A Good Distance From Dying (Book 2): Samantha's Song Page 12

  “Howdy, my names Charlie Collins and this is Jane.” Jane nodded at the people and walked towards the front of the building to check out the barricade this family had made. The father stepped forward, “My name is Bill North, and this is my wife Ruth.”

  I shook both of their hands and saw the two kids standing behind them. I gave each of them a sneaky smile and a wink before looking back at their father.

  “Sorry we have made things seem a bit scary for the last few minutes, we are here to help. I am the leader of a group of people who are currently living on top of Wal-Mart. Jane and another member of my group noticed the large number of zombies in the parking lot, so they made a trip to check things out. When they got back they told us that there were people trapped over here. We’re here to get you out and take you back to Wal-Mart with us where you’ll be safe.”

  The father was looking at me as if he was trying to figure out what we were really after. I smiled back at him remembering my doubts and distrust when we had first met the scouts from Gray on our way to Johnson City.

  “I promise you, we are not after anything other than to getting you to safety. If you get to our home and don’t want to stay, there will be no hard feelings, but I don’t think you’re going to survive more than a couple of days over here before you’re in some serious trouble.”

  “They could make it a good while over here actually.” Jane said walking back from the front. “That barricade is some good work. You could last in here a long time before they could get in as long as you had provisions. However, I'm betting you don’t. I bet your lack of provisions is what led to your current predicament.”

  Bill looked at Jane for a minute then nodded his head. “Yes, we ran out of food and water. I made an attempt to run over to K-mart and get us some food, which I managed to do, but some of the zombies must have seen me as I was making my way back.”

  “Some of them are much more attentive then you would imagine.” Jane said.

  “What do you say Bill? You ready to get out of here?” I asked.

  Bill looked to his wife and her look said that yes, she was ready to go.

  “Let’s get out of here.” Bill said.

  We went through the hole in the wall and up the ladder. I was the last one up and by the time I was climbing up I could hear where the zombies had started to beat on the windows in the front of the store we were in. I could also hear a horn honking and a gun blaring, both were getting closer.

  Once back on top of the building I followed the group as Jane led the North’s to the side of the building where Sass had brought the truck to a stop and helped them over onto the top of the box and down Amanda’s ladder. With Jane and the others already inside I paused for a moment before climbing down the ladder. I took one last look at the parking lot around us and saw that there were zombies everywhere. Once I reached the bottom I looked to Amanda.

  “This is bad. Won’t a bunch of these guys follow us back?”

  Amanda seemed to think about it. “Yes. I imagine more than a few will wander back with us, but we are about to start weapons training and you’re going to need some moving targets.”

  I looked at her and I guess my eyes had lit up like a kid’s on Christmas morning, “I get the long bow right?”

  Amanda laughed, “Yes Robin Hood, you get the long bow.”

  NOW

  DAY 123 OF THE INFECTION

  ELEVEN

  There is a time and place for memories. Hearing the moans of the pursuing dead helped me to realize that this wasn’t one of those times. I could hear Amanda’s gun getting closer to me. Jane and the others had already climbed through the hole in the window and I began to climb myself. Yes, I know this building pretty well and I also know that there’s only one thing that may stand in the way of our escape. This time around we have no ladder.

  I made it into the shop about the time Amanda made it to the window.

  “We good?” She asked.

  “The others are hopefully building some form of a ladder as we speak.”

  She nodded to me as she began to climb. “We have no more than five minutes before the mob arrives.”

  “Understood. Let’s go make sure we’re out of here in three.”

  Amanda’s smile flashed at me as she passed through the broken window onto the tops of the file cabinets, “You’re speaking my language.”

  “I do try to keep the ladies happy.” I said as I finished putting my little surprise together and we began walking towards the back of the store. From out of the corner of my eye I saw Amanda open her mouth to say something, then think better of it. We walked to where the others were constructing a ladder out of some shelving units.

  “How’s it going?” I asked as we stepped through the hole in the wall.

  “Not as well as I had hoped but better than expected.” Jane answered. He gave the jumble of shelves and cabinets a nod and began to climb up. They rocked a bit but seemed okay. Within just a few seconds he was pulling himself through the hole in the ceiling. He turned and looked back down at us. “Come on, there’s no time to stand there with your mouths hanging open.”

  This seemed to snap the rest of us out of the trance that we had fallen into as we had watched him ascend the shaky ladder to salvation. Marky Mark began to climb next followed by Fred, Sass and then Amanda nudged me forward making sure she would be the last one to climb up the structure. I gave her a look and she shrugged at me and said, “I figured you would want me down here to catch you when you fall off that thing.”

  I stopped climbing just long enough to flip her the bird. To this she said in a panicky tone, “Keep both hands on the ladder. Ten and two! Ten and two!”

  Sass stuck his head back down through the hole to see what the holdup was and upon witnessing the last exchange between the two of us he simply said, “Amanda, you’ve been around Crackhead way too long.” Then he was gone again, back up onto the roof to shake his head at Jane and say “They ain’t right.”

  Once I made it to the roof, without falling off I should add, I could see that the rest were already moving towards the far end of the building. The plan was to hop back off of the building on the far side, well out of our pursuers line of sight. Once there it should be just a matter of making our way around the parking lot, eventually coming back out to the road where K-marts upper parking lot met it. It wasn’t a complicated plan but there were huge windows where misfortune could sneak up and beat us with a rolled up newspaper if luck left us unattended for any amount of time.

  “Okay, here’s the deal. Sit on the roof then spin around and lower yourself over the edge until you're hanging on by just your fingers. Then, and only then, drop the rest of the way down.” I said. “You do not want to screw your ankle up, it hurts like a mother and there is no way back to Wal-Mart except walking. From this distance, if you even make it, the pain will be like nothing you have ever felt. Trust me on this, I know from experience.” Everyone nodded and this time I was first to show them how I wanted to see it done. I sat down and Amanda, who had crawled over to look at the front of the building, gave me a thumbs up so I spun around, hung there for a moment then dropped.

  Once back on the ground I caught a glimpse of Big Lou off in the distance. He was standing halfway between us and K-mart and was giving us a look that said, “Why are you climbing around on a building? Don’t you smell those things?” Yes Lou, I could smell them, zombies aren’t very sanitary. When we had first made our way to Johnson City, I had no doubts that Lou could smell the zombies because he would growl and bark anytime they got near us, but on that first day there wasn’t an odor that I could notice. Four months later, things are much different. Now everything has an odor to it. We built a line of shower stalls on the roof, but there is no water to take showers. The only water we have is bottled and seeing as how that is an ever decreasing number, we are rather protective of it. Instead, what we decided to do was build a row of partitioned stalls with soap and shampoo in each one and every time it rains we take s
howers in the rain. That’s the best we could come up with, and I am quite happy with it. However, if you run into a nice long stretch of sunny days, it could be a week or two before bath time rolls around and everyone on top of the building starts to get a funk to them. The zombies are even worse. They take no baths so when it rains it just makes matters worse. Kind of like the wet dog smell multiplied by a hundred.

  While I was watching Big Lou, Sass and Marky Mark had made their way down behind me. Fred was next, then Jane. The last to land behind us was Amanda who immediately drew her rifle back out. Big Lou looked at me again and yawned at us. He always thinks I take too long.

  Jane was starting to walk towards the edge of the road that bent around K-mart’s parking lot and I held out a hand to stop him.

  “Give it just a second. I left a party favor to help distract them.” I said.

  I was amazed that it hadn’t gone off yet. What I had left to inspire our dead fans was an item that had been thought up during my teen years, and it was one of my most successful inventions to date. When I was in middle school we terrorized the local mall one weekend and had the rent-a-cops hunting high and low for the “time bomb bandits.” Yes, that is actually what they called us. I thought it was a horrible name back then and time has really not improved my opinion. What we were doing was frowned upon in the eighties, but if somebody were to do have tried it right before the worlds extreme zombie makeover, they would have been jailed as some form of terrorist.

  We would pick up a half smoked cigarette butt from one of the many ashtrays around the mall and relight it, rip the filter off, and insert a firecracker into the cigarette. This effectively created a time bomb. Once the cigarette burned down enough it would ignite the fuse on the firecracker then there would be a loud BANG that would echo through the mall and make us laugh like half drunken banshees. We left the time bombs all over the mall. The nastiest one I can remember is when two of us each left one on the elevator at the same time and then got off on the ground floor and waited for the show. The elevator was glass and from the ground floor you could watch all the action as the car ran up and down. It didn’t take long before the first one went off. Everyone jumped and after a moment a few of them start laughing, that’s when the second one went off. It was hilarious. I’m sure most of those in the elevator didn’t think so, but I could see at least a few of them still laughing as the car stopped on the second floor and let everybody out.

  The rent-a-cops never did catch the time bomb bandits. We successfully completed our reign of terror on the Fort Henry Mall and then moved on. That is to say, we ran out of firecrackers and New Years was a long way off.

  This morning saw the return of the last living member of the time bomb bandits. I had lit the cigarette up as Amanda began to climb through the window of the Fidelity building. I took two puffs from it, and even though I had quit smoking over ten years ago that was all it took to make me want to start all over again. With some regret I took the cigarette out of my mouth and ripped the filter off and inserted a whole pack of firecrackers. A full length cigarette will give you around ten minutes before the firecracker goes bang if I remember correctly. I figured this would give us plenty of time to be back out of the building and ready to make our move across the parking lot before it went off. We seemed to be a bit faster than I thought we would be. Jane was giving me the “what have you done now?” look. I smiled and simply said, “Wait for it.”

  The wait was less than a minute before what sounded like gunshots erupted from the other side of the building. Jane smiled back to me, “You and those damned firecrackers.” Then to everyone else he said, “Charlie’s bought us some invisible time, let’s not waste it.” We began to move out around the edge of the parking lot working our way towards K-Mart. Big Lou, who had decided he was far enough away from the zombies to lay down for a bit, jumped up and walked over to meet us as we passed by.

  “Why is it that damn dog disappears every time we get surrounded by zombies?” Jane asked.

  “He’s smart.” I answered.

  The parking lot was still hidden in shadows, but the sun was rising. Soon any cover the fading darkness was giving us would be gone. We needed to be near the buildings by that time to help blend us into the background. We needed to be able to hide.

  K-Mart loomed huge before us. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like all the buildings that I took for granted before, seem to be so large and forbidding now. It’s like all of the post apocalyptic movies I used to watch where someplace as simple as an abandoned gas station could become the den of some evil monster. K-Mart looked like nothing more than the barracks for the army of the dead and I got a serious case of the willies just looking at it. Knowing that I would soon be outside the front doors made me want to tell the others that I was wrong about all of this, that I was sure Samantha was safe after all and maybe we should just head on back. It was a desire I wouldn’t act upon. Well, maybe I wouldn’t act upon. In truth it was getting really hard not to act upon it. I looked around and saw that everyone else seemed perfectly fine while marching towards this darkened hulk of a building. Across the parking lot the horde was still beating the bejesus out of the Fidelity building; the firecrackers had really done their job. There weren’t many wanders left in the parking lot and we seemed very safe at the moment. I was trying to remember what Jack had said about feeling safe the first night we were in Johnson City. It was something like the best way to be safe is to never feel secure. If that’s true, then I was the safest man on the planet at that moment. I felt completely vulnerable. I was expecting a huge pile of the dead to just come spilling out of K-Mart and proceed to devour every one of us. The closer we came to the building the more certain of that expectation I was becoming.

  The inside of K-Mart was pitch black even though the sun was almost all the way over the horizon now. I watched the slow progress of the double doors as they made their way towards me. To my horror I noticed that they were stuck in the open position. I can’t really tell you why this disturbed me so badly. I had stood my ground with the hordes bearing down on me more than once. I had stood strong in the face of the hungry dead and made it out alive. Why was this empty shell of a building messing with me so badly? Maybe that was the answer. It was true I had faced the dead and walked away more than my fair share of times. Maybe we have some internal counter in our bodies that tell us when we have pressed our luck all that we should. Maybe Veronica has been right, and I should just stay on the roof leading the masses from afar. Maybe this trip is destined to be my last.

  We were less than ten feet from the doors when Sass turned around to say something. I could see his eyes widen at the sight of me.

  “Dude. Charlie, are you okay?” he asked. He had stopped walking and was paying attention to nothing else but me.

  “Yeah, fine, why?” I stammered my eyes not wanting to leave the black hole of the doorway. I was confident that as soon as I looked away, the dead would come. I knew they were watching me, watching my eyes. One slip, one second of letting my focus waiver and they would take advantage. They would break upon us like a wave crashing onto the shore and there would be no sweet endings of happily ever afters at the end of this story.

  “Um, Charlie, you’re white.” Sass said and now the others were stopping as well. I wanted to scream at them to keep going. The only thing worse than passing by the doorway to retail hell would be to stop almost in front of it. “What?” I said to Sass not taking my eyes off the entrance to K-Mart. “What? Me? White? No wonder I could never learn to dance.” My voice sounded flat, even to me. Everyone was looking at me now.

  Sweat had popped out on my forehead and still they weren’t moving. Why weren’t they moving? I turned my eyes back to the doorway. Stupid, stupid stupid, I said to myself. I had looked away and they had seen. I had heard a sound come from the dark. A sound that reminded me of a metal pipe being banged against something rickety, like a shopping cart. This was so stupid; we had to get clear of this building. We had to m
ove. Why wouldn’t they move? Amanda was looking at me now, frowning at what she saw.

  “Charlie, tell me what you’re thinking. Tell me what you’re scared of.” She said. I gave her a look then remembered that if I took my eyes off the door then they would come so my eyes shot directly back to the door. I said, “Amanda you are a far cry from Doctor Phil, let’s just keep moving please.”

  I smiled at the others, but Amanda had seen the shift in my eyes. She looked into the store then back to me. “Charlie, you are freaking out. Why are you freaking out?”

  She turned to look at the doorway and as I spoke I heard the pipe smash into the cart again. They were coming. There was no doubt.

  “They are in there.” I said slowly then added, “They. Are. Coming.”

  Amanda never questioned me. She slung her rifle back over her shoulder and pulled out both of her hand guns taking aim on the doorway. Jane looked into the store then back to me. “What did you see?” He asked.

  “I heard metal banging on something that sounds like a shopping cart.” I said.

  Sass narrowed his eyes, “If they have figured out how to use weapons we are in some serious trouble.”

  Jane didn’t look convinced. “Charlie, I think you’re having a panic attack. The odds that there are any dead in this store after today’s festivities are highly unlikely.”

  I had heard the term panic attack before but had no clue what it was. I dismissed his idea. Why would I have a panic attack now? We were in no immediate danger. I had just successfully maneuvered us out of danger and not once felt a twinge of panic. It sounds stupid I guess but it seems that I am growing used to having a group of pissed off dead guys coming for me. If I was going to have a panic attack I think I would have started to panic when I saw the bunch of zombies hanging out all over the doomed kidnapper’s car, not now, not when we are relatively safe. It seemed like a stupid notion to me.

  “I don’t see anything in here.” Amanda said, now standing about five feet inside the store. “I don’t hear anything either.”