More of the creatures closed in on the car from all sides. Ginger swerved left and right trying to avoid them and other parked cars. Bodies bounced off the sides of the car more than a couple times. She found an empty lane and accelerated away from the mall heading north.
Driving home, they could see house after house under siege from the undead.
"My God, they’re everywhere," Alison said.
"Please Lord; don’t let them be at my parents’ house. Let my family be safe," Ginger prayed aloud.
"What do we do, if they are there?" the teenage girl in the backseat said.
Ginger's mind tried to play out a scenario of what she would do if she found her family dead from these things. Her mind couldn’t comprehend any kind of sane reaction.
A woman ran out into the road in front of the car waving her arms franticly. Her clothes were torn like she had been running through the woods that she emerged from.
Ginger caught the briefest glimpse of her mother’s face, and she slammed on her brakes. The woman dove to the side of the road to avoid being hit.
A zombie emerged from the woods after its prey and limped dead center into the path of the car. The impact hurled the zombie forward twenty feet, and it continued to roll for another ten, but it started to get right back up.
Ginger's mom struggled up from the ground and limped to the car.
"Hurry up," said the girl in the back seat while she opened the door for the woman.
Ginger turned around and looked into the back seat at her winded mother. Her mother, Vicky, worked out a lot and occasionally did marathons. Ginger thought her mom looked worse than she did when she finished one.
"Mom, are you okay; where's Dad?"
Vicky pointed to the front of the car. "He's right there, baby. They got him, and he's been trying to get me ever since."
Ginger looked up to see her father walking toward the car.
"We need to move,” Alison said, "or he's going to try and get in."
Ginger pressed on the gas and maneuvered the car off the road and into a yard on the right avoiding her father. The car plowed into a mailbox and knocked it under the vehicle. Ginger drove the car back onto the road and the mailbox hung along for a few moments, screeching metal and throwing sparks.
Ten minutes later, Ginger's red Saturn pulled into her Mom's driveway. The lights to the house were all on.
Rex hung out of her Mom's bedroom window waving at the car. He held her father’s shotgun in his other hand.
Ginger pulled the car into the yard below the window to the protective cover of the gun and got out.
"Ginger," Rex said, "I don’t know if you know what's-" he stopped mid-sentence when he saw his mother-in-law get out of the car. Rex didn’t see his father-in-law and filled in the blanks without asking any questions.
"I’ll be right down, don’t move," Rex said as he disappeared from the window.
From the outside, they could see him come halfway down the steps through the window in front of the stairs. He then jumped over to the side of the stair rail and went out of view. A moment later, Rex opened the door, gun at the ready, wearing only pineapple-covered swimming trunks.
"They came at me when I was in the hot-tub.” he said. “I killed one out back then they followed me in the house. There's a few bodies behind the door here, so don’t be alarmed when you see them. You have to shoot them in the head or they don’t want to die... or stay dead," he explained.
Rex handed his mother-in-law the shotgun and turned back toward the bodies. He grabbed on to the legs of the first body dragged the bodies out of the house one at a time. The corpses left a smear of red on the hardwood floor. Everyone watched in silence and kept an eye out for more zombies.
He waved for everyone to move close to him, "We’re going to stick together and move as a group. Let’s keep as quiet as possible and not panic."
Rex led the way down the stone pathway that curved around the side of the house to the garage. He paused at the corner and peered out into the night while willing his eyes to cut past the edges of darkness.
"The garage is all metal and block with steel fire doors," He said. "We can hold up there till the morning. Hopefully by then, we’ll have a plan and perhaps know what the hell is going on."
He thought about his options. When they moved to Pennsylvania, they moved in with the in-laws temporarily. The majority of their property sat at the far end of the driveway in a white storage pod. Among the pods inventory were several of Rex's guns and a decent cache of ammo. He also thought about his in-laws brand new all black Dodge Ram mega-cab. Rex had a vision about driving over the undead and laughing.
Ten minutes later, the group watched the garage door rattle closed while they sat safely inside the pickup in the garage.
Rex and Alison had collected all his guns and ammo from the storage pod. The guns included one AK-47, a Chinese made SKS, 2 Springfield Armory .40 cal XDs, a twelve-gauge shotgun, and a .308 “deer” rifle. He also managed to retrieve his .45 from the back of the house. The rest of the girls had moved the truck into the garage and collected food from the house. Ginger also managed to get her husband some better looking clothes to put on.
Ginger flipped on the radio while the other girls tried to get a cell phone signal. Throughout the night, they exchanged stories and listened to intermittent emergency radio broadcasts.
Chapter Six
In Pittsburgh, three nurses rushed into Malone's room with a crash cart. Alarms screamed out the dead man's condition. The bed stood empty, but a trail of lead wires guided their eyes to the standing figure of Malone who grabbed the closest nurse and pulled the man close.
"Restrain him," the male nurse ordered the others.
Malone's face sunk into the man's shoulder.
"Fuck!" the nurse screamed. "Get him off me."
Malone and the man fell to the floor while the other two nurses tried to pull Malone's dead weight off him.
Malone pressed in on his victim taking bits of flesh in his mouth every time he could get his face close enough. In the tussle, someone kicked the crash cart, and it wheeled back out into the hallway.
One by one they stopped fighting Malone as life ebbed from their bodies. Malone picked himself off the floor and left the room. He walked down the hallway and out of the wing. The level of the hospital that Malone had been admitted to housed a bridge that connected to the parking garage across the street. The glass doors obliged Malone's advance by sliding open at his approach, and he shuffled out through them.
Back in Malone's room, the lifeless medical staff picked themselves off the reddened floor and wandered back into the hallway. In the abstract, they went back to work. They rounded on the hundred or so other patients on the floor that were under their care.
In the parking garage, Malone rounded a structural pier, and ran into a middle-aged woman carrying several helium balloons. The woman threw her hands out at the naked Malone and somehow the balloons became wrapped around Malone's neck.
This was all happening in front of a security camera, but no one was watching at the moment. Security was responding to what they thought was some kind of riot from gang-bangers on the third floor.
Malone lost interest in the woman fairly soon. She had a heart condition and gave out to cardiac arrest after just a couple of moments of being eaten. Her last thought as light vanished from her eyes was that she thought she was being raped.
Malone left her and continued on. His naked form dressed only in the balloons strung, around his neck reading, "It's A Boy!"
On the bottom floor of the garage, Malone found the parking-lot attendant sitting in a tollbooth. The Hispanic attendant was sitting on a stool and reading the sports page. He listened to some kind of salsa music on his iPod.