Dying Days Read online

  “This might be our last day,” Barry said from behind her. “There’s pretty much no chance of us getting out of here alive now. They’ve caught up with us. There might be a million of them out there.”

  “Keep quiet.” Darlene watched as the streets flooded with undead, and the stench of their rot wafted up to her. She fought the urge to gag on what little she’d eaten. “If we stay here for a few hours we might escape.” She didn’t want to think about the rest of the group. More than likely, by the sound of gunfire and the screams that now echoed outside, her former friends would soon become her enemies.

  “I’ve been putting together a bucket list in my head lately, all the things I want to do before I die.”

  Darlene shushed him to be quiet without looking at Barry. He was getting annoying now. Couldn’t he shut the fuck up before the sound brought them?

  “Guess what my top slot is?”

  Darlene brushed something off of her shoulder. At first she thought it was Barry’s hand or a bug, but when she turned her head she was staring straight at Barry’s engorged dick. “What the fuck?” she stammered.

  “Exactly. I want to fuck you before I die. I have since the moment I saw you.”

  “Barry, get the fuck away from me.” Darlene stood but Barry, standing in the buff and now stroking his cock, had blocked her into the corner next to the window.

  “You know you want this as much as I do.”

  “I’m going to count to three and then I’ll scream.”

  Barry laughed. “And give away our position to them? I don’t think so. Besides, we might as well have some fun in case they catch us. If they pass us by, so much the better.”

  “I’m warning you.”

  Barry was on her in a rush, hands wrapping around her and squeezing her ass fiercely. His tongue darted around her neck area and he was moaning.

  She tried with all of her might to push him off but he was too strong despite his smaller stature. His fingers dug into the back of her jeans and he was trying to rip them off of her.

  They slammed against the window, jarring the glass. Her jeans had come undone and Barry dragged them down her thighs.

  Darlene punched frantically at him but her blows were ineffective. Her vision blurred as she remembered the attack from the militia and how brutal they had been to her. At some point she’d started crying.

  “I knew you had thongs on,” Barry was whispering in her ear now, drool sliding from his lips and coating her cheek. “I am gonna tear that little ass of yours up.”

  He slid a finger under her undies and tried to bury the digit inside her.

  Barry was still smiling as Darlene jammed the Desert Eagle into his stomach and pulled the trigger. His eyes grew wide in shock but he didn’t let go. “I loved you,” he whispered before falling backwards.

  Darlene kicked his body in the ribs before shooting him in the face four times.

  She heard the pounding from below again and knew there was no escape. Resigned to that fact, she put her jeans back up as best she could and stared at the blocked door, the Desert Eagle ready to fire.

  Chapter Eleven

  Undead of Winter

  A weak ray of light woke her from a restless sleep. She immediately gripped the gun and scanned the room with it. Empty.

  “What the fuck happened?” Darlene whispered. The furniture was still pushed up against the door, although a chair had toppled at some point. Barry was still on the floor, blood and guts coagulating and reeking. A hundred flies had settled on the crimson mess of his remains.

  Slowly, she walked across the room and removed a chair. She placed an ear to the door but heard nothing. “Don’t open the door,” she muttered. In every horror movie she’d ever watched, the stupid bitch female had opens the door and gets decapitated with a machete or has her throat slit.

  Instead, she went to the window and looked to the street below. It was empty of living and dead. There was blood on everything, though, and she knew while she’d slept another war had been waged. She didn’t know who won.

  Darlene suddenly remembered the large group she’d been traveling with: two hundred strong, moving from Connecticut to here, near Baltimore. Yesterday – or earlier today? – they’d holed up in a library, but Darlene was assigned Death Squad duty to kill a sickly member of the group. In addition, she’d managed to kill Jonathan and, later, Barry. Barry deserved it, having tried to rape her while they hid. Jonathan had been a good kid. A young kid just trying to survive like everyone else.

  “Fuck it,” she whispered. For some reason, since the world had gone to Hell, she’d whispered her thoughts. Ironically, there was no one living to hear her words. Like now.

  Going back to the door, she slowly pulled the piled-up furniture away from in front of it and gripped the handle. She held the gun at the ready and turned the knob. Before pulling the door open, she got into a shooting stance, wiped sweat from her face with a dirty sleeve and tried in vain to relax her body. Far from ideal conditions to kill anything on the other side of the door, she really didn’t have a choice.

  Darlene tugged the door open and came within a fraction of a second of pulling the trigger at an empty hallway. “Fuck.” Instead of a pile of body parts or a horde of zombies waiting patiently to kill her, there was nothing. Gouges in the doorframe shocked her. She was amazed the door had held.

  She went to the end of the hallway, glancing into open doors and ignoring the closed ones – no sense in opening one and having it squeak and alert the undead – and went down the steps one at a time, as gingerly as possible.

  Out on the street, she sniffed the cool morning air. When the dead were close you could usually smell them coming for blocks. Now she smelled smoke and nothing else.

  The library, where the group was holed up, was two long blocks away. She figured she had three shots left in the Desert Eagle before she’d need to find ammo and knew how bad her odds were of doing it. Before the day ended, she’d need to find another weapon.

  “And clothes,” she whispered. She glanced down at the blood and dirt caked on her outfit. Her thong undies had been pulled and stretched in the fight with Barry and they rode uncomfortable in her ass crack. Her bra had been damaged, and under her shirt it kept slipping off her chest. She wished she had time to slip out of her undergarments or find new ones, but she wanted to feel safe first before getting naked. Stupid, she knew.

  It was eerily quiet. The major cities had long ago been abandoned by the living and it seemed like the zombies followed their prey into the suburbs and the woods. But the cities still held more than enough of the undead.

  She approached the caravan of vehicles they’d driven into town with the day before. None of them had been touched, which meant no fighting had occurred on the street in front of the library and there were no living scavengers in the immediate area; or maybe the undead were still teeming and no one was stupid enough to chance it.

  Darlene wiped the sweat from her eyes and tried unsuccessfully to adjust her bra. Her thong was definitely digging into her and she’d probably chafe between that and the grime and the sweat. She’d give anything for a decent shower and some shampoo and soap right now.

  Two dead bodies, sans heads, were wrapped together in a grotesque human sculpture on the steps of the library. The sun gleamed off the crimson coating they wore across their ravaged limbs and torsos. Darlene forced herself to look away.

  The front doors to the library had been ruptured, blood and body parts covering the entryway. Darlene hesitated before entering the dark interior. Without a flashlight she would be blind. “Fuck it.” She moved quickly and was glad to see the main area was well-lit by skylights. Unfortunately, it also allowed her to see the chaos and destruction that had ensued.

  Pieces of bodies lay everywhere, the bookshelves and chairs were coated in crimson. No one moved, and not one body she could see was intact. She thanked God for that. She didn’t know if she had the strength right now to fight a horde of undead in this closed sp
ace. A spiral staircase ran up on either side of the doors to a second tier, where more death covered the walls and books. She wanted to shout out for survivors but knew how stupid that would be. She doubted there were any.

  She stepped gingerly across the room, trying to keep her breathing even and ignoring shadows on the walls. The last thing she wanted to do was waste bullets on nothing and alert the undead that she was here.

  In the back of the library, down a narrow hall, Darlene came across a ransacked set of vending machines. Candy bars littered the ground and the soda machine had been jarred open. She grabbed three Snickers bars and ate them, then slowly opened the bathroom doors with her Desert Eagle leading the way. They were empty.

  After washing down her food with two diet Cokes, Darlene cleaned her face in the ladies’ room and intentionally didn’t look at her reflection in the cracked mirror. Back in the hallway, she filled her pockets with candy and drank another soda.

  The rear entrance to the library led into a parking lot that was now reduced to a riot of twisted metal cars and body parts. The fencing around the perimeter was intact but the gates had been ripped off and bent at odd angles, and a torched Honda Civic blocked the entrance.

  Before Darlene could think, she ducked back behind the doors. Something moved out there, past the fences and the cars, and she was sure it wasn’t alive.

  Tears came to her eyes again and she decided to not be a hero and not try to figure out this puzzle just yet. She needed rest, real food, and for her hands to stop shaking. She closed the door and made sure it locked.

  The front entrance wouldn’t be so simple to secure. Darlene doubted she could close the doors enough or had the strength to push the heavy library furniture over to block it.

  Back in the main room, nothing had been disturbed and nothing had entered while she was checking the rest of the building. She was thankful for that. One of the few military men left in the group, his head missing, was draped over a table. She went to him and pulled his M9 pistol from his dead fingers and found three detachable 15-round staggered box magazines – all full – in his pockets. She wondered why he still had so much ammo, but didn’t complain. She’d been expecting to find two or three shells in the gun and nothing more.

  Darlene was about to do a thorough search of the room when she heard something slam against one of the vehicles outside. She knew it was time to find a safe haven.

  Upstairs, past gore and the stench of death, a utility closet with an intact door was her best bet. She tried her best to jam a broom handle against the door knob and put her back to the farthest wall. A small window told her she had a long wait until night fall, but she didn’t care. She needed sleep and she needed to gather her strength. Who knew what tomorrow would bring?

  * * * * *

  A residential area netted Darlene quiet a catch: two apple trees, an orange tree and a working well with an old-fashioned hand pump. Despite the impending cold the fruit was still edible. It was a bit of a distance, but she’d been lucky enough to not run into too many of the undead in the two months she’d been living in the library.

  The front doors had been sealed, the windows boarded up, and the back parking lot’s gate mended enough to keep the undead out but still allow her to slip in and out. From the roof of the building, she could see all around her, and from there plan her next moves.

  The highway she’d come in from was teeming with zombies, and in all directions she could see roaming packs of them. Fires and occasional explosions surrounded her, but she’d not seen another living person in weeks.

  Settling into her hard wooden chair on the roof, she snuggled with two wool blankets and bit into an apple. The sun was dropping, and it was already cold. Baltimore didn’t get as cold as Maine, but it was still going to be a bitter winter. Eventually she’d have to start a fire to keep warm and hope it wouldn’t attract the undead or the living.

  “Where am I going and what am I doing?” she whispered, tossing the apple in her hand. She didn’t want to stay here through the winter, but now realized she should have done something about it weeks ago. It was just easier to stay where she was, in the relative safety of her library-fortress, and hope the world would go back to normal.

  Darlene had been running for so long she was growing restless. She missed her home and she missed her father. At the thought of him, once again seeing him as he was before she pulled the trigger of the Desert Eagle, she started to cry. She knew Maine held nothing for her anymore, yet she longed to be there. By now her home had been ransacked and destroyed, her hometown of Dexter in ruins and aflame like here, but she didn’t care. She needed to be somewhere, anywhere, but here. She knew how silly it sounded, and unrealistic.

  The wind kicked up and she decided to go back inside.

  * * * * *

  The first flurries arrived a week later, while Darlene was raiding a diner, fighting the cockroaches for scraps of food. She’d found cans of tomato paste as well as two industrial cans of coffee.

  It was while she was leaving through the hole that she’d entered through that she saw the movement across the street. She ducked down and peeked over the jagged edge, expecting to see a dozen zombies shambling towards her. Instead she saw a living, breathing person disappear into the darkness of the automotive store.

  Snow fell on her face and hands, steaming away as she moved quietly across the desolate street. A quick check in both directions for zombies and then she was at the door, staring into the gloom.

  She listened for any small noise to see where he’d gone but heard nothing. He was good, and that was probably why he was still alive. Eventually, her eyes adjusted and she was glad, because directly in front of her the floor had collapsed. She skirted to her left and followed around behind the counter, which had been picked clean.

  Very rarely did she find anything of value anymore. The few survivors usually grabbed anything not bolted down, and unbolted what they could as well. At one point the store had been on fire, and the acrid smell still lingered in the cold air.

  Darlene moved through the store with ease, noting the path she followed. It was well-worn and recent. This guy is smart. He has an escape route through this building, so he probably lives nearby.

  The door to the back room was ajar and Darlene peered inside. The walls had been blown out and opened to the sky. She could see the snow had increased in the few minutes she’d been inside. It was still too warm to stick, but it would be soon enough.

  Behind the store was a parking lot similar to the one at the library. The gates had been reinforced with car husks and a pile of office furniture, the surrounding buildings natural barriers.

  There was only one door still intact and that was to the movie theatre in front of her. She went to the door and tried it, but it was locked. She smiled. The undead didn’t try to turn knobs, yet she did the same thing and locked up behind her.

  The snow was falling and her fingers were getting numb. She needed to get back to the library soon. The sun would be going down soon and she didn’t want to cross town in the dark with so many undead still roaming.

  She decided to do something unique before she left. A search of the auto store produced a broken pencil and a sheet of charred paper in a desk. She wrote down her name and the address of the building across the street from the library and slid the note under the locked door.

  * * * * *

  Even at the end of the world there were chores to be done. Darlene, wrapped in layers of warm clothing, shoveled snow off the roof of the library.

  Without benefit of the news or the Weather Channel, the blizzard had struck without warning overnight, dumping almost a foot of snow on the ground. It was still snowing, but Darlene needed something to do and wanted to clear her lookout spot off on the roof.

  She was glad she did, because there was someone standing across the street watching her. And he was alive.

  Figuring the noise she was making tossing snow off the roof had given away her position, she waved.

/>   He waved back and moved across the street toward her.

  Darlene knew it was a male because of the way he walked. He stood just under her on the front steps, boots hidden in the snowdrift.

  “Hello up there.”

  Darlene smiled. “Hello down there.”

  “Wondering if I can borrow a cup of sugar?”

  Now she was laughing. “Sorry, I’m all out. Did you try the grocery store on the next corner?”

  “Yes, but, unfortunately, the owners were pretty mean. In fact, they tried to bite me.”

  “Customer service.” Darlene smacked her gloved hands together. “I’m Darlene.”

  “Pierce.”

  “Seriously? That’s not a real name.”

  He laughed and put his hand on his jacket over his heart. “I swear my parents named me that.”

  “I’ll need to see a driver’s license.” Despite the playful bantering, she was being cautious and only half-joking. She was also getting very cold up here on the roof.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He made a dramatic show of rifling through it before producing his license and holding it up. ‘See?”

  “Not from here.” Darlene hesitated. She’d been fooled before, like when she was passing through Connecticut and that militia group held her captive.

  She was lonely for some companionship, someone who she could have an intelligent conversation with. If she wanted to be brutally honest, she was sick of playing with herself and a real, live cock might be good for her, too. Darlene laughed out loud at the images that flooded her mind.

  “Is something funny up there?”

  Darlene put the shovel over her shoulder. “Can you climb?”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged. “Why?”

  “Because the only way in is getting over the fence in the parking lot, and then I’ll have to unlock the back door. Think you can handle that?”