lawn, toward the spot where the group of humanoids had been. They were still there, and had not been alarmed. It took a lot of sound to stimulate their dead ears. Through his fright, Dave felt a tiny measure of relief. He hid behind a bush and he looked toward the house. Then he looked at his bloodied ax blade and knelt to wipe it off in the grass.

At that instant, with a shatter of glass, a rifle barrel was poked through a pane of glass in a downstairs window of the mansion, and the man behind the rifle began firing away. Flack had heard the sounds of Dave’s struggles with the attacking ghoul, the groaning and the crash of metal on bone. Flack fired five or six rounds, peppering the party of ghouls in the lawn, but he didn’t score any good hits. The ghouls were too far away. Flack got one in the chest, felling it dramatically enough so that it would have stayed down if it were human, but it merely rolled around and struggled to its feet and got up again. Flack quit firing. From behind his bush, Dave watched the rifle barrel being withdrawn from the window. He was pretty sure Flack hadn’t seen him, and the noise just attracted him to a window where he noticed the things on the lawn.

Keeping to the shelter of the maple trees, Dave again began to work his way toward the house. When he had advanced about twenty yards further, a noise startled him and he stopped, rooted in his tracks, peering from behind the trunk of a tree.

The bars on the front door of the mansion were being undone. The door opened, and the Kingsley family hobbled out, bound and gagged, herded and prodded by Flack’s rifle. A grin on his face, Flack stepped out onto the porch behind them. He had used the lengths of rope which previously tied them to pieces of furniture to tie them to each other, so that they could move only by lifting their legs and setting them down in unison. Flack laughed when the boy fell down and dragged his parents down with him. He prodded them with his rifle and waited while they all got to their feet. He herded them down off the porch and out into the middle of the lawn. Some distance away, a group of the dead things stood waiting.

“Come on,” Flack said. “Step lively. We’re all going for a nice little walk.” The grin on his face grew more pronounced as he glanced around to make sure nothing was sneaking up on him.

Dave had to watch this hideous tableau, helpless to do anything to prevent it. He was too far away to make a rush for Flack; if he tried it Flack would merely shoot him down or else he would be jumped by the flesh-hungry ghouls. He knew Flack was going to kill the Kingsley family by feeding them to the ghouls, or else, he hoped, Flack was planning to force information out of the Kingsleys by just threatening them with that cruel fate. Either way, Dave could do nothing about it. He was too vulnerable, and would end up as zombie feed himself if he acted rashly. If he could not save the Kingsleys, maybe he could still rescue the Miller girls.

While Flack was preoccupied with his game of forcing the Kingsleys further out onto the lawn, Dave continued sneaking toward the house. When Flack came back to the porch, Dave wanted to be waiting. He made a break from behind a hedge after making sure that Flack was not watching, diving for safety behind the shrubs at the side of the porch, and looked up at the sound of Flack’s insane laughter.

Flack had walked the Kingsleys far out onto the front lawn, within thirty feet of the group of flesh-eaters, and then had shoved the father to the ground, laughing as his body weight dragged his wife and son down with him. Bound and gagged, the family could not scream, could only scramble and struggle futilely as the ghouls advanced toward them. Flack backed away laughing, watching the ghouls close in.

In a matter of minutes, the Kingsleys were all dead, the flesh-eaters having converged upon them to rip and tear at the more vulnerable parts of their bodies—the soft flesh of necks, breasts, abdomens. Somehow the fact that there were no dying screams made the deaths more horrifying, thought Dave, as he watched from beside the porch. Flack backed up onto the porch steps, watching the ghouls fight over the newly dead flesh and the soft internal organs.

Flack did not see Dave coming. He had no time to think before his skull was split apart by a single blow from Dave’s ax. Dave jumped back, splattered with Flack’s blood, as the man fell without so much as a groan and tumbled down the porch steps, his rifle cracking against the pavement with a loud alarming sound. Dave was on Flack, sinking his ax into Flack’s chest for good measure, the ax hewing through the bones of the sternum with a splintering noise that brought a gush of blood from punctured lungs. The second blow was unnecessary, the man dead instantly from the ax-stroke that had cleaved through his skull, but Dave needed to do something to let out, in a violent way, some of his anger and satisfy his fired-up thirst for revenge.

Dave snatched up Flack’s rifle, worried that the gun might have been damaged upon striking the pavement. He worked the lever a couple of times and saw cartridges chambered and rejected—a good sign; the rifle was probably still working. The firing mechanism had, hopefully, remained intact.

Rifle ready, Dave mounted the porch steps and entered the house through the front door which Flack had unbarred. Flack’s body remained at the foot of the porch steps, his chest cleaved through with Dave’s ax, the blade still buried deep in his lungs, the ax handle sticking up in the air.

Dave found himself in a large foyer. To the right was the living room and directly ahead he saw a wooden banister and a long flight of curved, carpeted stairs. Dave heard noises from upstairs, the sounds of John Carter still going through dresser drawers, looting the master bedroom. “That you, Flack?” Carter called out. “Did you feed the zombies?”

Dave cupped his hand over his mouth and yelled off to one side, to disguise his voice, “Yeah! Everything’s taken care of!” He clattered around, making a lot of noise on purpose while he re-barred the front door, hoping to lull Carter’s suspicions by showing that, like Flack, he was not afraid to make noise. Then he advanced up the stairs, moving normally, knowing that Carter would hear his footsteps and think he was Flack.

In the master bedroom, John Carter had an opened suitcase spread out on the bed. The suitcase was half filled with jewelry, silverware, cash—whatever the room had contained that could be sold easily or turned over to a fence. Carter stood over the booty, eyeing it with a satisfied look. For a long moment, he did not even bother to look up when Dave Benton entered; then he looked and had a chance to register the surprise of recognizing Dave before Dave squeezed the trigger.