Beyond Dead | Book 1 | The Cough Page 6

  “I got it.” Kat began steering the car toward the exit. The exit arched slightly to the right, enough so they could see the sunlight on the other side but not enough to see the produce van blocking the exit. “No.”

  In the rearview the dead were still following the noise of the car like the rats in the Pied Piper.

  “Get out!”

  “What?”

  “Sarah, get out of the car. I’ll get the bag, hold onto the baby and let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. We just need to go. NOW!”

  Kat thrust open her door and grabbed the

  gym bag hooking it over her shoulder and across her body. Sarah was doing what she was told. She had the baby. Kat ran over to her and they both began to run toward the sunlight. Everywhere she looked there was movement, the darkness crawling with it. Her mind didn’t have time to formulate a plan so she ran on instinct and simply ran until they came to the roadblock. Kat skidded and slumped under the produce truck and waited for Sarah. They were coming from every direction now. Kat paused. She shouldn’t have. They never should have stopped, even for that momentary pause.

  Why?

  That was the question in Sarah’s eyes when she stopped behind Kat. She fell face first to the pavement landing on her chin. It split instantly, and the raw open flesh of her chin began to drain of blood. Sarah never said a word. Never screamed. Time slowed in that moment. Kat only seeing Sarah’s eyes that would haunt her for years to come. Sarah released baby Bowen into the spear of the light beyond the tunnel and Kat instinctively swept him up, as Sarah was pulled away into the dark.

  18

  Dark had settled over the quarantine zone. The hobo walked with the dead. His smile was brighter than one that he had ever worn before. No longer was he a freak or an outcast, now he simply was among friends. Part of the larger society.

  Accepted.

  Family.

  He was just another monster among the flock.

  “Come, come, come,” he said to the following dead.

  Up ahead he had a fire stoked in a metal rubbish can. He had filled it with clothes and copy paper that he had pillaged from a few stores in a strip mall that he was putting his feet up at the moment. It wasn’t home. Nothing permanent even, just a place like so many others he had spent his life wandering through. Life had changed over the last few days and he knew, somehow, he just knew that out there amongst his new family was a home waiting to be found. Where it was or when he would get there, he had no idea and that was okay for him. It would all be revealed in time.

  For the time being he was among family and that was enough.

  “Come, come, stop struggling,” he said. The hobo was dragging a sheet made into a crude replica of Santa Claus’s Christmas sack. Inside his sack something was moving and moaning. He pulled the sack along the parking lot headed toward his camp with its fire still burning bright. The books and smashed cabinetry he had plundered had made good kindling. The can of gasoline helped a little.

  The hobo stopped. He turned, still holding the sack tightly in one hand, and glared down at the sack. The trashing became more violent and the sack was tugging at his grip. He wasn’t angry as much as unamused. Huffing, as though his time was being wasted, he reached back and kicked his boot as hard as he could into the sack. There was a loud oomph of something exhaling pain.

  “Now, now, now, I said stop struggling,” he scolded the sack, “I don’t like to repeat myself. I’ve taken the liberty of escorting you all this way and at the very least you could show a little respect for that.”

  The sack still moved but not as much. The hobo tightened his grip and continued to drag the sack over to his campfire. When he arrived, he reached for his scepter with its darkly stained human skull, still dirty with slugs of flesh that he had not gotten around to fully removing, it was tied on with twine and duct tape. The hobo knocked the scepter against the rubbish can three times as though getting ready to present a toast.

  He let go of the sheet and the sack opened. A young woman pulled herself deeper into a fetal position as though trying to disappear inside herself. Her face was smeared with tears and snot, her mouth stitched closed with the same twine used to secure the skull to the scepter. Her fingers were stitched together so her hands were embraced in a pleading prayer, while the twine laced in an out of her wrists joining her arms in a corset up her forearm. The feet must have proven more difficult of a task as there were holes and bits of twine sticking out of places around the toes, but the task looked abandoned and instead the feet were wrapped at the ankles in duct tape.

  As the sheet had fallen away from its prisoner the dead had lunged forward in cries echoed in their loud coughs and hacking, teeth clattering together as spittle fell from their mouths like rabid dogs. They were hungry and placed before them was a dish of living flesh. It was not the flesh the dead were salivating for. No, no, the hobo knew that well. Knew what it was that his family craved. There were too many of them of course and not enough of one living person to quench all their hunger, but that was for them to work out. After all he was not their father.

  “Back, back, back, not yet goddamn it,” he barked at them while holding out his hand to summon them off. They stood where they were an obeyed. The hobo drew his knife and ran the edge of the blade down his cheek bone and poked a dimple. Not enough to draw blood but enough to feel the skin stretch.

  “There isn’t much meat on this one.” His knife came down and poked – piercing the soft flesh and drawing a line of blood – into the woman’s thigh. He pushed the knife a good way in as she tried to cry out between her sewn lips. When he withdrew the knife, he licked the blood like a child licking chocolate off their mother’s baking spatula. “But I guess it will have to do,” he said. The crowd of dead were eagerly pushing at each other and growing wilder as the hobo had opened the scent of blood into the air.

  “Oh hush!” he called out to them, “Goddamn impatient zombies. You can have her brain when I’m done.”

  To be continued…

  March 11, 2014 to October 9, 2016