Those Lazy Sundays: A Novel of the Undead (10 page)

“Sounds good to me,” Jack said. “I’ll take the phone up as well, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” Phil replied. “ By the way, do either of you know how to fire a gun?”

“Not really,” Jack said. “Never fired one.”

“I’m pretty good,” Kate spoke up. “My dad and I used to shoot all the time in our backyard. I’ve been to quite a few shooting ranges too. And hunting. Deer, mostly.”

Jack raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know you were into guns, Kate,” he said, sounding surprised.

“I’m not, really. But because of my dad, you know, I am pretty good with them. He always said that girls were better at shooting than guys, because they don’t have as many bad habits.”

Phil smiled. “Sounds like your dad is a smart man,” he said.

“Target shooting can be fun. I hated hunting though. Nothing against it I guess, but I just couldn’t do it, you know? Just shoot a deer.”

“Why don’t you take this,” Phil said, holding out a black pistol. “It’s a Glock 22. Same kind of gun that a lot of police use. The magazine has fifteen rounds. I’ve got a spare magazine upstairs and about two hundred loose rounds as well.”

Kate got up from the love seat and took the firearm. She felt the heavy metal weapon resting in her hand, its weight, the rough feel of the grip, the smooth metal of the trigger guard. She’d fired guns plenty of times, but certainly never at a person. She started to feel nervous. Her palms sweated, and it felt like the entire room was pressing down on her. They were relying on
her
to protect them?

 She took a deep breath and chased away her nervousness. She knew how to fire a gun, and that was what mattered. 

“I’ve fired pistols plenty of times,” she said, sounding more like she was trying to reassure herself than anything else.

“Great,” Phil replied. “I have a .38 upstairs as well, and I’ll take that.” He turned to Jack. “I’ve also got a baseball bat up there, just in case.”

“As long as you guys know what you’re doing, I doubt I’ll have to use it.”

“Hopefully not,” Phil said. “But there were a lot of things I would have doubted before today.”

His sentence was punctuated by someone pounding on the glass doors by the deck.

“Looks like we have a few more guests,” Phil said. “Let’s move upstairs. You two go first. I’ll be hobbling along behind you. Stairs are off the kitchen to the right.”

Jack and Kate walked across the room, but hesitated, waiting for Phil. More banging. Phil waved at them, signaling for them to go ahead. Jack looked at him skeptically, but moved into the kitchen. They were halfway up the stairs when they heard the crash of the doors shattering.

Without saying a word, Jack and Kate ran back down the stairs, nearly colliding head-on with Phil, who was waiting at the bottom.

“I’m fine!” he said. “I was just grabbing some Band-Aids and a few other supplies. Let’s get upstairs.”

They heard the slow clomp of approaching footsteps in the living room followed by a moan that made Jack shudder.

“Go on. Go!” Phil ordered, waving frantically.

Jack and Kate began climbing the stairs again. Jack looked back and saw that Phil was clearly struggling to move, using his pants leg as a handle to lift up his leg and put it on the next step. Jack descended the stairs and held out his hand, which Phil grasped. He hoped to take some of the pressure off the man’s bad leg.

Before they could ascend another step, a loud snarl came from the bottom of the stairs. Jack saw him first: it was Pantsless Man.

“Kate!” Jack yelled, but she was already moving. The half-naked man reached the stairs and grabbed Phil by the shoulders. As he gnashed his teeth and prepared to bite, Jack reached over Phil’s shoulder and grabbed a handful of the man’s hair. Pantsless Man growled and snapped his teeth, but Jack held on firmly, preventing him from getting his mouth close enough to bite Phil.

With his other hand, Jack started to punch at the man's face. He let off a rapid flurry of blows and was sure he felt the man’s nose shatter, but kept striking him, lashing out over and over until the man's cheekbones turn to mush, his teeth shattered, and Jack's own knuckles were red, raw and bleeding. While Jack used the man for a punching bag, Phil twisted himself around and then, putting all his power into his good leg, pushed off, drilling a shoulder into the man's torso. The momentum tore the man from Jack’s grasp and sent him sprawling backwards. At the last second, Pantsless Man grabbed Phil’s shirt, pulling the already off-balance man with him.

Jack tried to grab Phil’s hand, but wasn’t fast enough. Phil and the Pantsless Man tumbled backwards down the stairs, Pantsless Man finally losing his grip.  The two men crashed to the floor of the kitchen.  Phil moaned, turned his head, and found himself staring directly into the cold, dead eyes of the man, inches away from his face. The man's mouth was open, saliva dripping from what remained of his teeth, his cold, rotten, rancid breath washing over Phil’s face.

A pair of hands suddenly grasped him under the arms and pulled, dragging him backwards across the floor. Pantsless Man wriggled towards him and snapped at his leg, sinking his teeth around part of Phil's sneaker for a split second before having it yanked away. Jack dragged Phil back onto the staircase and helped him to his feet.

Pantsless Man pushed himself back up, took a step toward the staircase, and growled. Kate put one foot the bottom step and raised the gun, holding it in a classic shooting position. Her hands shook in spite of her attempts to calm herself. She aimed at the man's chest and squeezed the trigger. The first shot missed entirely and struck a cabinet across the room, leaving a tiny hole in the wooden door.

Kate took a deep breath and exhaled, her hand beginning to steady. She squeezed the trigger again. The pistol jumped in her hand, and the uncovered bottom half of Pantless Man exploded in a spray of red. A small, bloody appendage flopped onto the floor, reminding Kate of a small, uncooked breakfast sausage. Where Pantsless Man’s genitalia had once been was now a gaping mass of blood and ragged flesh.

“Aww Jesus, Kate,” Jack said, wincing. Phil also grimaced when he saw the man's injury.

The man staggered towards them again, slowed but not halted by the gunshot wound. Kate calmed herself and thought back to her basic shooting skills.

“Shooting low or high is a result of breathing,” she remembered her father instructing her in his cool, calm manner. “Shooting left or right is trigger squeeze.”

She concentrated on her breathing, aimed, and fired. This time the round found its mark, slamming into the chest of the man and sending him staggering backwards.

But he regained his balance and kept coming. She shot again, this round ripping through the man’s throat. He opened his mouth and tried to moan using his now-severed vocal cords, but only mustered a liquid, choking noise. He staggered backwards, but again regained his balance and re-started his advance.

The man shuffled to just a few feet from the stairs, and Kate.

“Jesus, it's barely doing anything. Shoot him in the head, Kate! In the head!” Jack yelled.

Kate calmly aimed the pistol again. This shot hit Pantsless Man square in the forehead. His head snapped backwards, and a small jet of blood and brain matter squirted out the back. He took one last step backwards, and fell over.

Kate didn’t have long to celebrate.  Another gravely moan came from the living room, this one a feminine voice. The woman in the pink bathrobe staggered into the kitchen, the belt of the robe no longer there, probably lost somewhere on the steep hill of the driveway. The garment hung open, revealing a pink, silk lingerie top and a pair of matching bikini panties. She shook her hips seductively as she walked, almost like a model coming down a runway.

Kate dispatched the Victoria’s Secret woman with one shot, taking out the upper right portion of her skull.

“Kate, we need to get upstairs now!" Jack yelled. More growling and crashing came from the kitchen, the sound of yet another group of unwelcome visitors.

Jack grabbed Phil under the armpits again and helped him up the stairs, Kate right behind them keeping the pistol pointed at the kitchen. One of the teenagers lunged into the room, his baggy pants down around his thighs, forcing him to waddle like some kind of bizarre penguin. Jack flung the door open and dragged Phil into the waiting hallway while Kate eyed the new arrival.

She considered taking a shot, but decided against it, and hurried up the last couple of steps, shutting the door behind her. She noticed a regular push-button lock on the doorknob and pushed it in, the door locking with a click. Jack helped Phil stand up, and they all started the process of trying to calm themselves.

Kate looked at the gun in her hands, almost with a sense of awe, or shock, at what had just happened.

“We need to buttress the door with a chair or something,” Phil said. “If they get in here, there’s nowhere else to go but up.” He pointed at a trap door in the hallway ceiling just above his head.

“Let's not do that unless we have to,” Jack said.

"Agreed," Phil replied.

Jack felt something in his pocket begin to vibrate. Initially bewildered, he realized it was his cell phone. He yanked it out of his pocket and flipped it open. It was a text message. Jack read it aloud:

“Stuck n allentown. Will come find as soon as can. Van is broken. Find building r house and stay there. STAY AWAY FROM PEOPLE ACTING STRANGE LIKE AT THE STORE.”

“It’s from Andy,” Jack said.

"Kate?" he asked. She finally looked up.

"Yeah?" she asked.

"Look. Message from Andy."

She took the phone and read it.

"They're okay," she said, relieved.

“That your friend that was going to come get you? If the network is backed up, it could be an old message,” Phil said. “When did he send it?”

Jack looked at the phone, and then glanced at his watch.

“Ten minutes ago.”

“So then that wasn’t him that drove past us,” Kate said.

“No, it wasn’t,” Jack replied. “I guess this means they’re not coming to get us, though. They’re stuck.”

“He didn’t say that anyone was hurt, right?” Kate asked, double-checking.

Jack nodded.

“Yeah. Thank God they’re all okay.”                                                              

K
YLE GRUNTED AS he and Brent pushed the heavy desk across the room. The desk slid roughly across the floor, the two men having to stop and lift it up every few seconds when it hit a bump or crevice. The wooden desk legs rubbing on the wood floor made a racket, nearly drowning out the banging on the door, and the moans and snarls of the people outside. Sarah and Mary sat in their chairs and watched their friend sweat and strain against the heavy piece of furniture. They’d offered to help, but in an ill-advised expression of manliness, Kyle assured them that it was a two-man job. 

Halfway across the room, Kyle took his hands off of the desk and stopped. He pulled his shirt up and wiped the sweat off of his forehead, breathing heavily. A prime physical specimen, he was not.

“You okay there, big guy?” Brent asked.

Sarah snickered, drawing a sharp glare from Mary.

“Yeah, just give me a second,” Kyle replied, still hyperventilating.

While he caught his breath, he looked up at the small windows, the glass on all of them now broken. Pale, stiff hands clutched the bars from the outside, the flesh lacerated and shredded from the broken glass, drops of blood sliding down the cold iron. The space between the metal bars was too narrow for anyone to slip his arms through, so all they could do was pull at them in a futile attempt to gain entrance to the building and the sustenance inside.

"Look at them," Sarah said, pointing at the hands clutching at the bars. "How can that not hurt?"

Kyle recovered and put his hands back on the desk and nodded to Brent, who joined him. They finished moving the desk to the door and then sat down, Kyle again sweating and huffing. He looked at Mary, embarrassed, but she patted his hand and smiled.

“That should be good for now,” Brent said.

“What about the back door?” Sarah asked, pointing at the wooden door next to the refrigerator that looked even more flimsy than the front door.

“Just a storage closet,” Mike said, looking up from the computer. “There’s another door that leads outside, but it exits into an alley. Should be secure. I doubt they'll get in there. Better to leave it unblocked for now.”

“But what if they do find it?” Sarah asked.

“We’ll hear it ahead of time if someone tries to get in that way,” Brent said. “Mike’s right. We can secure the door then if we need to. In the meantime, though, it’s good to have an unblocked door. It’s a way out if we need it.”

Sarah thought about it for a moment, and nodded. It was a good point, and she wasn’t about to argue security with a trained cop. It was an argument she knew she would lose.

The conversation over, Mike turned his attention once again to the computer.  He focused intently, sifting through articles and forums on the Internet, trying to get a sense of what was going on in the outside world. It had only been a few hours since the whole thing had started, less than ninety minutes since they holed up in the police station, but they already felt isolated, cut off. The station itself had come to feel like a besieged fortress to its occupants, they unable to leave, their enemy unable to get in.