23 Hours (6 page)

“So why stay here?”

“Culver City attracts two types of people; those who can’t live elsewhere and those who don’t want to.”

“Which are you?”

“Probably a bit of them both.”

I left her last statement just hanging in the air as we made our way to the back room. Sure, part of me wanted to dig deeper but it would only slow us down. And it wouldn’t do any good anyways; I only had a matter of hours left in this world. I’d already realized I wasn’t going to be able fix everyone.

“Down here,” she said as she slid an overturned refrigerator off a hole in the floor. With the moonlight shining through a small window I could just barely make out a steel ladder leading into even deeper darkness.

“You sure we’ve got to go that way?” I asked as the memory of the Town’s crawl space sent a chill through me.

“Trust me,” she said with a slightly mischievous look in her eye.

“Lady’s first.” I replied.

She climbed down the ladder, briefly giving me a nice view of her ample cleavage, before dropping into the complete darkness below. I wasn't sure if it was purposeful or not, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

“I guess it’s our turn,” I said to the boy as I tried to work up the courage to follow.

“You going to stay up there or what,” she hollered from the blackness below.

“Yeah, yeah, keep your shirt on... on second thought...”

“Remind me to slap you,” she replied with a laugh, “if you ever grow a pair and get your ass down here, that is.”

Gritting my teeth, I slid my legs down through the hole, feeling the metal rungs beneath my feet. Taking a deep breath, I grabbed hold of the ladder and forced myself into the darkness.

The kid was practically weightless on my back, but even so I was covered in sweat before I was half way down. Climbing down a ladder with only one working arm is not as easy as it sounds. By the time I reached the bottom all my muscles were cramped and aching but thankfully Rosie had struck up a couple old road flares and I could see that the tunnel wasn’t nearly as claustrophobic as I feared. There’s no way I would have spent a lot of time down there, but I was almost able to stand completely upright so the panic would take a little while to set in.

“Roomy,” I said with as much sarcasm as possible, “but you mind if we not stick around?”

“That’s right,” she said with a grin made even more devious by the light of the flare. “You don’t like tight places do you?”

“Some things are meant to be tight,” I said with a matching grin,” some things aren’t.”

I think that was the first time I actually saw her speechless and I won’t swear to it, but I’m pretty sure I even got her to blush. Of course she’d turned around too fast for me to be sure.

“You coming?” she asked before tossing a flare at my feet and heading into a series of tunnels reminiscent of the ones used by drug smugglers before the world had gone to shit. I slid Excalibur into the sheath and grabbed the flare then rushed after her.

“So now that we’re hidden underground are you going to tell me about Bubba’s cousins?” I asked trying to keep my mind off the walls that were getting way too close.

“Bubba?” she asked before chuckling. “I guess that’s as good a name for him as any.”

“So the cousins?” I asked once again as I tried to regulate my breathing so she couldn’t hear the panic in my voice.

“The Cousins is the name given to them by the locals,” she continued. “And they run this town, or at least most of it. They are the like the royalty and “Bubba” as you referred to him, was their enforcer; like the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

“Does that make you Robin Hood?”

“Well I damn sure ain't no Maid Marian,” she replied.

“Aw, come on. I bet you’d look great in one of those fancy ballroom dresses.”

I should have seen the fourth slap coming, but it was dark.

“You want me to leave your ass here?” she griped, but I know I heard a little smile in her voice.

She continued directing us left, right, anyway but out. At times it seemed we were going around in circles, but she kept us moving until I could finally see a hint of light ahead.

“So why are you doing this?” She asked.

“Following you? I like the view from back here.”

That time she didn’t slap me so I wasn’t sure if she was serious or just tired of hurting her hand.

“No this whole thing with the kid,” she continued.

“I really can’t say,” I replied, taking a moment to decide how much to share. “After I got bit I knew what my fate was and I showed up at that cabin at peace, ready to just get drunk and end it all. I was almost looking forward to it. But then I saw him. I don’t know why, but I just decided he needed my help more than I needed that drink. Maybe I just wanted to feel I’d done one thing right before I leave or maybe I just wussed out on ending it. Either way, here I am. I’ve made it this far so now I’ve got to see it through.”

“Unfortunately that’s not going to happen,” she said as she turned and once again pointed the revolver at my face. By my count she’d already used up three of the six bullets but if I tried anything I highly doubted she would need more than one of the remaining.

Chapter 9

“Really? You’re doing this now?” I asked, trying to think of some way out. “What about the kid?”

“Don’t worry about the kid; I’ll make sure he gets to the hospital. You just won’t be the one taking him,” she replied as she took a couple steps back.

“You could have killed me back there with the rest of them,” I said. “Why wait until now.”

“I hadn’t really made up my mind until now.”

“So my story about helping the kid made the decision easier? What kind of psychopath decides they want to kill someone only after a story like that?”

The decision wasn’t about whether or not I want to kill you, it was about whether or not you were worth the bullet.”

I had to admit, I kind of agreed with her.

“You know you’re not going to make it to the hospital in time. This way you’ll get a quick painless death and I won’t have to spend the rest of the trip worrying about you turning on me halfway there.”

“Yeah. It sure sounds like a win-win for both of us.”

“Hey, I could hold you here until your heart explodes and the infection takes over. Your body’s in good shape; I could probably harvest a lot of fresh organs and make a killing, no pun intended.”

“If it’s money you’re after,” I said. “I’ve got a MK1 Ferret you can have. You’ll get plenty for it as long as you don’t try to sell it to Big Mike.”

“You stole one of Big Mike’s cars?” she asked with a laugh.

“Yeah,” I said, setting the flare down slowly and pulling out the keys. “It was just too bad I didn’t get to see his face when he found out.”

“Toss them here.”

“Not ‘til you let us go.”

“Fine, I’ll just take them after I kill you.”

“They won’t do you any good if you can’t find the car.”

“It’s a 12 foot long, 4 ton vehicle somewhere between here and the Town. I doubt it’ll be that hard to find.”

She had a point.

“You’re not driving it so my guess is that if I head down the main drag towards the Town I’ll find it run out of gas about halfway there.”

“Fine; just don’t kill me in front of the boy,” I said as I slid him off my back.

“It’s the least I could do,” Rosie replied. She even curtsied like Maid Marian.

I tossed the keys at her and as she strained in the dim light to see them quickly slid a knife from the makeshift sleeve on my left arm. I aimed for center mass but missed badly. Still, it managed to sink itself into her right arm causing her to drop the gun and her flare. I pounced immediately, grabbing the gun from the floor before she even realized what was happening.

“Damn that hurt,” she growled while giving me the stink eye something awful. The light of the flare at her feet gave her an even more menacing look and I suddenly had a vision of what hell must look like.

“Well the quicker you get us out of here, the quicker you can get that taken care of,” I said with the gun pointed directly at her. “So start walking.”

Fire once again danced in her eyes, but Rosie said nothing. Instead she picked up her flare, turned around and continued on towards the light.

Thankfully the tunnel opened up to a more spacious area with a couple oil lamps hanging from the rock walls. Through an opening at the far end of the room I could see the silhouette of trees in the moonlight.

“That’s far enough,” I said, causing Rosie to stop dead in her tracks. From where we were at I had enough room to safely move around her while still keeping the gun on her. It was a sensible move, one I was sure she expected, so I’m sure she was shocked when I came up from behind, flipped the gun around and smashed the butt of the grip into the side of her head just behind the ear. Well she might not have been shocked right then, but I’m sure she was when she awoke a few minutes later to find me and the kid long gone. I almost felt bad leaving her there crumpled on the floor of the cave but I really couldn’t trust her to not try killing me again so there really was no other option.

Rosie had managed to get us to the outskirts of Culver City and for that I was grateful so I left the revolver at her feet before heading out into the moonlight. I was sure Excalibur would be enough to handle any of the infected we might encounter and I still had the one bullet I needed for myself. Besides, she’d probably need it once the Cousins found out what she did to Bubba’s guys.

With the kid once again clinging to my back, I headed in a roundabout way towards the tracks. I was sure the Cousins or some of their goons would be patrolling that close to the city so I waited until we were at least a mile away before I made my way through the brush once again to follow the tracks towards the hospital. It wouldn’t take us all the way, but it would get us within sight of the building before we had to leave its security.

I should have been exhausted by then, and mentally I was starting to get a little foggy, but my body wasn’t ready to stop so I kept pushing. The thing is, the farther we went, the better my body responded and after the second mile I even broke out into a light jog that eventually turned into a run. At that point I decided to chance a quick glance at Willie’s watch and I can only imagine the look on my face when I saw it wasn’t quite 4 am. By my calculations we only had a couple miles left, and almost two hours to make it. Even with all the interruptions we actually had a shot to get him there in time, so I picked up the pace even as we left the train tracks and headed to the main road.

Trees lined both sides of the street but I still felt completely exposed. I hated the idea of being so out in the open, but the road wasn’t covered with the typical overabundance of cracks and potholes so I managed to make even better time than the others roads or even the train tracks would have allowed. For once things seemed to be going our way, so I ran and I kept running.

At that point I couldn’t have been happier if I had a stripper and a keg of beer, but then I started to notice things. At first I thought the insects had grown louder or maybe there were just more of them but the sound of them became almost overwhelming and then I started to be able to smell them. They didn’t smell all that great, but the sensation was incredible.

And then I started to smell other things; squirrels and even birds in trees a dozen yards away. All of that wouldn’t have bothered me much except for the fact that I could picture the animals I was smelling but I couldn’t think of their names. That scared the shit out of me so I began running even faster but the faster I ran, the faster the thoughts started swimming around in my head yet I couldn’t focus on a single one. That was about when I realized my thoughts weren’t the only thing I couldn’t focus on. At first I thought my eyes were just dry or tired, but even after blinking the left one just wouldn’t cooperate. It was as if I had one contact in and one out. My depth perception became all screwed up.

But even with only one good eye, I could see the lights from the hospital less than half a mile ahead. The end was so close I could smell it. I don’t know if was my excitement at the sight of the hospital, all the changes that were happening within me, or a combination of both, but somehow we were practically on top of the group of infected waiting to ambush us before I caught their scent. I stopped as soon as I sensed them but that was about the same time the howling started. The spotter’s warning was practically ear-splitting and completely disorienting but I focused on ignoring him and instead swung the kid and my pack off my back and slid Excalibur from its sheath.

Then I stopped for a minute and stared down at my arm. After Godzilla had torn the meat from the bone I’d sworn it’d never work again, but I was clenching and unclenching it in anticipation of the fight. I probably could have stood there for an hour, marveling at the moment, but that really wasn’t the time.

Knowing what was about to happen, I should have been a little scared, but I wasn’t; not even slightly. Fear no longer existed within me, anger had completely replaced it and I was salivating at the thought of ripping a few of those creatures to pieces.

Chapter 10

The first one rushed me from behind but I smelled him and heard his footsteps, no matter how soft they’d been, before he could get within ten feet of us. I had the throwing knife out and flying at his skull before I’d even completely turned around. It hit perfectly and even buried itself several inches into what remained of that thing’s brain.

He dropped instantly but Excalibur didn’t have a chance to sever the head before the second and third creatures leapt from the trees on either side of us. I started to rush the nearest one but then stopped, only I wasn’t sure why. I shook my head then looked around for a second before I caught a glimpse of the kid still sitting in the middle of the road so I moved back towards him. I should have known him, something told me that much, but I just couldn’t think. And he smelled so good. He wouldn’t be much of a meal, but he’d make a nice snack. And I was hungry, really hungry.