The Infected (Book 3): Nightfall Read online

  Women are so weird sometimes. Don’t they get how cool it is to build a sweet weapon with your own bare hands?

  Cliff shook his head as his lady walked down the hall. Then he took the largest drill bit that he owned and slid it into the end of his drill. He held the aluminum handles over a trash can. He centered the tip of the drill at the end of the handle and started to make a hole. The little slivers of aluminum fell into the can. His three children came running into the bedroom to investigate the sudden noise.

  “What are you doing Daddy?” Eve led the charge into the room and hit him with the first question.

  Cliff paused for a moment and looked up at his three girls. He had heard them playing in the other room and heard the comment she had made about him saving them and being like a prince.

  “I’m making a weapon only a Prince can use to save beautiful princesses.” He finished the sentence with a big bright smile and the little girls melted over his answer.

  “That’s so cool,” Eve said with a twinkle in her eyes.

  Cliff started again. The children got bored watching their dad and they raced back out of the room. It took him a little time to get through the metal and make a clean hole, but he finally got it. Cliff drilled another hole at the other end of the handle he was working on and did a matching set on the other half of his handle. With all four holes cleaned out he opened the circular saw package and carefully set the blade between the two handles. The teeth in the saw were so sharp that even moving slowly with it he almost nicked his skin open. He lined up the two halves of the handle with the hole in the blade and dropped a bolt through all three of them. Cliff used two crescent wrenches to tighten the nut onto the bolt. His powerful arms pulled against the handles of the wrenches until they couldn’t move anymore.

  His weapon was starting to come together now. He had the handle and the blade but the handle had hard edges that were very uncomfortable on his hands. He needed to soften up the grip on this thing and give himself something better to hold on to.

  About a year ago, Cliff saw a video online about wrapping Para cord around knife handles. It looked so badass that he wanted to do it himself. So he bought the cord, but never got around to buying the knife. Money was tight at the time and spending fifty bucks on a blade that would just sit in the closet was a hard sell for Tina. Cliff found the black cord in his sock drawer and went to work trying to remember the pattern he had seen on the video. It took a couple of tries but he finally figured it out. He pulled the cord tightly as he covered half of the aluminum handle in the black rope. Once he had it set he also looped a chunk of cord through the hole he drilled at the bottom of the handle to make a lanyard to keep the saw in his hands and not the skull of the infected. The last thing he needed to do was dip the handle in boiling water to shrink the wrap so that it was as solid as the rest of his new weapon.

  As the saw’s handle cooled in the kitchen sink Tina’s eyes widened as she took in his new zombie killin’ tool.

  “It’s better than I thought you were going to make,” she said with a surprised tone.

  “Thanks, I guess,” Cliff slid on his leather work gloves and lifted the metal weapon out to give it a test run. He looped his wrist through the lanyard and held his weapon out in front of his chest. Not only did it feel awesome in his hands but it looked medieval. Cliff swung it around in the living room of his apartment and the thing felt deadly. It was heavy-duty enough to hit like a bat and break bones, but it was also sharp enough to cut that bone in half. Cliff hoped he would never have to use it, but he was also absolutely sure that he was going to be forced to use it in the near future.

  “What’s that you got there?” Morgan wheeled herself away from the TV to get a better look at the hunk of metal in Cliff’s hands.

  “I made it out of some old junk I had in the closet.” Cliff pulled at the blade to make sure it didn’t move. It looked like a heavy metal lollipop. No matter how you swung it the weapon was deadly.

  The three little ones raced down the hall to witness their father’s version of Excalibur.

  “Whoa, wicked!” Eve poured praise on her Daddy’s genius.

  “Is it sharp?” Alex reached to touch it.

  Cliff raised it higher out of their reach, “Yes it’s very sharp, so don’t touch it.”

  Brea backed away from her Daddy with fear, “I no touch it! Don’t kill me Daddy!”

  “I would never kill you baby, don’t worry. It’s only to kill the bad people outside.” Cliff looked over the saw and pride in its construction gleamed on his face.

  “Boys and their toys,” Morgan said as she wheeled herself back in front of the TV.

  “Boys and their toys,” Tina agreed.

  Cliff needed a place to store the weapon that would have easy access but keep it out of the hands of his children. He reentered his bedroom and found a package of coat hooks they had purchased from IKEA but never installed. Cliff tore open the package and mounted the hooks in the hallway next to the front door.

  He sunk the last screw into place and tested the hooks. They were secure. He raised his new saw up eye level and laid it across the hooks. It fit perfectly. The light gleamed off the blade and aluminum handle. The weapon was a work of art. It was a pity that someday it would have chunks of infected brains and skulls stuck in its teeth.

  A gun was fired in the lot outside.

  Maybe Jim was back?

  Tina joined Cliff on the sprint back to their bedroom. Another shot was fired. Cliff opened the blinds just enough for them to see what was happening.

  A man they recognized was standing at the bottom of the stairs in front of the building across the lot from Cliff and Tina. They had seen him every summer at the pool with his four children. The kids were close in age with Cliff and Tina’s youngest girls and they always played well together. The guy had a small caliber revolver in his hands and just gunned down another infected.

  “Come on!” he yelled up the stairs. His young wife and four children marched down the stairs behind him and the five of them headed straight for their SUV.

  “Keep running! Come on kids get in!” The wife tried her best to keep the children out in front of her and moving fast. The gunfire and shouting alerted a fresh horde of the infected to this family’s escape attempt.

  The man emptied his gun into a monster that was sprinting towards him. The woman just finished getting the last child up into the tall vehicle.

  “Let’s go!” She called after her husband.

  The horde was closing in fast and hot on his heels as he stepped up quickly into the driver’s side. He slammed the door shut and a set of monsters crashed into the door. The beasts pounded at the window as he struggled to get the key into the ignition. Finally the engine roared alive and the wheels began to peel out of the lot. A zombie smashed in the driver’s side window and clawed at the man. Cliff and Tina lost sight of the action as the SUV passed by the garbage and recycling center in the middle of the lot. The SUV swerved suddenly as it passed the garbage bin that blocked their view. The SUV was now heading straight for a parked car. Half of the zombie’s body was up inside the window of the vehicle. The man had his foot to the floor and was screaming along at thirty miles an hour. They hit the parked car so hard that it pushed it from one parking spot all the way over to another. The airbags blew, the bodies inside the SUV hadn’t buckled in and they crashed around the interior.

  “We have to do something! We have to help them! Right?” Tina pulled at Cliff’s sleeve. Cliff wanted to, but there were so many infected outside it seemed impossible to survive the rescue.

  “We can’t!” The words felt rotten in his mouth.

  The muffled sound of the family’s cries could be heard even from Tina and Cliff’s bedroom.

  The horde shuffled over to the scene of the accident. Thirty seconds after the crash the SUV was surrounded. They punched and head-butted at all of the windows.

  “We can’t just sit here and watch them die, Cliff!” Tina’s panicked vo
ice cranked up her accent and the words zipped out much faster than normal. “Get the guns and the saw! We have to try!” Tina stepped away from the window and bolted towards the front door. She got five steps away when she noticed that Cliff hadn’t moved. “Come on!”

  “We can’t!” Cliff kept watching even though he didn’t want to.

  “Why not!” Tears had begun to form at the thought of something horrible happening to those young children.

  “What if we get bit? Who would take care of the girls? I want to save them too, but we can’t risk it!” Cliff was full of rage. He hated that he couldn’t save them, but being a father meant doing things that you hated to keep your girls safe.

  Tina didn’t want to admit that he was right. Her hands twitched and her mind raced. She became extremely anxious and was trying to think up some way to run down there and save them. She was on the verge of a full blown meltdown. “I can’t just sit here and do nothing!” She took another step toward the front door.

  Cliff closed the blinds after the sound of broken glass echoed through the parking lot. “It’s too late!” he said as he stepped away from the window.

  Tina plummeted to floor. The tears came and her shoulders shook as she sobbed. Cliff joined her. He draped his arms around her and embraced her as the two of them cried.

  Shrieks spilled out of the busted windows. The cries of someone being gutted cursed the air around the apartment. The young mother called and begged for someone to help her.

  No one came.

  Tina pressed her fingers against her ears to stifle this fresh nightmare.

  CHAPTER 7

  Leon dried his face with an old towel. The kitchen felt dark and cavernous with the main window all blocked up. He twisted a corner of the towel and used it to get it in the nooks and crannies of his ears.

  That kid’s blood got everywhere.

  Leon felt emotionally drained. Killing that infected boy was harder on his troubled mind than he thought it would be. He had plowed over that horde with the police Charger and that was no big deal. He put the axe into a few of them too, but that was to save his and Karen’s life. Splitting the kid’s face down the middle with the circular saw was so…. personal. He was having a hard time shaking the way it sounded and felt when the teeth of the blade ripped out of the top of its skull. Leon dabbled in crime, stolen cars, commandeering white and brown goods but stealing electronics and home appliances was easy and fun. Sometimes you get pinched and you do a little time, no problem, but he had never committed a violent crime before. He had daydreamed about committing murder, sure.

  Who hasn’t?

  Your girlfriend is driving you nuts and you’re at your wits end. She’s going on and on about how great her new girlfriend is and that as a man you can never compare. So you think to yourself what if I dump her body in the woods somewhere? Mother Nature can take the bitch back!

  I bet I could have gotten away with it too. You pour a couple of drinks down her throat and have her sign a Dear John letter that you typed up on her behalf. Run down through the checklist, rubber gloves, plastic bags, shovel and a pocket full of cash so there are no records of your trip on your credit card account.

  You take a nice leisurely drive, followed by a healthy hike and your woman problems are in your rearview mirror. No more wisecracks from her about how her pussy must be like an impossible Rubik’s cube that you could never figure out.

  Oh god, I should have killed that woman!

  Leon laughed a little to himself in the kitchen. He loved it when the dark side of his thoughts took over and replayed that scenario. He never did it and never ever would have, but it was a fun thought. As his laughter died off, his thoughts turned to Karen. What was he going to do with her now that she was mad, disappointed or scared? He was not quite sure what that woman was feeling towards him. He never knew what any woman felt about him. He couldn’t get a solid read on his own mother for that matter. Yes, she raised him and cared for him, but did she love him? He couldn’t remember a time that she said it.

  Classic Leon, dragging your dead mother into your current woman problems. Every time he clashed with the opposite sex his mother would spring up.

  He ran the towel over his scalp to make sure he had removed all of the big chunks from his hair. The towel came back clean so he rinsed his hands off one more time and used the excess water to slick back his hair.

  Be cool, Leon. He told himself. He was safe and no longer in that jail cell. Even if Karen was mad at him she was much better company than Sergeant Poole. Her cold shoulder was nothing compared to walking the streets with those monsters on the loose.

  Karen hauled lumber out of the sewing room into Penny’s spare bedroom. She had not said a word to Leon since they left the blood soaked backyard across the street. The sound of the saw hitting the boy in the face played over and over in her mind. It sent a horrible shiver down her spine, like the unwanted touch from a stranger’s icy hand. Karen kept working and tried her best to shake it off. She was used to having an unspoken language with Jim. They had been together so long that they could pick up on what each other wanted and needed. She had forgotten that dealing with most men was like dealing with another child. They need direct instructions. They need to be told what to do and when to do it. You can’t assume that they know what you mean, because most of the time they have no fucking clue.

  Karen did not have the time to hold a grudge. She knew that she couldn’t give him the silent treatment all day. She asked him to take care of the infected boy and he did it with very little hesitation so she was grateful. Karen knew she couldn’t board up the rest of these windows by herself and she needed help from this stranger to keep her girls alive.

  Leon entered the spare bedroom with his head down like a sad puppy dog. He had cleaned most of the blood off of his body, but Karen could still smell the stench of death on him. Then it hit her, was she mad at Leon for killing that infected boy so horribly or was she afraid of a man who’s first thought was to drive four inches of spinning steal into a child’s face? At this point in the game it didn’t matter and she had to bury the hatchet quickly if she wanted to keep her girls safe.

  “Leon?” she called to him softly. His head raised a little. “Thank you for stepping up and taking care of that…infected…boy.” Karen moved closer to him. “I really appreciate how much you have helped the girls and I today. We’d be dead right now if it wasn’t for you. So, thank you.” She forced a very believable smile onto her face. Her good hand reached out and gently touched his forearm. Leon registered her sincerity and smiled his big bright smile back at her.

  “You’re welcome,” he said softly and just like that he was back in. Leon would walk to the ends of this god-forsaken earth for a woman that talked nice to him and made him feel special.

  “You ready to get back to work?”

  “Yeah.” Leon grabbed a chunk of lumber and the drill. He was ready to get this place locked down.

  They finished barricading the bedroom window quickly. All of the windows facing the street were now covered. They also secured the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. It was too big for a single sheet of plywood so they used seven of the twelve-foot long two by sixes. They bolted them up horizontally with a five inch gap between each of the lengths of lumber. At that point they felt dizzy and exhausted. It had been too many hours since either of them had eaten and they were burning calories like crazy today.

  “We need a break.” Karen’s voice was lethargic. Only Penny’s bedroom windows and the ones in the living room remained. Thankfully they faced into the backyard and there was a fence around the property. On the other side of the fence was a thick lush forest. Evergreen trees stretched out of the earth and towered forty-feet in the air over Penny’s home. It might have been a false feeling of safety but the woods behind the house somehow made it feel protected. As if the evergreens themselves wouldn’t allow the evil to pass.

  “I need food. I’ve only had jail food for the last week. Th
ree meals a day of near spoiled milk and dry bologna and cheese sandwiches.” Leon stuck out his tongue in disgust.

  “Girls, are you hungry?” Karen already knew the answer.

  “Yes, Mama. I’m hungry.” Valerie called from the living room.

  “Me hungry too,” Robin could not be left out.

  Of course they were hungry. The girls were always hungry and Troy needed some food too. No rest for a mom though. Who else was going to fix a meal for everyone?

  “Let’s see what we have got here,” Leon led the charge into the kitchen. He nosed around in the refrigerator and the cupboards. Penny loved to stockpile food so there were plenty of choices. The dream of making a big fancy feast was appealing, but they still had a lot of work to do so Leon knew he needed to keep it fast and easy. He pulled a loaf of bread, a couple of jars and some cans out of the pantry and set them on the counter next to the range. He quickly found all of the dishes and utensils he would need to make diner and got to work.

  Karen’s thoughts had wandered off and she was thinking about Jim. Hoping he was safe and on his way home. She remembered her phone in her pocket. She hadn’t checked it in over an hour. She dug the device out of her pocket and swiped it on. To her delight there was a message from Jim. She clicked play and held it to her ear. Jim’s voice was strained. The recording sounded like it was done in a bathroom or closet. He talked rapid fire. He said he loved the girls and that he was almost home. He begged her to be safe and reaffirmed how much he loved her. It lifted her spirits to hear his voice. Jim leaving for work that morning felt like a lifetime ago. He said he was close to being home and that was over an hour ago.

  Maybe he made it home and saw the note I left on the counter.

  Maybe he’s on his way here right now!

  These happy thoughts filled her aching heart with joy. She pressed Jim’s name on the screen of her phone and held it up to her ear.