Winter's Salvation Page 3

  When Rod was not working on the Cutter he was with his son doing something. It didn’t matter what they were doing, but they were always together. Lately it seemed all Drew wanted to do was play some video game on the computer which really upset Rod, but as long as he was happy he was ok with it. He just missed when they would go out to the festivals on the weekends and hang out.

  Now in the back of Eric’s Jeep they held each other tight and cried quietly together. Dave turned the volume to the radio up, not to quiet them, but to give them the privacy they needed.

  Eric lived in a town house on a quiet street that for the most part was off the path of any main street. As they rounded each corner getting closer to his home the traffic became less and less until they rounded the corner a few streets down from his destination and the traffic came to a dead stop. Cars lined and filled the street, but there was no one in them. On both sides of the road, cars were parked parallel to each other, blocking the street. People were forced to leave their vehicles where they rested and travel by foot if they wanted to get to their homes.

  He pulled up to the truck in front of him and sat behind the line of parked vehicles in the middle of the street. Eric turned his lights off and an eerie stillness crept over them. Rod’s phone made them jump as it rang and vibrated. He flipped it open, silencing it, and saw Maria Bray on the screen. “It’s the boat,” he looked at Eric. “I’m not answering it.”

  His phone soon stopped ringing and as soon as it did Eric’s started. He flipped it open surprised that he had service. He had been trying to contact his father nonstop until he pulled into his neighborhood. Sure enough it was the Cutter, “Hello,” There was a pause, “Yeah I’ll be there. No, I haven’t seen Rod. If I talk to him I’ll let him know.” He hung the phone up and called his parents.

  They could tell the phone was ringing, because Eric kept the phone close to his ear and wasn’t followed by a few creative curse words of disappointment due to a dropped call. He turned to Rod, “We’re not going to the boat.” The look of surprise and happiness shown on his face, “Dad.” He turned the radio down and talked to his father as if this were the first time he talked to him in years. “I’m coming up. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Dave tried to contact his family, but could not reach them. The phone just rang and then went to voice mail. The look of worry crossed his face with each passing moment and with no response he received from the phone he got more restless.

  “I’ll call you back tomara morning to find out how the night went. Love yas.” He hung the phone up and apologized. “I just needed to talk to them. Are y’all ready to go in.” They all nodded their heads.

  The street was quiet. Rod, Dave or Eric have never heard this street so quiet. Even on a week night there was always a party going on in one of these houses on his street. They all stepped out of the jeep and tried to close the doors as quietly as possible. As they traveled the sound of a snap then a moan echoed off the walls of the town houses. It was impossible to decipher which direction the noise came from, but they walked on the sidewalk cautiously avoiding the spaces in between the cars. The town houses in the neighborhood sat high on a hill and looked as if they were towering structures from the street on this dark night. Each townhouse had a set of stairs that went up a steep eight foot hill to leveled ground and then another set of stairs that led to the front door.

  They heard another moan echo loudly off the walls, then immediately followed by a quarrelling second and third. They slowed, as the two new voices were pin pointed just up ahead and to their left on the other side of some parked vehicles. Dave was the first to peer his head around the side of the car from the side walk.

  He stretched his neck while taking baby steps to catch a glimpse of what was on the other side. On their knees sat four humans, so badly eaten and torn apart he was not able to make out what sex they were. The two of them had their faces chewing deep into a mound of bloody flesh. When one would pull free an organ of some type they would fight over who got that piece. As Dave stepped over a little more one of them caught his eye. Looking up from the corpse with blood and pieces of flesh caked to its face, it let out a scream that was blood curdling. It wasn’t the moan they have been hearing, but a scream. Dave did not hesitate and ran down the street with no regard to who was behind him. The others took to a run not being able to control themselves and had to look at what made the horrible noise. As Eric passed he was able to see all four rise to their feet and start to squeeze between the cars. The closer they got to Eric’s house more of them started to rise from behind cars from in front of them.

  In his haste Dave ran past Eric’s house. Rod and Drew turned at his stairway and ran to his door screaming for Eric to hurry up. Eric heard the sound of feet beating the pavement from behind him, but never turned to see how close they were. He screamed to Dave informing him he went too far. He lived on the second house from the end of the block and David had already crossed the street that started the next block.

  Eric ran up the side of the steep eight foot high hill to his house and after his third step cleared the hill, fell and rolled back to his feet. Reaching the second set of steps he squeezed on the front landing of his front door. There is a five foot drop on either side of the landing to the front door and only three feet or so before you would step on the stairs. He had to push Rod and Drew back so he could open the screen to get to the door, but they fought to be as close to the door as possible.

  The crazed people were running down the street, now from both directions. There were seven coming from the direction they just came from and Dave could hear more behind him in the other direction. They all were not running in the same manner, but they all were moving very quickly. Many of these savage people had severe damage to them that would slow or stop any normal human being, such as large chunks of flesh from bite wounds pulled from their legs or broken appendages and feet, but it did not seem to stop them. Some moved slower from their injuries, but none of them showed signs of pain and they all wanted to move faster, despite their obvious wounds.

  Three of them fumbled on the hill right before the steps. Dave got to the steps the same time these two did. The sound of three gun shots rang between the row houses. Two of the chasing men went stumbling back and the one in back fell to the ground.

  Eric with keys in his hand stopped to see what happened. Dave was running toward them with his gun in hand. The first one he shot was already making it’s way up the stairs as if nothing happened. The other five were trying to make it up the hill, working their way toward the stairs.

  “Fucking open the door,” Dave shouted turning around and letting another bullet fly into the right shoulder of the man who just made it to the top of the stairs. This man was wearing a button up shirt with a nice brightly colored tie on. His left side was torn and covered with red blood from a prior incident. His eyes looked like they were white marble with just a touch of black in them. As the bullet knocked him back a step, he snarled. His mouth opened wide, wider than any human could physically open their mouth. It’s tight grey skin wrinkled to make way for the gapping maw and to insinuate the hunger this creature had for its prey.

  As the beast screamed David walked up calmly and pulled the trigger of the 9mm pistol, aiming at its forehead. The frantic man fell backwards down the stairs making way for the others to climb his body.

  Eric watched the whole event not working on the door at all. He jumped as the gun went off and managed to open the front door with no hesitation.

  Chapter 3

  The Decision

  The door shook as the demented people out front beat on it. Their blows to the front door shook the entire house. Locking it behind them was not enough. Eric franticly searched his house for something to secure it, but his mind was blank. The sound of the screen door ripping off the hinges sounded louder to the people inside because they all immediately recognized the extra layer of protection that was no longer there.

  Dave ran into the kitchen an
d started looking at the liquor selection Eric kept on hand. He grabbed a bottle of Everclear and ran past Eric who was pushing the entertainment center in front of the door. As soon as he pressed it against the wood it cracked. “Rod help!” he screamed.

  Dave ran upstairs to the bathroom that over looked the front part of the house and was directly over the front door. He looked at the clear bottle and examined the amount of liquor that was left in it. It was just about full and he thought about how lucky they were that they didn’t bring this bottle to Rod’s house the night before. He ripped a portion of towel hanging from a hanger and stuffed one end deep into the bottle. Opening the bathroom window and looked outside to evaluate what he was about to do.

  Eric and Rod franticly piled furniture in front of the cracked door. The sound of shattered glass and then the front windows lit up as if it were plain as day. An orange glow lit the front living room and he paused for a second, not registering what just happened. The heat coming from the cracks in the door and frame snapped him out of his shock.

  From the bathroom Dave could feel the inferno bellow. There were six frenzied people on the small landing and more were trying to push themselves onto the platform. He tried to aim the bottle, so it would crash right behind the first six because he did not want to catch the house on fire and for a brief second he thought about the wooden front door, but he dropped it directly on the front six. The flame exploded on them and like a water fall flowed over the sides of the landing and down the front stairs.

  He ran down the stairs hollering, “I need more liquor! I need more liquor!” A pile of furniture blocked the normal way down the stairs, so he jumped over the railing and landed on the couch and entertainment center piled in front of the door. He ran into the kitchen and this time did not care what he grabbed just as long as it was some type of alcohol.

  Climbing over the furniture and back to the bathroom he looked out the window. The crowd that started off with fifteen maybe twenty turned into a hundred in a matter of seconds. The front six had fallen and the next, already on fire, but in line ran to take their place in the blazing inferno. None had moaned or screamed any louder than before and gave no notion of being in pain or afraid of the fire because they kept coming. The crowd out front was growing and soon the door would shatter with the weight of flaming people. He tossed his next bottle at the bottom of the stairs a few feet past the landing, creating a large spread of fire for the creatures to walk through before they got to the entrance to the house.

  Eric, with no furniture left, turned his attention to the flaming door. He ran to the dining room and looked out of the back window that faced the alley. He shared a privacy fence with the neighbor on the end of the block and looked at their two small lots of land. The fenced yard was clear, but in the alley ways he could see people running through them wildly. These quiet streets were now filled with the moaning and screeching of these crazed people. Another sound unfamiliar to these streets were the cries coming from the row houses behind him of terrified mothers calling for their children and the helpless calls of their fathers, as he knew they were being overrun. Down the alley coming from a house to his right he saw a woman run from her back door being chased from her yard. As soon as she stepped onto the alley the demented ones turned their attention to the scared woman and attacked her.

  Eric saw too much death and destruction in one night and the overwhelming urge to run into the alley was taken away when he turned and saw Drew standing where his couch once was staring at him hoping he had a solution. He looked back to the alley and with their attention on devouring the young woman he waved Drew toward him and then ran outside. As Drew got to the door Eric looked up from his garden’s hose reel. “Open the window and grab the other end of this.” Drew completely silent, did as he was instructed, and grabbed the hose.

  “I’m going to feed this through the window and I need you to give it to your father.” As soon as Drew came back to the window Eric was able to tell he had given it to Rod. He opened the faucet’s valve, ensured there were no kinks in the hose and locked the door behind him as he entered the kitchen.

  “I need more liquor up here!” Dave bellowed from the upstairs bathroom. He was trying to spread the fire away from the house and further down the hill. Now the deranged people had to run through about ten feet of flame and a pile of burning bodies that was building at the bottom of the stairs that led to the three foot landing before the door. Most of the running ones that made it through the fire got tripped up in the mound of burning flesh and added to the victims.

  Rod started spraying the door and was greeted by an extinguishing hiss and a great plume of smoke. Eric tried to look out the two front windows to the left of the front door, but the heat of the fire barred him from getting too close.

  Dave hollered from upstairs again, “I’m running low up here!”

  Eric ran to his fish tank, with only one fish swimming in it, from years of neglect, and opened up the drawer under the fifty five gallon tank. He began to pull out and toss behind him filters and aquarium decorations, until he found what he was looking for. He pulled a long hose and a faucet attachment from the drawer and handed it to Drew. “Take this upstairs and hook it up to the sink.”

  Eric’s mind raced for what he could give Dave. He no longer heard the banging at the door, so the fire was working. The tall whipping flames could be seen from Eric’s front windows that sat seven feet from the ground, but Dave continued to holler for more liquor.

  It was then when he remembered the red gas can in the shed for his lawn mower. He looked out the back window and saw the people were still devouring the woman down the street. Running to the shed, he opened the large door as fast as he could disregarding the noise he made. He found comfort within the confines of his six foot tall wooden privacy fence (knowing they could not see him). Grabbing the half empty gas can he ran back to the house locking the door behind him.

  Entering the bathroom Eric was hit by thick black smoke that smelled of burning flesh and rubber. The bathroom was small and with three people jammed into it made it almost impossible to maneuver. Drew and Dave were both looking out the window and when Drew looked behind him he stepped back and let him in. Eric, out of breath, looked out the window and saw the crazed people moving forward in the flame. They would step in moving toward the house, but then most of them would start to veer off in wrong directions. He thought while they were in the fire their eyes had burned out and they could not see where they were going.

  Dave grabbed the gas can from him and gave it a little shake. By the look on his face he was not impressed by its contents, but he was not going to give it back.

  “That’s all I have left.” Eric said with a shrug.

  Dave pushed it out as far as he could. They watched it land just passed the ten foot section of fire and when it struck the ground, flame bounced through the air and spread out to the street. Cars caught on fire, and the people that were just arriving, who were about to run into the fire were suddenly engulfed in flame. The heat from the sudden burst of fire forced them back inside the barrier of the window.

  Eric did glimpse at what the fire was doing to the front of his house and the only part that was on fire was the trimming around the front door. The house was older and completely made of brick and he took a temporary feeling of comfort that they would not burn tonight, but he hooked the fish tank hose adapter to the bathrooms faucet, turned the water on and hung it out the window to put out the fire on the door.

  They closed the window as much as possible without stopping the water from flowing and watched the fire from behind the window. The fire looked like it rolled in waves as the undead carried the fire closer to the house, but bounced back as it hit the mounds of charred bodies that protected the home.

  **********

  The four of them barricaded the back door with a two by four from the shed. They pressed it against the set of cabinets directly across from the door and jammed the wood under the door knob. The windows we
re set higher and unless they started to climb on top of each other they didn’t have to worry about the crazed people getting in through them.

  Eric has two other roommates that are in the Coast Guard and neither of them was answering their phones. He tried to contact their units and he got a busy signal. The town house he rented was small, but really no different from any of the other houses on the block. Each house was built exactly the same and his house was in much need of a rehab. Paint fell from the ceilings, he thought more than likely lead paint, and there was not a single piece of wood that did not creak as you walked over them, but right now there was no other place any of them would dare to venture. The blaze had died down and moved away from the landing, windows and front door. The piles of charred bodies created a wall of fire that protected the front of the house. The crazed people continued to feed the wall making it larger and impenetrable. The back of the house was protected by a privacy fence. It was poorly made and a child would be able to push it over, but what it did provide was what it was originally intended for, privacy.

  The smell in the house was starting to die down and the adrenaline they were all feeling was slowly dissipating, but the monsters outside never let them forget they were still out there. Their groaning was unrelenting and constant. The four of them were all sitting in the largest bedroom that faced the alley, because the front room still had the strong smell of burnt flesh in it and was very warm from the fires even with the AC set on its coldest setting.