Tower of the Dead: A Zombie Novel Read online

  There are three bodies. Two are adults. One is a kid…a little girl. She’s face down on the carpet. I can’t see what her wounds are. But they are there…somewhere beneath all the mess.

  “Don’t let it be her, don’t let it be my baby!” Tasia isn’t concerned with being delicate. She twists the girls’ head in her hands, brushing the hair aside, trying to get a look at the features beneath. After a few seconds, she lets the girl go and collapses against the wall on her butt, breathing heavy and shaking all over. “It’s not her, oh thank you Jesus, it’s not her.”

  I feel the same relief, but the fact remains that we still haven’t found her. “Come on, get up. We don’t got time to relax.”

  “I’m not relaxing, I just need a minute.”

  “We don’t have—”

  Something starts bumping around in the room at the end of the hall; it’s enough to bring Tasia back up to her feet. “Alisa, honey, is that you? You’re safe, baby.”

  I beat Tasia to the door, my hand on the knob, hatchet raised. “Alisa, we’re coming in.” I turn the handle and let go, swinging the door open with my foot, keeping my hands free to defend myself against whatever horror may be waiting to greet me.

  The room is empty except for a set of bloody footprints embedded in the carpet. They lead straight for a small closet on the other side of the bed. “Alisa, honey, it’s your dad.” The folding door is decorated with stickers: sparkling images of shooting stars and glowing planets. I approach slowly, careful to avoid the fresh line of footprints.

  I’m not feeling anything close to hope. It’s all darkness and dread.

  If my girl is on the other side of these doors then why hasn’t she called out to me?

  Nah, something more sinister awaits and I’m ready for it. After everything I’ve seen today, you bet your ass I’m ready for it.

  “Tasia, get the lights.”

  There’s the small plastic click of the switch flipping and the exposed bulb above my head flickers to life, bathing the small world around me in a sickly yellow.

  I steady my nerves, ready my weapon, and yank the door back.

  It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust, even with the assistance of the light behind me, the closet is still cloaked by shadows from the hanging clothes. But behind all of it I see an outline balled in the corner, moving…shaking. Despite the figure doing everything in its power to disappear into the shadows, the tip of a sneaker slips into the light; white with pink spots.

  Alisa’s sneaker.

  “Alisa, it’s me! It’s your dad! You’re safe!”

  “Oh, Alisa, baby!” Tasia starts charging in.

  I hold my arm up, stopping her.

  “You don’t have to be scared anymore.” I drop the hatchet and extend my hands. “Come on, it’s okay.”

  Alisa pulls further away from me. “I killed her,” her voice is flat, void of all emotion.

  “We all killed people today, sweetie. Your mom and me both killed people; we had to, to save you, to save ourselves.”

  “It was Rhonda,” her voice cracks as she says her friend’s name, “she wasn’t a person. She was something else.”

  “People are getting sick. And the sickness, whatever it is, it changes them; it makes them want to hurt people. You did what you had to.”

  Now she’s crying.

  I want to see her, to pull her from the shadows and comfort her. But I have to calm her down first. She’s been through enough trauma. This has to be on her time.

  “I came out of the kitchen and…she was…” the words get caught in her throat.

  “It’s okay; you don’t have to tell me.”

  “I’d gone to the kitchen because Rhonda said she wanted juice. Then I heard all this banging in the hall and I heard her parents and they were just screaming their heads off. So I thought Rhonda had gotten hurt or something. I ran around the corner and Rhonda was biting them on their stomachs and legs…but it didn’t look like Rhonda…her skin and her eyes—”

  “It’s the sickness, sweetie.”

  “I went back in the kitchen and I tried to call you guys but the phone wasn’t working. I was scared she was gonna get me next so I got a knife, a big one like the one mom has, and I started to run for the door cause I was gonna run home and find ya’ll. But when I opened the door, everyone was just…they was losing their minds. A couple of them were doing the same thing as Rhonda; just biting on people. So I came back in and locked the door. I didn’t know where to go.”

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that. I’m sorry your mom and me couldn’t get here sooner.”

  “The screaming had stopped and I thought maybe everything was okay. So I went to check on Rhonda and her parents. But…Rhonda…she was just eating on them. I felt like I had to help them. All I had was the knife.” She’s crying so hard that she’s struggling to catch her breath.

  “It’s okay, we’re here now.”

  “Her parents…after Rhonda wasn’t hurting them no more…they came back to life. I…didn’t…I didn’t mean to hurt them, Dad. I didn’t mean to.”

  “Come here, it's okay.”

  She pulls away. “You don’t want to see me.”

  “Yes I do, we’re not mad at you.”

  “No…Dad…you don’t want to see me.”

  “Alisa, come here, now.” I’m not loud, but I’m firm.

  She scoots forward, the light exposing her bit by bit: legs, torso, head.

  It takes everything in me to not let my emotions show, but I’m absolutely horrified.

  Tasia loses it. “Oh my god! My baby! What happened? What happened?”

  Alisa starts crying harder because of Tasia’s reaction and attempts to retreat back to the shadows.

  I grab her by the shoulders and hold her still while scanning her for wounds. “Are you hurt? Did you get bit?”

  She shakes her head, the tears mixing with the blood on her face. “It’s all theirs, it’s not mine.”

  “Tasia, go get some wet paper towels from the kitchen.”

  “Is she—”

  “Tasia! Paper towels!”

  She rushes from the room, still a ball of emotion.

  “It’s alright. You hear me? It’s alright. We’re gonna get you cleaned up and then we’re gonna get out of here. You believe me?”

  She nods.

  Tasia is back with the paper towels. She hands me a thick stack and has another stack for herself.

  We begin wiping down Alisa. She takes one side of her face and I take the other. She takes one arm and I take the other. We go like that until we’ve cleaned every exposed piece of skin.

  Tasia throws the soiled paper towels aside and hugs Alisa to her chest, kissing the top of her head.

  “Feel a little better?” I ask.

  She nods, her chin still trembling.

  The building quakes with another explosion.

  Alisa spooks and grips Tasia tighter.

  “That’s our signal to leave.”

  Tasia scoops Alisa up and follows me back into the living room.

  The scene playing out on the television grabs my attention.

  ‘The military is pushing us back from the barricades now; they’re saying it’s for our own protection.’ The ashen-haired female reporter with the thick eye makeup slides in and out of frame as the man holding the camera turns circles, getting brief shots of the line of heavily armed soldiers forcing them to move. ‘Beyond that, they’re not saying much else. As you can see, they’re being quite hostile. We’ve seen the explosions. We’ve seen them firing on unarmed civilians. We’ve seen the bodies in the streets. The reason given to us has been brief and vague, to say the least. All they’re telling us is that people are sick, highly contagious, and that they’ve been acting out violently. Again, I want to reiterate that everything we’ve heard is, at this point, speculation.’ She stops moving and brings two fingers up to her ear piece. ‘We’re getting word now from one of our sources that the military may be planning to conduct air str
ikes. That may explain why they’re pushing us back, but at this point, we just don’t know. But again, word is coming in that they may be planning to launch an air strike of some sort on this neighborhood.’

  “We’ve got to get the hell out of here, now!” Tasia says, taking the words right out of my mouth.

  6

  We’re back in the hall. A quick check reveals that the bodies Tasia and I dropped on the way down are still lifeless.

  “The window!” Tasia points to the single dirty window at the end of the hall. Oddly enough, there’s not a single crack or bullet hole to be seen. It’s a twin to the one I’d thrown Amos out of.

  I look at Tasia and shrug, her message lost on me.

  “We can signal for help, tell them we got our child up here!”

  “Tasia, I’ve seen what they do to people…what they’re doing to people right now! I can’t just—”

  “Try, damn it!” Tasia catches herself and puts a hand over Alisa’s ear and presses her head down against her shoulder, lowering her voice. “We’ll never make it down to the lobby. What do you think it’s like down there? This ain’t no place for our little girl.”

  She’s right. Even before we found Alisa, I was asking myself how we were gonna get her out of here in one piece. I look at the window and remember the men in the helicopter killing all those innocent folks on the roof. The voice of the lady on the news talking about folks getting shot down in the street echoes in my head. But the desire to see my little girl safe is louder than all of that, so I start towards the window.

  The glass is fogged over with grime and I don’t think the window has actually been opened since it was installed. The wood is splintering off and the edges are damp with moisture. The window sill is coated with dust and the carcasses of various species of beetle and spider. I wrap my fingers under the bottom lip and begin to pull.

  At first it doesn’t budge.

  Then it creaks.

  Some of the dust and grime starts to sprinkle away as the window begins to shake some of the sleep from its bones.

  It moves an inch, screeching its resistance.

  Then it moves another.

  And another.

  The glass shatters and blows back in my face.

  “Goddamn!” I stumble backwards, blinking rapidly against the fresh currents of blood flowing into my eyes from the newly created cuts on my forehead. I rub my eyes and blink again, trying to make sure that I haven’t been blinded. My vision is fine. My face seems to have taken the brunt of the assault. I turn and run back towards Tasia as the gunfire continues from the streets below, splintering the window frame and powdering the ceiling tiles.

  “Markus, you’re—”

  “I’m fine, let’s go!” I run past her to the stairwell door, opening it and checking up and down to make sure it’s clear. “Come on!”

  Tasia hustles past me into the stairwell and I let the door slam home. “Markus, why are they shooting?”

  “Because they’re not here to save us, they’re not here to save anyone.”

  “But we’re…we’re not sick. We’re not trying to hurt no one.”

  “That’s not how they see it. For them, one bad apple ruins the whole batch.”

  I lead the charge down to the twelfth-floor landing and look over the railing, down at the eleventh; Looney Tune’s turf. There’s no sign of him or his Golden Boys and the gunfire from their floor seems to have quieted. I go down the first two steps, whispering for Tasia to follow close. I don’t know if Looney Tune and his boys are psychic or if I just have shitty luck, but as soon as my feet land on that second step the door to the eleventh-floor swings open and three Golden Boys emerge carrying black machine guns.

  I freeze, trying to stay quiet.

  Tasia doesn’t stop quite as quickly and falls into me, knocking me forward and causing the head of my hatchet to slam against the metal railing. The noise created by this fills the entire stairwell, pinpointing our exact spot for the Golden Boys.

  They open fire.

  I turn with my head down and aim right for Tasia’s midsection, going at her like I’m trying to sack a quarterback. She’s still carrying Alisa. My daughter’s feet scrape the top of my head as I make impact. I lift her and Alisa into the air and set them down hard on their backs as the bullets create fireworks on the railing behind me.

  “Let’s get those mutherfuckas!” I hear one of the men scream.

  My wife is coughing and trying to get her breath back.

  “Up, let’s go!” I pull Alisa from her arms and yank Tasia to her feet. “Go, go, go!” I hold the door to the twelfth-floor open and shove them ahead of me as the footsteps of our aggressors draw closer. I let the door swing shut behind me. My wife and daughter are both standing in the middle of the hall, confused about where to go next.

  Unfortunately, so am I.

  Tasia is trying to say something but the words are scratchy and are missing most of their syllables due to having the breath knocked from her lungs.

  The Golden Boys are on the other side of the door now, ready to storm our position.

  I push Tasia and Alisa left into the hall. “Step on the gas!” I’m looking around for an open door, for a readymade sanctuary, I don’t have time to shake handles and pray. There’s the expected sprawl of bodies in the hall. None of them are moving, thankfully. We step over and around them. Alisa gives a little shriek of fear as we approach each one, staying close to Tasia’s side.

  A few feet in front of us, to the right, a door opens.

  Fuck.

  A sick one. It’s gotta be.

  Only a sick one would open their door to the sound of gunfire.

  Paul, the maintenance man, pokes his head into the hall. “Come on, get in here!”

  The Golden Boys are in the hall now. I can hear them. In another two seconds, they’ll breach the corner behind us and send hot lead soaring towards our backs.

  Paul pulls us inside and slams the door shut, locking the handle and securing the two deadbolts and the chain (for whatever that’s worth).

  All four of us stand there in the small foyer, panting like backyard dogs in mid-July, exchanging glances of uncertainty.

  Did the Golden Boys get eyes on us?

  We can hear them stomping the hall. “They’re here somewhere, man. Ain’t nowhere to go. We got em’ cornered. Yo, Tone, you watch the stairs. Pook and me will kick doors till we find em’ and wet em’ up.”

  “Aight, then.”

  I look around at the group, my eyes stopping on Paul. “Thank you,” I whisper.

  He winks and slaps me on the shoulder. “You’re a good man, Markus. You’ve got a good family. Not gonna let a couple of young punks be the end of you.”

  “Unfortunately the young punks may be the least of our worries.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.” Paul points towards the living room. “Been watching it on the television. Been listening to it through the windows. Crazy what they’re doing, right?”

  “Yeah, crazy, and we don’t have much time. Does anyone have any ideas?”

  Tasia just shakes her head, holding Alisa close to her left thigh.

  Paul walks towards the living room, one hand in the left pocket of his jeans, the other perched thoughtfully beneath his chin. “You got the gangsters in the hall. You got the military on the streets. And you’ve got the monsters in between. All of them are trying to kill us. Not good, is it? Not good at all.”

  “No, Paul, it’s not.” I’m trying to keep the annoyance I feel out of my voice, but Paul pacing the room and reminding me of how dire my situation is isn’t helping matters.

  Paul sits down on the edge of his couch, watching the muted images on the television. “I may have a way out of here, but it’s risky.”

  “Risky is better than hopeless.”

  “Then follow me.” Paul stands, his knees popping with the effort. He leads us towards his bedroom.

  “I want to go home,” Alisa whines, her words muffled against Tasia’s jea
ns.

  “This will all be over soon.” Tasia gives her a reassuring pat on the head.

  I kiss Tasia on the back of the neck as we walk into Paul’s bedroom. “You’re doing great, sweetheart.”

  She reaches back and gives my hand a squeeze.

  Paul is whistling as he walks over and shoves his bed against the wall, opening up the center of the room.

  “What the hell is he doing?” Tasia whispers in my ear.

  “I have no clue, but let’s just let the man do his thing.”

  He goes to his closet and starts moving boxes and shifting clothes. “Where did I put it? You know, I got it as a gift and never really used it. I plugged it in once. But that was it. Not much use for it around here.”

  “Mind if I ask what it is?”

  “Patience, it’s good for the soul.”

  “Today it’s bad for your health.” I bounce nervously on the balls of my feet, looking around the corner from the bedroom, waiting for the front door to leave its hinges and the Golden Boys to come in spraying. “Paul, I’m not trying to rush you, but time really is of the essence here. We got guys with guns outside.”

  “There are always guys with guns outside,” Paul gives his breezy retort as he tosses another box.

  His sage way of speaking is really starting to grind my gears. “These ones are trying to kill us and they’re trying to do it right now.”

  “Here we go.” Paul backs out of the closet. He’s holding a reciprocating saw with a red and gray body. The blade is black and mean and untarnished.

  “Neat toy, but what the hell are we supposed to do with that?” I’ve never wanted to hit Paul, but that’s quickly becoming an option.

  Paul points to the space he’d cleared on the floor.

  “Paul, are you out of your damn mind? The entire eleventh floor is Golden Boys’ territory. We’ll be dead before our feet touch down.”

  “If luck is not on your side, maybe you will. But I happen to know that the apartment below me is vacant at the moment. If luck is on your side, you will touch down safe and sound. What you do after that, I can’t really help with, can I?”

  “No, I suppose you can’t.” I look to Tasia.