Among the Living (30 page)

“Ange, we’re going to have to move upstairs. Grab everything you can and haul ass, babe. Get the guns and anything that looks like a weapon.”

He runs to the kitchen and starts throwing as much food as he can into a box. The back fence groans and rattles, but it doesn’t give. The front of the house is not as silent, because the rabid people are banging at the front door and pounding on the steps as more of them move onto the porch. He hauls the box into the living room and catches Angela lighting a joint.

“What the fuck?”

“If I’m going to die, Les, I’m going to die stoned and drunk.” She tosses the handgun and a magazine into the box, then marches into the kitchen and comes back with a half-f bottle of Scotch. Lester doesn’t comment, because after they get upstairs he may just join her, figuring it will be better to die drunk off his ass. He almost goes back for more booze, but the banging from the door scares the shit out of him. He gathers up the machine gun and heads for his secret stash.

There is a painting in the hallway of a pair of herons on a blue seascape. He yanks the frame up and then to the side to shake it off the four nails that hold it on the wall. It’s a stretch as he reaches into a hole he cut there. He hooks his elbow and leans in until he feels the strap, then he pulls out a zippered black bag.

Reaching back into the hole, he comes out with a small .38 hammerless pistol. It is compact enough that he can stash it in his front pants pocket. It’s a last-resort weapon, but right now he doesn’t want to think about what he will do with it if he has to.

Angie puffs the joint while she continues to load stuff into a box. They grab bags and cardboard boxes they have both been filling and haul them upstairs. Louder and more desperate banging causes him to stumble and nearly fling the contents of one of the boxes all over the floor. A window shatters. Lester stops, one foot poised, and stares toward the front of the house. Deaders moan and wail. It sounds eerie, like a hard wind whistling through a cracked door. Lester watches the stairs, waiting for them to flood inside.

“Holy shit, Ange, I know how we can stop them!”

He grabs her hand, drags her into their bedroom and starts hauling drawers out of the oak armoire and tossing them on the floor. Then he runs into the kitchen, retrieves two towels and spreads them on the hardwood floor beside the heavy piece of furniture. He tilts it so all of his porn videos slide out of the double doors on top. Joining these is a pile of prescription drugs and a couple of sex toys Angela had brought over.

“What are you doing?”

“Help me drag this to the stairs!”

He pushes while she pulls, and they slide it on the towels. Lester hopes they will lessen the friction. One end has a decorative lip, and it drags across the floor, leaving a noisy furrow. When they reach the door, Lester quickly changes places with her and tilts the armoire over so it lies on its side. The thing is as heavy as an obese woman on a waterbed, and he ends up dropping the end. The sound reverberates across the house.

Downstairs, another window breaks.

He is in a panic, and when Angela doesn’t move fast enough to help, he lashes out at her. “On the other end! Jesus fucking Christ!”

“Don’t yell at me. I don’t know how to move this big-ass thing!”

He sighs in frustration and sits with his back against the heavy wooden box, then pushes against the floor with his feet. The cabinet budges and then slides as he puts his back into it.

Angie stands back with her hands on her hips and watches. She finally gets the idea and drops down next to him. She digs her feet into the floor, but they slide as she pushes. It’s better than nothing, though. It budges, and they are able to maneuver it out into the hallway. They push the old thing until it is out of the room, and then they both take hold and stand it up with a lot of groaning, which—ironically—sounds like the moans coming from downstairs.

“Fuck, that thing is heavy. We just need to slide it to the stairs.”

“I think it’s too big, babe.” Angie observes, her eyes dropping a little.

“I hope so,” he replies, shoving it closer to the stairwell. When it is lined up, he presses the top until it tilts and falls forward. It slams against the wall with a crash, takes a chunk out of the whitewall, and promptly becomes lodged in the stairwell as it slides to a halt at the bottom of the stairs.

“More shit, we gotta jam more shit in the stairs so they can’t get up here,” he gasps and runs back to the bedroom. The two nightstands join the first obstacle, then the bed frame with its bookshelf that is used to hold a stereo and CDs. Then everything in the guest bedroom joins the pile. An extra dresser he never found a use for. A mattress is jammed into the space above the furniture, and they back it all up with boxes of crap that he was planning to toss someday. Glad I put that shit off. A weight bench that has never seen use and even the standing ski machine Angie brought from her old apartment.

Soon a mountain of stuff blocks the stairs. There is no way those brain dead things are ever going to get up there. Of course, it also means there is no way he and Angela are getting out. They sit at the top of the stairs and study the pile they have created. Lester wipes at a river of sweat that is dripping down his forehead and wishes he had a line of coke right about now, just to stay sharp. He stares at the blocked passageway and starts laughing. After a couple of seconds, Angie joins him. Nervous energy leaks out of him like air from a balloon as he considers the giant mess they have made.

“Now how the hell are we getting out of here?” Angie turns to him. Her eyes are heavy and bloodshot. It’s not just the pot. She is tired, just like him, and the problem is that he has no idea what to do next.

“I can’t stay here with those things around,” he replies. “I say we shoot our way out.”

“Babe, there are too many of them. I mean, there are seriously like a hundred of those angry people out there. Ain’t no way we can get them all. What we need is a really big car like John’s. If we had that, we could ram our way out. We could head to town, find some cops—find some of the Army guys that are supposed to be in the city. Anything but hang around here.”

She is making a lot of sense, and he knows it. John’s overpriced luxury car probably weighs a ton or three.

The door finally gives below, and the deaders stumble into the house. His house. Bastards.

“John’s SUV is still in his garage. I don’t know how we can get to it, though.”

“Jump the roof,” she says.

“Too far. Probably a fifteen-foot jump.”

“I can do it,” she says.

“No, babe, you can’t jump that far. No one can.”

“Hmmm.”

“Seriously. Imagine jumping to the end of the hallway from here, look how far that is.”

He points to the wall at the other end of the hall where a painting of a spooky old woman hangs. She is dressed in the kind of stuff they wore a hundred years ago, severe black lace up to her neck. Her face doesn’t have even a glimmer of a smile. Lester doesn’t know who she is, but he liked the way the frame looked, so he left it, gave the place a dark feel as if the old lady were some kind of ghost. Now he couldn’t care less about ever seeing anything scary for as long as he lives.

“Okay, I see your point.”

The deaders mill around below, walking into stuff, knocking things over. There is a crash from outside as the wooden fence gives. They both jump up and run to the guest bedroom, which looks over the other side of the house, and sure enough at least fifteen of the people are making their slow way toward the house.

“We better think of something fast.”

They are making a lot of noise below, and it is really pissing Lester off. He wants to take his gun, clear a space and start dropping the fuckers as they wander by. He has the nasty little surprise in his black bag as well. A little something that would take out a chunk of them for the small price of the destruction of part of the house. Well it’s not like the house is even mine.

Stupid generator. Hauled the thing over here and all we got out of that deal was the attention of every deader nearby. Should have stayed put, waited it out, hunkered down and stuck with the weed and alcohol. Hell, we have a closet full of stuff we can drink.

The fence below is pretty close to the overhang of the roof on the other side of the house. He is pretty sure that if he hangs off the edge, he will be able to put his feet on the top of it, then drop down to John’s yard, enter the house, avoid looking at the corpse of his former MILF neighbor, run to the garage and jump in the SUV.

Fuck! The whole idea is filled with fail because there are so many things that can go wrong. He doesn’t have any cool James Bond toys. He can’t shoot a wire across the roof and have it stick to something, then slide across the gap.

“Come to the window with me and watch what I’m doing.”

“Okay.” She follows, eyeing the stairwell as they pass. Every step brings a creak in the wood no matter how softly they walk, and she has a look on her face that says she is sure the things below are about to break out the deader chainsaws and go to town on the barricade.

He slides the window open in the guest bedroom and then works the screen up and down until it comes loose. He starts to pull it in, but the thing slips, falls outside and slides down the roof, rattling as it goes like a string of firecrackers. He grimaces and holds his breath, but the screen just stops at the gutter and stays there.

He swings out of the window and carefully walks along the old tile. It is gritty for the most part, but there are signs of wear, which make it slippery under his Nikes. He stares down and avoids the spots as much as he can until he is near the edge. He looks over, and there is the top of the fence, but he sees the problem right away. He will only have one shot at this. One chance to drop over the edge, swing his body away from the house and somehow make contact with the top of the fence. Lester is all too fucking aware that he is anything but an acrobat. In fact, he is one of the most uncoordinated people in the world.

Angie, on the other hand, was a dancer at one time and is quite light on her toes. He motions for her to join him, so she slithers out the window and just as carefully as he did a moment ago, creeps outside, following in his footsteps.

She isn’t wearing shoes and seems to have a better grip than he does. She joins him, and he leans over and whispers in her ear what he has in mind. She looks at him, shock painting her face before she looks down at the drop, at the fence and then at the roof.

“Okay, let’s do it,” she says with conviction. Lester wishes he felt as confident.

There is nowhere to take her car. The streets are at an absolute standstill, and the National Guards are directing the cars that have been sitting to get out of the way, up onto sidewalks if they have to. More military trucks are trying to maneuver through the alley that has been cut in the stream of automobiles. People stand around talking, joking, pointing at the men in green. A helicopter thumps in the distance, and we raise our heads, hands in a salute to cut out the sun as we watch the copter rattle across the sky. It weaves into view like a black wasp, pods bristling with weapons. Another arrives behind it, and it is an older one, the kind you’d see in an old Vietnam movie.

This is surreal, and the only thing I can think of to compare it to is the WTO riots ten years ago when the streets were turned into a battle zone. Only then it was an army of police against an army of civilians, and the civilians didn’t come out so well. I can’t believe that these guys are telling me that virus-infected crazy people are on the way and they are the only thing that can stop them. Call me a bleeding heart liberal, but you just don’t use machine guns to stop sick people.

I notice that most people have cell phones and are holding them up as they capture the scene on video. Some of the guards ask those near them to stop. Some comply, but others—most likely thinking that this is America and they can do whatever they want to—continue to film.

One overzealous Guardsman decides he is in the right, so he snatches a phone with a look that promises violence. He throws it on the ground to the indignant cries of the owner—a man in shorts and a tank top with a Seattle Mariners hat turned around backwards. The guy grabs the Guard on the shoulder, and the Guard responds by reaching up and by some twist of the wrist pulling the guy’s hand off him and then forcing him nearly to the ground with as much ease as if he were flicking a fly off his clothing.

Some stop filming but others, farther away, turn their cameras on the drama.

A pair of men comes into view, and they look very sick. One of them is dressed in shorts and a pair of flip-flops. His shirt is filthy, torn and disheveled. The tails flutter around him in the gentle breeze, and he glances about as if confused, then he walks into the back of a car, recoils, goes around it and continues advancing on us at a sedate pace.

The other man is much taller and dressed like someone who works at a ticket booth or concession stand. He is young and would have more of a gangly gait if he weren’t leering at everyone he passed. A group of Asian tourists are walking at a fast clip when one of them stops and points. Tiny phones snap pictures as the skinny kid takes notice of them.

One of the men steps out of the group and says something I can’t hear. By way of answer, the sick guy strikes him across the face and then falls on him like a vulture descending from the sky.