Fountain of the Dead Read online

  “You told me, you’d take me out yourself.” Pierce said bored.

  “Don’t mock me, Pierce. You think you found a patsy for your little trip. I’ve dealt with far worse than you. We’re doing this so maybe this shithole existence can end.”

  “Please. Do you think I’m threatened? Or threatening? I’m trying to help,” Pierce said. Catherine looked Pierce in the eyes and scowled.

  “Have no doubt that I can and will cut you from crotch to throat and leave you behind as zombie chum if I have to.” Catherine stepped back catching herself. “And if I don’t have the strength in my arms to do it, I know 30 or so volunteers that will step up.”

  “You really don’t frighten me,” Pierce said. “You forget what I’ve seen in the swamps.”

  “Part of me just wants to choke the life out of you right now,” Catherine said as Frank sauntered over, scratching his chest with the barrel of his pistol.

  “There a problem here?” Frank asked.

  Pierce shook his head and wandered off. Frank looked down at the apple. “Perfectly good waste of food. Are you sure about this trip, Catherine?”

  “Why aren’t you out hunting, Frank?” Catherine asked.

  “Someone has to watch you riff-raff.”

  “You’re still fiddling with the Monte aren’t you? I want you to keep an eye on him, on Pierce.”

  “I’ll give you both eyes.” Catherine smiled a little. “I don’t know what it is about that guy, Catherine, but every time I see him I want to put a bullet between his eyes.”

  “I’m starting to feel that way. And yes, maybe, the trip is a good idea. At the very least we’ll get an idea of what’s left out there. We’ve been holed up here for so many years now. We could have another village like ours close by that we can trade and share with. Get away from the city.”

  “There’s enough here for defense if none of us make it back. Their ammo is going to be really low, but if they’re casual with their killing they should last. I just don’t want to take too much away with us.” Frank tucked his gun under his belt. “We need to find a gun store. I knew of a couple up in Maine, but I’m sure they’ve been ripped apart by now.”

  “What makes you think you’re going, Frank?”

  “You’re not getting out of this place without me watching out for you. I’d still be out there on the road trapped in my crappy mail jeep if it wasn’t for you.” Catherine smiled, patted his shoulder and walked off towards her house.

  * * * * *

  Frank let the line of cars behind him pass before he pulled out for the next mailbox. The flashers were going. People should know what to expect from a mail truck. The seat next to him was piled with plastic trays. Frank reached across for a handful of letters and pulled out on to the road. There was a cloud of dust behind the vehicle. He pulled to the next mailbox, looked at the house number and the address on the envelopes and stuffed the proper ones into the mailbox.

  “Rinse, repeat, rinse repeat.” He muttered. It was going to be a scorcher of a summer day. There was some benefit not to have the walking route today, no layers of sunscreen or being chased by dogs or carrying bottles of water. He didn’t like covering this route and even though there were small fans, they didn’t do shit to cut the heat. And the steering wheel on the ‘wrong’ side of vehicle added to the irritation.

  He’d spent the early morning hand sorting mail too big for the machines or that showed up late. And now he was delivering it. The dash of the van was decorated with photos. Even though it was a temporary thing, Frank wanted the pictures. They were on the visor, on the dash and some taped to the side of the door, taped on before he left and removed before he stepped out back at the post office. The photos were of his ex-wife, his children, and pets.

  He turned off the street into the parking lot of a convenience store. He let the truck idle while the fan did nothing. He sorted the mail in his hands and set it back in the tray for the next batch of houses. Frank ran into the store for some bottles of water and gum. He had to stop himself from getting a six pack of beer for the ride home. One of the many reasons his wife had taken off.

  The side street was intersected by a two lane state highway. To the east it led to major highways and west it trundled on to the next city. Frank got back in the truck and pulled out on the state highway, each side dotted with houses. He stuffed the first mailbox. The hydrant next to the house was gushing brown water. No one had said anything about flushing hydrants today. And there were no kids around playing in the spray.

  Frank steered around the rising puddle on the side of the road. It looked like a rusty stream flowing down the to the sewer grates. “Rinse, repeat.” The mantra of the day. At least on the walking route he could listen to his MP3 player or a book on CD. He stuffed the next mailboxes, a line of cars forming in back of him.

  He tried waving them past, but whoever was right behind him seemed incapable of going around. Frank pulled off to the side, doing his best to avoid the muddy water churning around the metal grate. The truck shook. He looked in the mirrors, but there was no one near him. The truck shook again, like someone had picked it up and dropped it. Mail scattered and the trays slid, spilling more onto the floor.

  “What the shit?” Frank reached for his phone and the front of the truck slid down into the street. Dark waters covered the hood. The engine sputtered and died. Frank tried restarting it, but it wouldn’t turn over. The vehicle slid forward and turned in the mud. The asphalt had a gaping hole in it, and Frank was stuck in its maw.

  The truck was leaning towards the passenger’s side, sinking into the mud and water streaming in from the street. The viscous brown water was pooling on the floor. Frank grimaced at the ruined mail and clicked into survival mode. He got the seat belt off and tried the door. It was jammed from the outside. The wind shield cracked and spider-webbed. The brown water started to drizzle from the vents.

  Frank elbowed the window until the pain was too much. He tried the engine again to power the windows. The engine wasn’t clicking. No contact, no sparks.

  “Fuck!” Frank bellowed. He started pulling his pictures from where they were papered across the truck. “Think, or you’re going to drown in your fucking mail truck.” The truck shifted again, going at a sharper angle down, sinking into the enlarging crater. From beyond the crater he heard people shouting and screaming. “Window is on a crank, it’s not electric dipshit.” Frank cranked the window down, practically ripping it from the door and climbed out. The windshield exploded behind him, showering the insides with dime sized pieces of safety glass. He stood on the truck unbalanced and it continued to sink.

  Someone grabbed his hand and helped him up.

  “Thank you.” He gasped. Bending over, resting his hands on his knees fighting for air.

  “Do you need anything?” Catherine asked.

  * * * * *

  Tony slowed to a stop a couple miles outside the village. His radio blared static and he turned down the volume so as not to attract any unwanted attention. He wiped dark windblown hair from his eyes. For the immediate time being, the road was clear.

  “Why’d you stop?” Sam asked through the radio.

  “Let’s go south. We’ve raped every strip mall to the north and past Boston and Providence,” Tony answered. He tapped his head with a long finger thinking where they hadn’t been. “And if we go through Boston we have to deal with the patrols.”

  “You’re in the lead vehicle, it’s your call,” Sam said.

  Tony checked the mirror and loosened his guns in the holsters for quick draw; two more men in the back seat took up the front line.

  Sam put the radio on his dashboard and scratched his dog’s head. The dog’s ear perked up at something and he let out a soft growl.

  “Easy boy.” Sam peered out the windows to see what the dog was hackled about. “There’s nothing out there.”

  Tony turned the Jeep around, pulling a U-turn on the highway, now driving north on the southbound side. He was still amazed Fra
nk let the vehicle out of his sight. Tony knew if anything happened to the Jeep it would come out of his hide. There were fewer functional abandoned cars on this side and the bridge into Boston had been cleared. When the truck towing the trailer had turned, he followed suit.

  They drove north to the 95 exit and sped past. They slowed pulling into Wilmington. Tony pulled the convoy over at the first gas station they saw. He scratched his head trying to remember if they had hit this place. It was so close to the city they must have. And if they didn’t every other poor bastard had to have wandered passed did. 93 was a busy highway back in the day, both sides lined with industrial parks.

  Across the street was the entrance to one of them. Closed now for many years, there were rumors people had holed up in the old complexes, but no one dared explore them. The massive buildings were a mystery. Most of them had their own cafeterias, which meant dry stored food; also water from toilet tanks and whatever was left in the pipes. If no one thought enough to explore, it could be someone’s mansion. Or loaded with walking corpses and deadly traps.

  “Why here?” Sam said coming from his vehicle.

  “I have a hunch. Not a Vegas hunch. But a hunch.”

  “Let’s hit it.” Sam waved and whistled.

  They piled out from the vehicles. A hand written sign was taped to the pumps that read “No gas.” Tony tried the handles on all of them regardless. People had used similar tricks after Night Storm hit and it kept some away. The last pump in the line spit out gas. Tony stopped and listened; if the pumps were working there was electricity someplace and that meant a generator. But there was no hum or pulse that he heard. If there was power inside the station, there had to be an emergency generator someplace. Which meant someone was keeping it fueled.

  He signaled to Sam to pull the SUV up; Tony filled the tank while Danny kept watch from the back of the truck. The pick-up moved in next; Danny hopped from the bed and filled the tank. What was left went into the Jeep. They filled fuel cans from the diesel pump for the generators and stowed them in the truck bed. Whatever gasoline was left went into red, plastic canisters.

  Tony pointed to Sam and Danny. “You two watch the front. I want two more around back; everyone else in the store.” They ran to the front of the store, checked for locks on the doors and looked through the glass windows. Nothing moved inside. The windows were dirty, loaded with dried, empty spider webs. Sun bleached posters and ads lined the insides of the panes. There was little room to see though. Above the door was an old video camera, with no power to it. There were others around the pump stations. Tony stepped through the door, making sure the dog was still in the front of the Jeep, not someplace the mutt would be in the way. Sam watched over that dog like it was his kid. He nodded to the others and went in.

  * * * * *

  The back end of the station / convenience store was an abomination. Bodies were stacked five high and seven deep almost the full length of the back access road; the backdoors were inaccessible. Some of the corpses were wrapped in plastic and sheets; others left open to the elements. The buzzing drone of insects was deafening; birds had pecked at the bodies and left the foul meat. Sam turned and threw up on the cracked asphalt. He took a step onto a yellow painted speed bump and held his arms out for balance.

  “You ok, old man?” Danny asked.

  “Yeah, I never get used to the stink,” Sam said and covered his mouth. “Especially so much of it.”

  Danny patted him on the back and then went back into watching-out mode. “We should take some gas and burn these bodies. Where do you think they came from? The parking lot was empty.” They both looked at each other. Sam pulled up the collar on his shirt to cover his mouth and nose. He looked like a pathetic cowboy bandit from a spaghetti western. The cloth did little to filter out the stink of the bodies stacked like cord wood.

  “Better question, who stacked them here?” Danny asked. Sam turned to the rusted access ladder on the building and Danny scampered up it, without thinking. A few years ago, I would have been up that ladder like that, Sam thought. Sam shook his head thinking how young Danny must have been with the storm hit. He couldn’t be more than six or seven years older than Micah. The roof was a barren waste of cracked paint, rusted vents and old tar with loose gravel. Danny looked over the side, shook his head and flew equally fast down the ladder.

  “Nothing.”

  “Look at it this way, Danny if anyone was inside, they know we’re here now.”

  “You’re an asshole, Sam.”

  “Maybe, kid. At least I didn’t give away our position. You know twenty years ago, I could have scrambled up that ladder to the roof,” Sam said.

  “Twenty years ago I was in diapers.”

  “I wonder if someone was stacking corpses from one of those office buildings.” Danny said pointing over his shoulder.”

  “We’ll never know.” Sam patted Danny out back and they started for the front. Sam let the collar of his shirt slip down around his neck and his spit several times to get the taste of puke and corpse out of his mouth.

  * * * * *

  Tony stepped into the store, in an instant he knew something had rotted. The refrigerated cases that held meat and milk and various juices were wide open, the others sported empty shelves and ruined glass doors. Shattered glass lay on the floor like the remnants of an ice storm. Tony gave a quick scan to the aisles; almost everything had been stripped clear. Tony looked up to the ceiling and readied his guns when he heard footsteps on the roof. He brushed some of his dark hair away and continued through the aisles. Sam’s dog looked in patiently from the outside.

  The convenience store had six aisles; the outer walls were refrigerator units. Tony went to the end of a row and walked past an empty display for canned nuts, checking for anything salvageable. The freezer cases had defrosted; black and white speckled tiles were water stained and coated in mold below them. He covered his mouth, whatever the smell was, was behind the freezer case.

  A wooden pallet that held stacked boxes of Soda was mostly empty, bullet casings covered the floor and when he looked closer, Tony saw the bullet holes in the walls and in the shelving units. The remaining cans and bottles all had holes and the fluids left inside wasn’t a viable option. The entrance to the refrigerated cases revealed a doorway that led to cold storage and a walkway to fill the shelves from behind; if anything was left it would be back there. He took a deep breath and opened the metal latched door.

  * * * * *

  Gerry walked to the front of the store, rifle out and ready to unload on anything that got in his way. Out of reflex, he opened the register; it was empty save for a handful of coins. All the cigarettes, gum, and matches all long gone. He grabbed a couple DVDs and stuffed them into his shirt, not bothering to look at the titles. Small displays at the front that normally held travel size toiletries were broken and thrown aside. The peg board in back of the register had a hole in it and the metal pegs were scattered across the floor.

  “This place is picked clean,” Gerry said. “Someone had a real party in here.” The others nodded to him. He grabbed the last three pairs of sunglasses from a spinner rack and went down each aisle looking for canned food, paper goods, snack foods, anything at all. He reached for a bag of beef jerky, checked the expiration date and tossed it on the floor. Gerry signaled for the rest of the party to fill white plastic shopping bags with whatever was left. “We’ll sort through it all back at the camp.” Gerry looked at the rack behind the counter and spied the scratch tickets. He grabbed the end of a reel and took a handful for Tony with a smile. Then the gunfire started.

  * * * * *

  Tony eased into the freezer unit. The stink of rotted meat was strongest back here. He stepped past cases of old cold cuts; even with all the preservatives, there was no chance for anything edible. There was bread in bags that looked like blue-green clay. If the freezers hadn’t cut out this would have been a treasure trove. THE treasure trove. The kicker was the two bodies, one a clerk with his throat chewed out
, the other, the undead that did it. The clerk managed to jam a metal rod through the zombie’s eye socket and out the back of its head before he died.

  Tony heard the groan ahead of him, in back of a pile of boxes. It looked like someone had tried to barricade themselves in back of cases of Coke and Root beer. He moved forward stepping over the corpses and doing his best not to breathe. From in back of the wall of soda, he saw movement. He leaned over the boxes and fell backwards, stumbling over the corpses landing on his back.

  The first dead plowed through the boxes trying to get to Tony, soda cans erupted and sprayed foaming liquid. It wore a store vest; one eye hung by dried veins and muscles from the socket, the other eye dull grey. It lumbered forward and before the third step, a bullet ripped through its skull it fell face forward, inches from Tony’s lap.

  Tony struggled to his feet when the other two came out. They were, or had been customers dressed like tourists, the fronts of their shirts stained with blood and gore, meat dangled from their teeth. They had a fresh kill. One got caught up on the body on the floor, went down hard. Tony punched and kicked at it until he got his gun free. It crawled up the corpse, using its legs for rails, inching closer to Tony. He pressed the barrel to the top if its head and fired. A backwash of damp brain flew backwards and splattered against his face. Without wiping at his eyes, he got up and put the rest of the clip into the last one, coming up behind.

  Gerry crashed through the shelving looking at what he needed to kill. He eased up before colliding with Tony. Tony grabbed a bottle of warm water from a plastic wrapped box and poured it over his face and head. The blood and brain ran off his head in thick streams.

  “Catherine would shit twice if she saw you doing that,” Gerry said.

  “Well she ain’t here, is she?” Tony answered and wiped his eyes clean. In back of Gerry a spinner rack squealed as it slowed turned.