Brian Keene - Dead Sea

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me it was locked?”

She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. “You think we’re stupid? We’re the ones that locked it. Mr. Lahav had us lock all the doors. We just didn’t have a padlock for the front door, so we used the plank.”

The pounding grew louder, in time with my pulse rate. Over in the corner, behind a pile of boxes, something skittered in the shadows. I wondered if there were rats in the basement, and if so, if they were the dead kind.

I turned back to the lock. “You have a key for this one? If not, stand back and let me shoot it off.”

Smiling, she pulled it out of her pants pocket and held it up. She started for the storm doors, but I stopped her.

“Wait. There might be some of them in the alley by now. Let me go first.”

She stepped aside. My fingers were sweaty and it was hard to hold the key and the shotgun. Plus, my hands were shaking, which made turning the key even more difficult. When it clicked open, I breathed a sigh of relief. Slowly, I opened the storm doors and stuck my head out—shotgun barrel first. The coast was clear.

“Come on.”

I helped them up into the alley, and then shut the doors behind us. The kids put their wet washcloths over their faces and waited for me. After hunting around for a moment, I found an old skid and managed to tear a board loose from it. I wedged the board between the door handles.

“That should slow them down.”

Malik squeezed my hand. “What now?”

I checked both sides of the alley. The front led out into the main street, where the zombies had surrounded me earlier. The rear intersected with another alley running along behind a bail bondsman’s office. We went that way as carefully and quietly as possible. Behind us came a muffled thump. The zombies in the basement had discovered the storm doors.

“This way,” I whispered, hurrying the kids along.

We turned left, and then right, and then left again, working our way toward the waterfront, more out of need than any sense of direction. I wasn’t trying to reach the harbor. That was never my plan. We were just trying to stay ahead of both the fires and the zombies. Several times our progress was blocked by one or the other. I preferred the flames. Didn’t have to waste ammo on them. Whenever possible, we stuck to side streets and back alleys.

We’d made it a few more blocks before we were attacked again. We were behind a used sporting goods store and I was trying to get a bearing on the fires. The smoke was getting thicker again, making it hard to tell how close the flames actually were. Every time the wind shifted direction smoke billowed toward us.

Without a sound, a corpse lurched out from behind a Dumpster. The only reason we noticed it was because it accidentally kicked an empty forty-ounce while stalking toward us. Its face was concealed by a hockey mask. The zombie clutched a hockey stick in its hand but never tried to use it as a weapon. I think it held the stick more out of instinct than anything else. With its free hand, it reached for my head, trying to pull me toward its gaping mouth. I ducked, sidestepped, and swung with the shotgun. The stock crashed against its jaw. The corpse stumbled backward. Gripping the shotgun barrel in both fists, I clubbed the creature’s legs, breaking both of its kneecaps. As it collapsed, I smashed its head in. The zombie’s face imploded behind the hockey mask. Black sludge that must have been curdled blood squirted out of the mouth and eyeholes like wet clay. It lay on the pavement, twitching.

“Hit it again,” Malik cried. “Smack that son of a bitch.”

I did. I struck the zombie on the side of the head, and its mask flew off. Its face looked like a bowl of spoiled spaghetti. Black mold grew on its skin. I slammed the shotgun down again and the skull cracked. The zombie quit twitching and lay still. Bending over, I picked up the hockey stick and wiped the mud and gore off of the handle.

“Here.” I tossed the stick to Malik. “Think you can use this?”

“Hell yeah, I can.” He grinned like a kid who’d just unwrapped his Christmas presents. Then he swung the stick around in a circle, making a sound like a light saber.

“Knock it off, Malik,” Tasha said. “You’re gonna get blood on me.”

“No I ain’t. I know what I’m doing. Next zombie we see, I’m gonna crack it in the head just like Lamar did.”

“Now you’re talking,” I said. “Just don’t hit me or your sister with it”

“You should have given it to me,” Tasha said. “He’s too little to hit anything with it.”

Malik frowned. “Say’s you.”

“It’s not fair.”

“We’ll find something for you,” I promised Tasha. “Don’t worry.”

After I’d cleaned the gore off the shotgun butt so that I wouldn’t accidentally infect myself, we continued on. I wiped the sweat from my brow and wished for a cold beer or just some water. The hot summer temperatures combined with the heat from the fires had made it pretty much unbearable. Add to that the fact that we were running and then fighting and then running again—I was exhausted. Sweat dripped from the tip of my nose and soaked my already wet clothes.

We came across some other survivors as we neared Fells Point, an area of the city where mostly rich, white college kids from the suburbs went to drink on weekends. It was full of bars and music stores and vintage clothing shops-stuff like that. (They called it vintage clothing, and paid top dollar for the shit. Meanwhile, you could buy the same pair of pants at the Goodwill store for a dollar). Every night, you’d see Eminem wannabes stumbling around drunk, shouting to each other, groping their girlfriends or even strangers passing by, pissing in alleys and puking all over the brick sidewalks.

Now Fells Point was a battleground. We’d cut through a very narrow alley, the old kind with crumbling brick archways over it. We heard the gunshots and the screams but they were muffled by the buildings on each side of us. It wasn’t until we’d reached the end of the alley that we really saw what was happening. There was a riot going on in the central market area—human versus zombie and even human versus human. It was hard to keep track of anyone. Hard to focus. I held out my hand, motioning for the kids to stay behind me. Then I stared in disbelief.

The street was littered with body parts and un-moving corpses, and the gutters ran with blood. Gunfire echoed off the buildings and smoke filled the air. It was a nightmare. The stench, the screams, the chewing sounds. Even over the explosions, you could hear the zombies as they fed.

I saw a car that was upside down, its tires sticking up in the air like the legs of a dead animal. It must have just wrecked right before our arrival because there were people still inside it. They screamed as the zombies pulled them out through the shattered windows and ripped into them, tearing their flesh with teeth and hands. Another corpse staggered by a burning antiques store. Its arms were missing. Someone shot it from inside the store. The store’s display window shattered, and the zombie crumpled to the sidewalk. Then the store’s roof collapsed with a roar, sending fiery embers soaring into the night sky. Someone, probably the shooter, screamed inside the burning building.

In the street, a pack of undead dogs chased a woman and her baby. A zombie pit bull ripped the infant from the fleeing mother’s arms and tore it apart, shaking the screaming baby like a rag doll. A wayward bullet took down the mother a second later. At least I hope it was wayward. Maybe the shooter had been aiming for the dogs and hit her instead. Or maybe they were aiming for her after all; a mercy shot. There were a lot of zombie animals among the chaos. Mostly rats and dogs, but I also saw a few dead cats and what I think was an iguana. The dog zombies moved faster than their human counterparts, and I wondered why that was. Maybe it was because they had four legs instead of two, or maybe they hadn’t been dead long.