The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) (5 page)

“He went in it?” Ron asked. Despite his rescuer’s guarantees that the condo tower was zombie-free, he kept stopping to listen for the approach of footsteps, or of the chilling moans that marked the shamblers. Peering over his shoulder into the darkness, he paused
,
only a little as he followed the fit, younger leader.

“No. But he talked to the guy. A real gun nut was how Jake described him. He saw the movers hauling gun cases and at least two gun vaults up here. He just couldn’t remember which unit. We’ll have to try them all until we find it.” They were at the landing and Ted pushed the door open. Light flooded into the stairwell. Both men squinted into the brightness.

“What if he’s home? A guy like that would be likely to shoot first and talk later.”

“Actually, Jake said the guy never finished moving in. He wasn’t here as late as last week. Just his stuff. Jake told me the guy was just stopping by about once a week to organize his new digs. I think he was out of town until…well, shit. It doesn’t matter, now, does it? I don’t think the guy’s ever coming home.

“And even if he did, from what I know about guys who are into guns like that, he’d be careful before he pulled the trigger. More than anything else, those guys are about safety. I don’t think he’d shoot us. Anyway, I intend to knock first, and he’d have to realize that I have a key.”

“I guess you’re right,” Ron said, stopping to massage his knee. He looked up to see that Ted was looking at him.

“You going to be okay? Your knee giving you trouble?”

Cutter nodded. “I’ll be all right. It hasn’t completely healed. I was still in therapy.” He laughed, thinking of missed appointments. “Fuck it. Let’s just find the guy’s place and see if there really are any of the guns your pal was talking about.”

**

As they say in the funny papers, the third try was the charm.

Siskey had knocked on the door of Unit 412 for a good two minutes before he inserted the master key. Ron hadn’t liked that they were making so much noise, but neither did he want to get shot by an irate homeowner. So they’d rapped on the very solid door and called out, leaning into the door to speak to anyone who might be inside, holed up for the duration.

“I’m going to unlock the door,” Siskey yelled to the wooden barrier, informing anyone on the other side that he was going to do just that. He inserted his master key and disengaged the lock. More light flooded into the hallway as he opened the door.

“I’ll be damned,” Ron said. Ted just stood there, staring at the room.

Inside, the place was furnished in an almost
minimalist
manner. There was a bland couch that was obviously also a convertible bed, colored in what Ron had often heard described as ‘corn’, a kind of pale yellow. A small coffee table sat in front of it and a flat screen TV
was
mounted on a wall some six feet beyond that table. To the left of
that
room was an alcove that contained a small kitchen and dining area, with a door leading back to another space that was likely a single bedroom with a bath.

However,
the living area
was what
held their attention. Four maple wood gun cases stood against one wall and each was full of rifles and shotguns. Just a quick inventory revealed to the pair that they were looking at twenty-eight firearms. Drawers at the base of each case soon gave up more content: half a dozen pistols, ranging from a compact .38 to a 9mm Glock to a .357 Smith & Wesson police issue revolver. Some small .22 caliber pistols glittered where lightly oiled rags failed to cover them. Each gun case held no fewer than 100 rounds of ammunition for every gun present.

Going to one of the cases, Ron was happy to discover that like the others it was unlocked. He opened it slowly and put his hands on one of the rifles. “Do you care if I take this one?” He thought it best to ask Siskey before he acted. He didn’t want any conflict to arise over some small slight.

“No. There are only two of us and…” Ted counted silently. “Over two dozen rifles and shotguns. Anyway, I didn’t come up here for a rifle. I want a pistol and I see what I need.” He knelt and retrieved the .357 from the space that had been custom built for it in the case. Opening a
drawer,
he found a box of shells and loaded the weapon. All the while, Ron was hefting the 22.220, getting the feel of it, smelling the good scent of gun oil and feeling the polished wood of the stock. This was pretty much like his favorite gun back home. With this, he could shoot his way to his old neighborhood and rescue his family, if he
was able
. Or he could blast his way to freedom and leave
Charlotte
,
North Carolina
,
far behind and take refuge in the hills to the west. With that gun, he could do just about anything.

“Ron.” He heard Ted’s voice and it startled him from his daydreaming. He turned to face the young man who had pulled him out of such a bad situation.

“What is it?” He looked at the tall, athletic fellow standing before him. For the first time
,
Ron took a really good look at him and saw the dirty jeans he was wearing, the scuffed Air
Jordan’s
, and the white shirt that covered his body, much like Ron’s own shirt. And that was when he noticed the tracery of fresh blood on Siskey’s left wrist.

“I
was bitten
,” he told Ron. He waved his free hand, the bloodied one. “Nah, it wasn’t when I was pulling you in. Don’t feel guilty. I was trying to save my pal, Jake. He didn’t make it, but he did give me the master keys. I just wasn’t careful and one of them took a bite out of my arm.” A drop of blood came free of his wrist and fell to Mr. Edmundsen’s new carpet.

“Damn,” Siskey said. “If Edmundsen comes back, tell him I’m sorry about the carpet stain.” He smiled.

“What are you going to do, Ted?”

“You know what I’m going to do. You know what happens when you
are
bitten
. They told us that much
and
I’ve seen it happen. You get so sick you want someone to put you out of your misery.
Then
you die, and then you come back like those fucking geeks staggering around waiting to bite someone else.

“Fuck that. It ain’t happening. Not to Ted Siskey.”

“We can treat…we can put some disinfectant on the bite,” Ron said. “You don’t have to kill yourself.”

“Look. I’m not going to argue with you. I’ve seen it. My mom and dad, my girlfriend
,
”
he
sobbed. “It doesn’t matter what you do. Alcohol, penicillin, ampicillin, Bactraban; I’ve seen people try it all.” His eyes met Cutter’s gaze. “I am going to ask you for a favor, though.”

“What’s that?” Ron asked.

“Just be my second, so to speak. If I fuck up and don’t kill myself with the first shot…finish it. Okay?”

“Fuck.” Ron stared at the floor.

“Okay?!”

Ron looked up, into Ted’s face. “Yeah. I’ll do it.”

Before
Cutter could say or do anything more, Siskey shoved the barrel of the gun into his mouth, aimed it at a high angle, and pulled the trigger. The sound was hideously loud in the confines of the apartment; blood and brains showered the couch and coffee table behind him as Siskey’s body slumped to the floor, sitting solidly on his ass before tumbling like a sack of wet sand to the carpet.

Ron did not have to administer another bullet.

Now
, eighteen months later…

**

Since that moment, Ron Cutter had been pushing on.
He had
spent all of that month, and almost every month since then running and hiding. Sometimes he wondered how
he had
made it. The simple thing was that he had. Cutter survived and was now one of the lucky
and
mean few thousand who still lived in the streets of
Charlotte
. One of his Jewish pals had told him some years ago that the way
many
of the survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps had made it through those hellholes was by being the meanest, cruelest sons of bitches around. Maybe that was so, Ron figured. Maybe that was so.

From his perch on the top
floor,
Cutter had a good view of the streets below and the land exposed for several blocks to the south. His own outline was obscured by a jumble of material in the form of rolls of tarpaper, cans of roofing pitch, and a collection of tools that would never be used to patch the leaky roof over which he now marched. The men who had transported all of that stuff to the rooftop in preparation for the backbreaking toil
, they would
never have to complete were probably all dead, like so many others. Just like millions of others, he mused.
Here in the
United States
alone there were hundreds
of millions of others
, and
then there were
the billions who were now dead all over the Earth.

Well, not quite dead in the traditional sense. The dead now got up after a little while and shambled around, dead but not willing to lie down and take it. These days the dead stood on their uncertain feet after an hour or so, and then they got down to the mindless business of seeking out the living. For some reason the only thing that got them interested in much of anything was the prospect of tearing the living to pieces and having them for a meal. Even after almost two years of having to deal with that fact, Cutter still pondered it on a daily basis.

Cutter put his telescope to his good left eye and surveyed the streets. He was legally blind in his right eye—the result of a boyhood illness, and he preferred a single optic telescope to a pair of binoculars. Nothing moved down there except for bits of trash that were blowing in the wind, and a few of the reanimated dead folk who were in such bad shape that they could barely inch along. Two figures in particular had been stranded between the burnt out wreckage of a pair of big Mack trucks at the intersection of
Maryland Street
and
Pack Avenue
. They were fresh kills, but he hadn’t heard anyone screaming in the past week, so he wasn’t sure who they could have been or where they could have come from. Maybe
they had
drifted into
Charlotte
from the countryside thinking that after a year since the
catastrophe
they would
be able to find help in the big city.

No effing chance
, he thought, squinting into the scope and focusing until he could make out the pathetic wreckage of flesh and bone that was trying to move. One had been a man and there was nothing at all left of him below the waist. One arm was completely missing and the other was just a stump below the elbow.
During the attack that had killed him, his
guts had been carried off and eaten. Cutter doubted if the guy weighed more than thirty pounds at this point.
Cutter felt fairly certain that his
companion was a woman. There wasn’t a lot more of her left than of her companion, although she still had both arms and one leg. Neither of them had figured out how to crab their ways free of the mass of burnt metal that had been enormous trucks just a few months before.
He had
stood on that very same roof and watched them burn, he recalled.

These days, the only excitement around
was
what you made for yourself. Like when you went to find something to eat.
If you didn’t watch every damned thing you did, that
was always good for a lung-busting good time
, and
God help you if you weren’t careful. Because there sure wasn’t much in the way of kindness and charity left in the world.

It was kill or be killed.

And every man for himself
.

Don’t forget that one.

And it was time for Ron Cutter to go on patrol.

**

He had
been spending more and more time in his house on the roof of the
Caine
Building
. The place had once housed various offices of lesser attorneys
,
realtors
,
at least two bail bondsmen and some guy who’d run a skip-trace outfit. Ron often thought of the place as The Circle Jerk Building. There had to have been a lot of inter-office
businesses
being run there with that combination of professions. In days when it had seemed relatively safe and he was bored,
he had
gone from office to office figuring out what each one was for and doing his utmost to secure the building. Zombies rarely ever got into it.
He figured that the smell must be from the
lingering stench of the folk
who had
worked there.

Ron had safe houses and panic rooms set up all over a roughly ten-block area. When all was said and done,
and
he had
finally made his way to his old house and realized that his wife and daughter were likely gone forever,
he had
retreated to the familiar streets where
he had
worked. From time to
time,
he had
considered moving out, away from the rotting urban remains of
Charlotte
, but when he had ventured out into the countryside
,
he had
discovered that it was at least as infested with the roving dead as the city. And there were fewer places of refuge to be had in the boonies than in the city. Whenever
he had
spoken to survivors straggling into the city limits
,
he had
pretty much gathered the same from them: