“Other folks? Walt, be a dear and tell me, have you seen Fred from accounting? I really need to speak with him.”
“Fred? Why no, I can’t say that I have seen him, we have some parts of the building shut off, those…but if Fred were in one of them he would have shown up by now. Why? Surely this doesn’t have anything to do with business Miss Wieden, haven’t you seen what’s been going on out there? We’ve got bigger problems to deal with. We should get you up to Kirkpatrick’s office and the let others know you and your friends are alright.” Walt said acknowledging that Nancy was not alone.
“Can you recall if anyone in Kirkpatrick’s office mentioned seeing Fred?”
Walt rubbed his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “No, no, I can’t say that any of them have said anything about him to me.”
Her tone now changed from businesslike to a considerably more friendly manner, “OK then, no harm done, I just would really like to see him. Come over here Walt, I want to introduce you to my new friends.”
The light above Nancy shown down on her like a spot light hiding her face in a dark shadow cast from her brightly lit hair. Her friends, as she called them, were just dark shapes outside of the spot light and Walt could not make out any details. For some reason he hesitated at first and then he remembered that this was Nancy, his friend who he was glad to see was unharmed. As he approached Nancy and her friends a thought entered his old brain.
“Miss Wieden, why do you need Fred so badly?”
“Well Walt, if you need to know. He has something on me and I want to get rid of him.” Nancy replied. Walt had just a fraction of a second to pull back and he was too slow. Nancy and her friends pounced on him like a pack of hungry wolves and tore the life out of him.
Chapter 20
Max couldn’t sleep. Not a surprise given his location, the hard floor inside a cubical at work. However, with the kind of day he had been having he really expected to be able to do more than doze. Part of it was trying to sleep in an unfamiliar area, the noises were unfamiliar and some primeval sense told Max his ‘home’ was being invaded, and kept waking him up. Around three thirty Max opted to go empty his bladder and see if that magic would help get him to sleep again. He was not the only one unable to sleep, he saw several others moving around too, and someone had made a pot of coffee, probably to bring down to Walt. He entered the bathroom and had a feeling of dejavu as there was some serious shuffling going on in the stall, however, after a second the stall opened to reveal a guy named Dave, who Max didn’t really know. Dave nodded sheepishly, as if to say, “Sorry about the smell” and went to wash his hands while Max stood at the urinal. He left while Max was taking his turn at the sink and Max heard him grunt just outside the door.
“What the fu-”, was all Max heard Dave say. It was enough to cause adrenaline to pump into his veins, a feeling Max had grown all too familiar with in the last twenty four hours, abruptly he shut off the water faucet. Out of habit he grabbed paper towels and dried his hands. He cautiously went to the door and listened quietly, he heard a slightly familiar woman’s voice whispering, “Keep quiet Jimbo! Drag him to the cube with the others, we might get a clean sweep after all. V? Have you found the ones with the guns yet? Quiet everyone, maybe we can catch them snoozing. Let me check out the bathrooms to see if we have any other naughty night pissers on our hands.”
Max tensed himself, this was it, no weapons and a zombie bitch getting ready to come in and munch him. He anxiously looked around for something to defend himself with. Nothing came to mind and he heard the door swing open whirling around he was stunned to see it was not his door, apparently it was the door to the women’s bathroom. Quietly Max re-appraised his situation. The handicap bar, if he could pry that off he could bash someone with it, going into the stall he reached down, braced his feet on the ground and lifted as hard as he could. It was fastened too well, he was able to get it loose, but not break it off. Wait! A toilet plunger! A wooden rod fourteen inches long was not much, but better than nothing. Oh and the metal trash can could be slid out of the wall too! Max backed out of the stall, keeping his eyes on the door while backing towards the garbage can. The men’s room door swung open and a large male zombie stepped in. He immediately spotted Max and swung towards him. He was slow, though, 'Thank God, a break!' thought Max. Max grabbed the trash bin with one hand while pointing the toilet plunger, rubber suction cup first, towards the zombie. He sat the stainless steel trash bin in front of him like a make shift shield. The zombie, just stood there, apparently evaluating the situation, then he shuffled back to the door, slowly opened it and left!
Max stood for a second breathing hard, and then heard the women’s bathroom door open and a female voice quietly say, “Well Jimbo, any other wee-wee birds?”
“No one.” Max heard the zombie man say. Dumbfounded Max listened to the woman's voice reply.
“Good, lets go on real slow, V, you take point, Gap girl you are next up, Jimbo you got the rear, keep well back to cover us, the other girls will be following after me, go people, we have a cube hole up here on the left.”
‘Up on the left? Uh-oh' thought Max, 'that is my cube. Shit.' He went to the door, it opened in such a way to allow Max to peer down the corridor towards where the zombies were heading. The zombie Jimbo was looking right at him, then turned away and shuffled back down the corridor, the opposite direction. 'What the fuck is going on?' thought Max, 'He is letting me get the jump on them, it has to be a trap!'
Still Max, knew it was not going to get any better than right now. Max eased out the door, bracing it against a loud slamming noise and headed off behind, what looked like an all girl gang.
The lead girl was fast approaching the cube entrance, 'This is it.' thought Max. He ran up behind one of the three girls between him and the three zombies in the lead and swung the metal garbage can over his head, it made a resounding thud and the zombie girl dropped like a sack of cement.
When he was a kid, Max, like most of his generation, had watched cartoons. He was reminded of one in particular where the character would swing his guitar at his foes, making a grand ‘El-ka-bong’ noise as he struck them down. It was hilarious, the trash can, filled halfway, made the same noise as it smashed the zombie girl down.
A nice side effect of the strike was the loudness of the noise, Max had meant to scream out a primitive war cry, but somehow it came out as a faint gurgled squeal, definitely not the noise to wake the whole office as he hoped. The 'el-ka-bong', however, woke them all up effectively. As Max was readying a blow against one of the other girls, he heard Stewart screaming, “Get the fuck off me Steve! Get the shotgun, you Tom, you! Oh for fuck’s sake!” followed by the sound of her nine millimeter gun discharging, the girl, V, came reeling out of the cube opening and the third zombie, pushed her and the second girl past the opening into Kirkpatrick’s reception.
Max pushed forward into the second girl, who still hadn’t quite figured out just what was going on, she was slow, slower than the three women in the lead and dressed pretty nicely too, in a blouse and mini skirt Max could have admired on a living body, that thought led to revulsion and he pushed her all the harder forward, screaming, “Stewart I am behind them, there are five or six left!”
That got the two girl’s attention, they turned on Max like slavering beasts and his all out charge abruptly ended, at least he had the trash can between him and them, even if he could not raise it over his head to whack them, he could use it as a lousy shield to keep them a whopping eight inches away from his fleshy parts.
Stewart appeared behind the girls and Max ducked, mini skirt girl number one suffered what was probably her second fatal wound in the last twenty four hours as the back of her head was forced through the front of her face. Then Max saw one of the faster moving zombies jump Stewart from behind, after that he was busy dealing with mini-skirt zombie number two or was it number three? She was strong and Max had already been through a lot that day, she jumped up on him and her momentum, if not her mass, knocked him over onto his back. A shot gun blast echoed in the confined space of the office, but Max’s girl kept on coming. He tried to flip her over using an old high school move from his wrestling days. He had a moment to reflect that he never thought that wrestling would come in handy, but hey, just goes to show that everything you learn has a proper application.
The mini-skirted girl went flying, a testament to Coach Julian’s training and the laws of physics. Once again Max was up and on his feet. He reached down and grabbed his trash bin as another shotgun blast echoed in the
