DEAD: Snapshot (Book 3): Liberty, South Carolina Page 9

  “Mom,” Jonathan cried.

  The slap of a hand on his window made him jump and he spun back around in his seat, banging his fractured wrist in the center console of the police car. His vision swam as the pain returned with a renewed vengeance. Once it cleared, he could see the undead face of a man staring in at him. It brought a hand up and slapped at his window again in a futile attempt to get at the living being on the other side of the glass.

  Torn between the grief of his mother’s death and the anger at the undead creatures outside the police car that had caused this accident, Jonathan let loose with a howl of frustration. He reached down with his good hand to open his door and felt something grip his shoulder.

  “Stay put, son,” an authoritative voice spoke from behind him.

  A piece of his brain reminded him that he was in the police chief’s car, but he was currently incapable of rational thought. His mother was dead just a few feet away. Her last thoughts of her son had been that he was something terrible…a murderer. Tears began to well and drip from his eyes, mixing with the blood that ran freely from his busted open forehead.

  The sound of a car door opening drifted into his jumbled thoughts. He turned to see the chief force his way out of the car. It looked like he tried to shut the door behind him, but was unable to do so. Jonathan could only watch as the man worked his way around the front of the car where a hint of steam now drifted up from the edges of the crumpled hood. He had a machete in his hand.

  “Where did he get that?” Jonathan mumbled, unaware that his voice was a bit slurred.

  He continued to watch as the chief jerked the zombie away from the passenger side and shoved it to the dirt. The angle of the car prevented him from seeing the zombie on the ground, but he was able to see the chief bring the machete up and then chop down hard. He jerked the weapon free and then moved down the vehicle. Glancing in the rearview mirror, Jonathan was able to make out a twisted and broken figure in the middle of the road several feet behind them. The chief walked to it with an odd calmness. The man stopped and seemed to study the twitching figure on the road for several seconds before raising the machete and binging it down once more, burying the heavy blade in the skull of the zombie.

  Once again, the chief appeared to pause and study the corpse for a minute until he planted a boot on it and jerked his blade free. The man came back to the car and worked to pry the passenger side door open.

  “Can you walk?”

  Jonathan gave a weak nod and allowed the chief to help him climb out of the car. He started to turn and felt firm hands grip his shoulders.

  “It’s best you not look.”

  “But it’s my mom,” Jonathan insisted.

  “I am so sorry,” the chief apologized. “There is nothing you can do for her and we need to get moving before more of those things show up. Your car is just back the road a piece. If you give me the keys, I’ll get us out of here.”

  “My mom has them,” Jonathan managed around a throat that was growing tighter with each passing second.

  The chief returned to the car and Jonathan stood there in the middle of the road. This wasn’t anything like the video games or movies. He’d nearly died in a car crash. His mother had died and was now just a few feet away and they were going to leave her behind. A thought occurred to him.

  “Why can’t you call somebody on your radio?” Jonathan asked.

  “You broke it with your left hand, and the antennae is lodged in the throat of that zombie we hit. And before you ask about phones, cell service is basically shot from what I have been able to see,” the chief explained.

  Zombie. Jonathan actually felt his eyes grow wide at the sound of that word. The police chief had used it like it was no big deal.

  “You know what they are?” Jonathan asked meekly.

  “I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, and I don’t much enjoy watching those types of movies, but I haven’t lived under a rock my whole life. I can’t figure what else you would call ‘em.”

  Jonathan felt a surge of relief. Then he felt nauseous. Then…he passed out.

  ***

  Stephen had just started back for the school when a terrible thought gripped him. Terri was supposed to head to the school and help with notifying the town.

  “Please don’t be there…please don’t be there,” he chanted as he took off at a sprint back towards the elementary school.

  He reached the back side of the church and paused. The fire truck and the red pickup were still as he’d last seen them. His police car was also right where he’d left it. There was no movement coming from the building. Deciding that noise was now second to survival, he cleared the safety on his shotgun and jacked a round into the chamber.

  He was just across Hillcrest and jogging up the gentle hill between the road and the drop-off lane when he heard another scream. It was shrill and impossible to tell if it belonged to a man or woman. He fought the urge to charge in blindly; knowing that to do so might end up with his running into something he was not ready to handle. That would punch his ticket in a hurry.

  “You can’t be squeamish about this one, Stephen,” he told himself as he approached the covered walkway that led to the entrance of the main entry hallway.

  The door was still open and he paused just inside and listened carefully. A low moan could be heard to his left and up the first hall on the right. He hugged the wall opposite the hall he could hear noise coming from and moved slow, leaning forward enough to try and get a look. At last, he reached a point where he could see.

  On the floor was one of the firemen. He’d taken off his jacket for some reason, and it was tossed to the side against the wall next to a pushcart with a large, plastic trashcan on it. There was a broom on the floor just a bit beyond the cart. Kneeling beside a woman in a skirt was a man in dark gray coveralls.

  “Keeshawn,” Stephen whispered, instantly recognizing the janitor.

  Keeshawn Moore was a forty-seven-year-old African American man who’d been a janitor at the elementary school for over twenty years. He’d been born with severe autism. The one place he felt safe and comfortable had been the elementary school. He was often the first person to arrive and stayed until the last staff member left for the day. During the summer, a few of the teachers rotated and took turns coming to the campus and unlocking the door so that Keeshawn could sweep floors and wash windows whether they needed it or not.

  As if he heard his name, the figure crouched on the floor raised its head and twitched around a few times until it found Stephen. Opening his mouth to moan, a piece of something fell out and landed on the linoleum floor with a splat.

  As Stephen started down the hall, the body of the fireman began to twitch. Knowing that the sound would be thunderous in this long, empty hallway, Stephen considered trying to just crush the man’s head, but when the body of the teacher on the floor began to twitch as well, he dismissed that idea and brought the shotgun to his shoulder.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered as he pulled the trigger.

  The top part of Keeshawn Moore’s head almost vaporized as the shotgun shell slammed into him at close range. A dark and chunky spray painted the wall behind the zombie as it staggered back and slid down with legs splayed out in front of the corpse with the body somehow coming to rest in a sitting position.

  Stephen didn’t have time to dwell on such things as he turned to the fireman. He winced as he saw yet another familiar face. He quickly banished the name from his mind and tried to force anonymity on the reanimated corpse with a big chunk ripped from the left side of the neck and a few large chunks torn savagely from the chest where the mangled Liberty Fire Department tee shirt now hung in tatters. The zombie staggered forward two steps and Stephen brought the shotgun up and fired into a face that was only a few inches from the barrel when he pulled the trigger.

  He jacked another round and kicked the feet out from under the female teacher. Standing over her, he blinked away the tears that threatened, and pulled the t
rigger again. The boom was deafening and a dark slurry of brain, bone, and teeth sprayed in an obscene halo on the floor around the little bit that remained of the woman’s head.

  At last, it was simply too much. Stephen dropped to his knees and vomited. He heaved again and again until there was nothing left in his stomach. When he finally felt that he was done, he wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt and headed for the exit.

  His ears were still ringing as he emerged from the front door of the school. A familiar car pulled up and he saw a look of concern on Terri’s face as she emerged, appraising him with eyes that knew him better than any other.

  “That bad in there?” she said as the two met and embraced.

  “Keeshawn.” That one word seemed to hang in the air and add a chill to the world.

  “Do I dare venture inside?” she finally asked.

  “We need to do this and stem the losses before we are too far gone.”

  “How can it be this bad?” she asked, her face buried in his chest.

  “People like that CDC woman telling everybody that what they are seeing is a lie. By the time somebody fesses up, I think it will be well past the point of no return.” Stephen paused and surveyed their surroundings. He wasn’t about to have one of those things creep up on him. “That Kentucky story was over a week ago, and Chief Gilstrap says that he heard something from one of his police buddies in Clemson. When he sent a reply asking for details, the email address came back as not existing and he hasn’t heard from the guy since. If my memory serves, I think there was a story in the news about five weeks ago about some city in China being wiped out by a terrible plague. Their government refused international aid or something. This could have been building for weeks. The funny thing is that we have gotten so used to pop-up sicknesses and conspiracy theory loonies that we could have heard a dozen stories telling us there was something going on and we just ignored it.”

  “That’s what I love about you, Stephen,” Terri said with a soft chuckle as she pulled away from her husband.

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “You are just such a ray of human sunshine.”

  His wife grabbed a pair of handguns from the front seat and handed him his favorite .38. That particular gun had been his first gun. It had been given to him by his daddy for his tenth birthday and just felt like it fit perfect in his hand.

  Armed and as ready as they could be, given the circumstances, the pair headed into the school to start notifying the citizens of Liberty about the big meeting. Less than ten seconds after they entered the building, the echo of a handgun being fired sent a handful of birds skyward from one of the many nearby trees.

  ***

  Jamie and Chief Gilstrap stood next to each other in the middle of the high school football field. The stadium bleachers were filled on both sides, people milled about on the track as well as the field itself.

  Two fire trucks were parked at either end and over two dozen men with rifles were perched on top of the press box as well as around the perimeter. Chief Gilstrap had been very selective in his choices and given specific instructions as to what to be on the lookout for. Jamie winced at how he had convinced these men of the danger they faced. Apparently Mr. Deese had managed to capture one of the zombies over by the elementary school. It had been little Timmy Darcy.

  According to the very brief recounting of the incident that the chief had given, five of the men he’d initially picked had walked away after he put two rounds in the young boy’s chest to illustrate his point. She had worked very hard making her mind wipe away the images of that scene that it tried so hard to construct and play.

  She looked out at all the people gathered. Some had apparently seen the report from Greenville, but others were absolutely oblivious to what was going on in the world around them. The four large screens, which had been set up by some very enthusiastic members of the high school A/V group, were about to provide a harsh introduction. Even more impressive were the files on the computer of poor Jonathan Patterson.

  The chief was eating a lot of self-recrimination about the death of that man’s mother. Sophie had been the one to go out and pick up Mildred Patterson’s body with a pair of newly deputized bodyguards. When she returned and took care of Jonathan’s injuries, he had spoken of some videos that he’d received from a kid over in Japan that he played video games with on occasion.

  She had watched them, but it was what was on the last video that might haunt her forever. Apparently Jonathan hadn’t seen it yet, because it had caused the man to gasp and then turn away. She had looked over and seen the man clearly trying to fight back tears; then she just as quickly looked away, not wanting to embarrass him by having her witness him cry.

  Unfortunately, that left her watching the video. The young boy on it was very clearly emaciated. His eyes were hollow and his lips were cracking to the point that red wisps of blood could be seen to leak from them when he spoke.

  He was in a small apartment, and after showing some footage of the massive and catastrophic destruction of what she guessed to be Tokyo, the camera returned to the front door. A jumble of flimsy furniture had been stacked against that door, but the zombies had managed to claw through and create a gaping hole large enough for the occasional face of one of the undead to fill as they worked relentlessly at the barricade to get at the one living person inside.

  In the final minutes, after a period where the camera had obviously been shut off to conserve its battery, the boy spoke one final time.

  “Jonathan-san, they will be inside soon. I hope you have shared what I sent you, but I will never know. I am afraid there is nobody left alive here. I have not heard a scream in over three days. Mine may be the last one.

  “I do not have time to send this. The power keeps going off and on, so I am hoping that somebody may find this and email it to you if power returns, otherwise this will be all for nothing. If they do not act soon, that will be impossible. The power has been off and on for the past two days. It just came back a short time ago, but I do not know if it will last. That is the only thing that gives me hope. Every time that it comes back on, that means to me that there must still be somebody out there trying to survive.

  “I have kept a written journal, but my last pen went dry this morning. I had just enough time to write a note that now hangs on my wall above my computer.” The image blurred, came to rest on a wrinkled piece of yellow legal paper with something scrawled on it in what must be Japanese, and then back to the boy’s face. He flashed a weak smile.

  A loud crash caused the boy to flinch and the camera jostled around to show that the door and barricade had finally given way to a horde of undead. The zombies pushed through, some trying to shove past or crawl over each other to get at the boy.

  The camera fell to the floor and ended up facing a wall. In some ways, Jamie thought that might have been merciful; however, it also allowed for the imagination to go into overdrive and create its own imagery.

  The sounds of whimpering and what, despite it being in another language, was obviously pleading and begging could be heard. There were moans and even some very peculiar sounds that were almost like that of a crying baby. Then came the first howl that turned into a scream of pain. From that point on, the screaming became worse and turned into something that could not be compared to anything that Jamie had ever heard in her life.

  The sounds of wet slurping and greedy chewing were present and became even louder as the scream mercifully ended in a wet, gurgling sob. Then a spray of blood painted a section of the wall that had been visible during this last terrible part of the recording in a runny slash. For several seconds, the tape showed the blood as it dripped and ran, accompanied by the nightmarish sounds of zombies feeding.

  Then, something apparently kicked the camera and it shut off. The next thing to happen was the surprise. A woman’s face came on and filled the screen. She spoke in Japanese and the only recognizable word was “Jonathan-san.” So far, nobody had been able to translate, b
ut apparently this person was the one who sent the last email with this file as well as the goodbye email that Jonathan had received.

  Jamie shook her head clear and once more turned her attention to the growing crowd. Despite Liberty’s small size, when you gathered pretty much every man, woman, and child in one place, it was fairly impressive.

  Chief Gilstrap gave her a nudge. “I think this is pretty much it. Go ahead, Mayor Burns.”

  Jamie stepped up to the microphone and tapped it experimentally. The sound boomed almost like thunder and she jumped back. After quickly composing herself, she stepped up once more.

  Faces were all turning her direction. It was as if she could feel the energy from every pair of eyes; it was boring into her soul, causing her heart to flutter and her stomach to twist into knots. She pushed back the sudden urge to pee and then forced a smile onto her face.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming,” she began. That sent a ripple through the crowd and then everybody hushed and now focused solely on her. “I don’t know any good or decent way to say this, so please forgive me. I am going to be very blunt. Here it goes.”

  Jamie paused and tried to put together the right string of words to convey what she believed the town of Liberty was facing. She needed to prepare them for what they would see on that video, and she needed to keep everybody calm.

  “For those of you who have already seen it on the news, there is something terrible happening. I will share the details with you in just a moment, but first, I wanted to let you know that this is worse than what we are being told on television.” That sent another ripple through the crowd. “This morning, I saw with my own eyes…things…things that have no logical explanation. So, before I continue, I want you to watch on one of the screens that we have put up. You need to know that this is not some sort of joke. It is not fake. This is very real. You may want to prepare yourself…and those with small children, now is the time where you may want to go over to the soccer field. A screen has been set up there along with sound so that my address to you all will be shown there after this particular bit of unpleasant business is dealt with. ”