Solstice: A Novel of the Zombie Apocalypse (10 page)

Tomas frowned, confused. “Father Vernon, is that you?”

Suddenly, the eyes vanished. Tomas heard the latches slide back, and the door opened. He was greeted by several men he recognized from around the village—Lester Morgan, Mitchell Henriksen, Harrison Lunde, and a couple others whose names he couldn’t quite remember. The last two were of the other end of the social class—rough, resentful, ready for a fight at the drop of a hat.

“Come in, friend,” Lunde said, his mouth pulling wide in a farce of a smile, exposing a row of large, crooked teeth. He slapped Tomas’s shoulder. “Bring in your pretty wife and your boy. We’ve hot food, some light, and a big fire.”

Tomas returned the smile, but something didn’t feel right. He glanced at Father Vernon, who wouldn’t meet his eye. He took a step backward. “Maybe not. We just thought we saw something. We’ll move on. Sorry to have bothered you.”

Over the man’s shoulder, Tomas was able to make out about two dozen other faces, some he recognized and others he’d never seen. Nobody appeared happy, despite the draw of warm food and light. Sounds layered the pub—talking, babies crying, the low murmur of despair. The women sat on chairs or on the floor in the back near the billiard tables. They were wrapped in blankets or quilts and cradling children close.

“You need to rest, Tomas.” Mitchell Henriksen grabbed a handful of Tomas’s coat in one bony hand. “Now tell your family to come on inside.”

Apprehensive, Tomas turned and motioned for Melanie, Leila, and Christopher to join him.

Leila climbed out, then moved to the back and took Christopher from his booster seat. “Should I get anything else?”

“Later,” Tomas answered.

“Quickly, now,” Henriksen said. “Before the others hear us and come back.”

Melanie grabbed Bo’s lead, preparing to let him out, but Henriksen stopped her. “Dog stays out here. I’ll let you bring him in through the back soon enough.”

Melanie pushed Bo back. “Stay here, boy.”

Once they were all inside, Lester Morgan lumbered forward, his bulging stomach brushing against Tomas. He glared at Tomas as if sizing him up. “Got any guns on you, Tom?”

“I don’t own a gun, Lester. You know I don’t like them.” Tomas glanced at Melanie. She bit her lip, and he wondered if she’d left the pistol in the Rover or if she’d hidden it inside her coat.

“Yeah, but let’s make sure. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Suit yourself,” Tomas answered.

The man frisked him roughly and then stepped back. “All right.” Lester glanced at Henriken, a stupid grin crossing his piggy face. “He’s fine. Can I check the girls?”

“Try it, and I’ll break your neck.” Tomas stepped forward, but someone pulled him back.

“Settle down, friend,” Mitchell Henriksen said. “We just can’t be too careful with those lunatics out there. You understand. Now have some food. Get warm.”

Tomas wanted to respond with something cutting, but bit his tongue. Melanie and Leila huddled close to him, and he took Christopher from Leila’s arms.

“Cute boy.” Morgan seemed to be leering.

Tomas squeezed his small son to him, profoundly uneasy over the whole situation.

***

Tomas found a place for Christopher to sit in a back booth with several other children around his age. Someone had placed an oil lantern in the middle of the table, and one of the mothers had brought a stack of coloring books and crayons. Many of the coloring books had apparently been taken from one of the churches nearby as they depicted images of Jesus, Noah and the Ark, and other Bible story characters.

Tomas didn’t like having his son away from his side, but being among the other children seemed to have relaxed Christopher a little. Leila and Melanie found seats near the fireplace, where Leila alternately swirled a glass of red wine and cut Tomas with her buzzed gaze. Melanie watched everyone else. She apparently shared Tomas’s misgivings over the lowly crowd and scanned the bedraggled faces, as if waiting for something to happen. She had refused to remove her coat, claiming she was still cold. That let Tomas know she had the gun inside that coat.

The place stank of cigarette smoke, shitty diapers, rank body odor, and burned food. The conversations were muted and tentative, and someone’s hushed weeping reminded Tomas of sounds that might echo through the dark corridors of an asylum. The only laughter came in small bursts from the children.

When he moved around the tavern to be closer to Christopher and Melanie—for access to that gun—he noticed several of the other men gravitating along with him, including the disheveled welcoming committee of Henriksen, Lunde, and Morgan. Tomas lingered along the edges of the crowd, uncomfortable, leery, and ready to move if he needed to, his listening keen on what the other kids were saying to Christopher. He didn’t need anyone telling the boy something that would upset him even further.

He scanned the room repeatedly. Something weird was going to go down, sooner rather than later. Father Vernon sat alone at a table, hunched over a glass of vodka filled to the brim, his face drawn with not only worry, but perhaps guilt, as well. He carried the guilt in the slump of his shoulders and the way he refused to meet Tomas’s gaze.

Tomas wove his way through the smoky crowd and slid into the empty seat opposite the craggy priest. “What the hell’s going on here?” he whispered, aware of the eyes still on him.

Father Vernon lifted his glass. “Drink?”

“No. Now tell me.”

The priest took a drink. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tom.”

“You won’t even look me in the eye. Morgan and his girlfriends haven’t taken their eyes off me since we got here. What’s going on?”

Father Vernon laughed bitterly. “Where’ve you been for the past week? The end of the world. That’s what’s going on.” He glanced around, then leaned closer to Tomas. “Sacrifice, Tom.”

“What are you talking about? Sacrifice?”

“They’re choosing bodies to go out as offerings to keep those things out of here.” He finished his drink and tipped the bottle to refresh it.

“Are we in danger here, Father? Is my child in danger?”

“We all are, aren’t we? They’re using warm bodies to distract the crazies when they need to go get supplies.” Father Vernon grimaced, the low flame of the candle creating monstrous shadows beneath his eyes. “They send someone out front, tied like a bit of bait, while Morgan, Lunde, and some others go out the back and raid the shops and homes for food, drink, and whatever else they can loot. We started running low on food a few days ago.”

“Why don’t you just move on, go somewhere else?”

“We considered it. But with a group this size, it would be a bloody massacre.”

Tomas nodded. “You’re right. I suppose it might. But what’s the difference? The weak are sacrificed, anyway.”

“Exactly. The weakest. They send out the ones they know aren’t in this for the long haul. The first to go was Eric Wikman’s son.”

Tomas took a moment to get a clear picture of Charlie Wikman in his mind—thirteen years old, his small limbs crooked with cerebral palsy. His stomach flip-flopped. That explained the abandoned wheelchair out on the street. “Are you serious? What happened to Eric?”

Father Vernon shrugged. “Don’t know. Gone, I suppose. Eric burst out there, snatched the boy from his wheelchair, and took off into the darkness. Those… things followed like a pack of mad dogs.” The old man wet his lips and reached across the table to grip Tomas’s arm. “They’ll send you out next. You’re a threat. They don’t want a voice of reason in here. Or a conscience. Survival is all that matters to them.”

“I thought reminding these people of their morals was your job.”

“I quit that job long before the Solstice came.” Father Vernon hung his head.

Tomas had had enough of the old man. “Looks like decency is more of a luxury than I realized.” He stood to leave.

“You have no idea, Tom,” Father Vernon said, and then his eyes widened. “Tom! Look out!”

The blow came from nowhere. Pain exploded in the side of Tomas’s head.

Chapter 15

London, England

The rest of the trek to Tana’s building was uneventful. The four of them hung in the shadows like the rats that had taken over the streets. Snow blustered, the flakes as light as feathers from a down pillow. Josh and Brett wanted to get too far ahead, and Stu couldn’t decide if they were careless or crazy. He tried to remember if he’d ever carried that mad sense of invincibility. He doubted it. At their age, he had been a bespectacled, undersized boy who hid behind a book and slinked in the shadows. Football players hit hard—he learned that in ninth grade. He was quickly learning that zombies, or whatever the hell they were, hit even harder.

Tana shuffled past Stu and onto the sidewalk. She headed to the front door of a six-story red brick building Stu assumed was hers. London in normal times was unfamiliar to him, but the streets, dark, deserted, and lifeless, formed a scene from a dystopian science fiction novel. As Tana fumbled with her key, Stu looked up at the sky, which seemed to have a million stars, but a conspicuously absent moon, then around at the eerie streets. Paper and trash gusted in the wind like deformed birds. A double-decker bus lay on its side atop what appeared to be a relatively new Fiat. The stink of gasoline filled the otherwise crisp air.

Tana finally managed to open the door. “Be careful. The stairs are narrow.”

Stu followed her inside, with Brett and Josh bringing up the rear, their flashlight beam, shorting out one moment and bright the next, bobbing like a tiny flare in the bleak lobby.

They started up the narrow stairway, their footsteps echoing too loudly in the gloomy silence, breaths amplified to sharp hisses. Then, another sound came—the slamming of a door. Stu stopped in his tracks, heart in his throat.

Tana squeezed Stu’s hand. “What the hell was that?”

Stu then heard the shrill laughter of a child, as thin as crystal, followed by the rapid footfalls of someone very small running along the hallway just one level above. The light thumps trailed away, ascending, along with the happy, manic giggling.

Tana and Brett trained their lights upward, searching the thick darkness for movement. There was nothing, and quickly the sounds had disappeared as well.

“Let’s keep moving, guys,” Tana said. “I’m on the fifth floor.”

“Boy, that’s a long way in this darkness,” Brett said. “Of course, I didn’t have any other plans.”

“Never did.” Josh laughed softly.

“Smart ass,” Brett answered.

“Shut up, the both of you.” Stu couldn’t see how they could think of goofing off when he was nearly too afraid to move and probably wouldn’t be moving at all if Tana wasn’t leading him by the hand. His forehead was perspiring, and he wondered if Tana felt his hand trembling in hers.

The stairwell smelled foul, like spoiled food or garbage that had been sitting too long. The thought of garbage led to visions of rats peering out of the shadows—big mutant rats with huge teeth and blood dripping from their wiry whiskers, like the ones in that Stephen King story. Stu shivered and listened for the sounds of their needle-sharp claws skittering across the floor.

He wondered if it was possible to die of fright because he was positive he would if a cold hand caressed the back of his neck. In the cloying darkness of the stairs, he felt exposed without a light or a weapon.

Tara squeezed his hand again. “We’re almost there. Two more flights.” Her breath touched his face like a kiss, and he was comforted yet again by her unyielding presence, as he’d been so often since the sun had set for the final time.

When Tana shined her light on the fifth-floor landing and then down the bleak hallway, Stu indeed saw rats, hordes of them racing away from the invading light and into ajar apartment doors. Had those homes been looted or had the inhabitants simply left, as Tana had, in a panic? Perhaps they were still in there, waiting, afraid. Or changed, gone as mad as the ones back in the car park.

“Which one?” Josh asked.

“Five-G,” Tana said. “Three doors down and on the left.”

They found her front door still locked and uncompromised. She fished her keys from her jeans pocket and gave Stu her flashlight. Once inside, Stu locked the door and then slid the chain into place, but he felt no safer. He wondered if Tana had any alcohol in her apartment. Maybe a drink would calm his anxiety.

Tana briefly vanished down a narrow corridor and then reappeared with another flashlight and a duffel bag. She passed the light to Stu. “Can you believe it? The batteries still work,” she said, flicking the switch on and off a couple of times. She passed the duffel bag to the two teenagers. “Pack some of Davis’s clothes and toys. His things are on the left side of that second bedroom down the hall.” Tana then touched Stu’s arm. “Come with me.”

Stu was thankful to have a light of his own again and pointed it toward the floor ahead of him, and then in the corners, looking for any wicked, silvery eyes reflecting the light back to him. More than anything else, rats were the things that really made his flesh crawl.

Tana’s bedroom was the larger of the two. In the adjacent bedroom, Brett and Josh babbled, then laughed heartily, and again he wondered how kids could so easily adjust to incredible situations. Were they just not worried? Or did they consider it just another fantastic adventure on the road to adulthood?

An adulthood that would likely never come…

Stu had talked to his students about the
situation
a couple of times, but how could he truly address something he didn’t understand? In the end, he had reasoned that allowing a crying shoulder, a place where they could pour their concerns and fears might help them cope. Stu coped with the aid of a bottle more often than not, but the kids didn’t have that crutch. They worried over their families, as he did, but unlike him, they also carried an overwhelming sense of faith.

He pretended his faith in front of Tana and the kids. What else could he do? They looked up to him for some reason. Support? Good news? Courage? If they could look inside him, they would find none of those things. They’d find fear and little else. Of course, being scared didn’t relieve him of his responsibilities to his students. And to Tana.