More of the dead were pouring in from the stairwell, slowly,but this was the tortoise's race and not the rabbit's. The others were backingtowards a stairwell on the other side of the parking garage. He saw Katie'sheavily bandaged hand, spots of red blossoming on the thick gauze that Joan hadwrapped around her maimed appendage. Katie held the hand close to her chest,her free hand clutching her handgun.
Lou's thoughts went back to the men in the street. Theone's they had gunned down. Were they good? Were they bad? They were dead.
"Let's get down, people. Take that stairwell!"They didn't need further prodding. They were ready to run, rabbits fighting thetortoise. Rabbits going as fast as they could. The finish line was somewhereout there, but would they know it when they saw it?
Lou was the last one in the stairwell. His nose was onceagain assaulted by the familiar stench of stale urine. Ahead of him, the otherspelted down the stairs, their shoes and boots clomping on the rough concrete.From below him, around the turn of the landing, he could hear the clear smackof a metal hammerhead upon the skull of the dead. They were in the stairwellahead of them. That was not good news. Lou hoped that the dead were scattered throughoutthe garage and that there were only a few standing between them and thestreets.
Down they went, circling to their left, the smack ofhammer on skull ringing through the stairwell. Katie shuffled along in front ofhim, not quite rushing as fast as he wished. Now was the crucial time, thecritical time. They would escape, or they would be surrounded... and then theywould be lost, for a time at least, before they would rise again.
He stepped over the flailing bodies of the dead withmisshapen heads, their arms reaching out for him. Then they were out on thestreet. Lou took a deep breath, realizing that he had been holding his breathas they ran down the stairs. The air felt good; it still reeked of the rottingcorpses of the dead, but it felt like a lungful of air that served a purpose.It served to move him through the streets, one step-closer to that finish line.
They moved through the scattered remains of the dead thathad followed them into the garage, the rest of them shuffling aimlessly in thesix floors of concrete that piled above them, trapped there until somethingliving came along and drew them out. For now, the parking garage was amausoleum.
The street lay ahead of them, empty but for a fewstraggling dead folk, their limbs too busted up to allow them to keep up withthe other dead, the more functional ones. Lou thought of them as"bustas," an old slang word that had fallen out of fashion through nofault of the word. The "bustas" were easy to move through.
Without having to tell anyone, they burst into a jog.Even Clara with her sore ankle and Mort with his slowly healing knee saidnothing as they loped up the street, away from the dead in the parking garage.Above them, the death rattle continued as they scurried through the blocks, upthe hill, and away into the outskirts of Portland.
It would be better there. Lou knew it would be. How couldit be any worse?
Chapter 13: Into the Darkness
They stood at a fork in the road. A decision was waitingto be made. Mort was bent over, his hands on his knees, gasping for air. Hisknee throbbed, but it had been worth it to get out of the city proper. They hadrun for maybe a mile, dodging and weaving between the dead and the battered,disowned cars that lined the street.
The dead were behind them, some of them in plain sight,but the survivors had a moment to breathe, and sometimes breath was the mostprecious commodity in the new world. They stood looking at three possibilities,each one with its own shortcomings. To their left, a road curved gently upwardand out of sight around the side of a hill. It was the on-ramp to the freeway.A line of cars stood abandoned in the road. They could only assume that thehighway itself was much the same, a parking lot full of deadly occupants lockedinto vehicles that were worthless.
In front of them the MAX tracks wound westward,disappearing into the hills. A tunnel waited at the end of the tracks, or soJoan said. She had the best knowledge of the West Side, having lived there forseveral years while commuting to the hospital. The tunnel would be dark, whichwouldn't be a problem if it were empty. If those things were in there, then itwould be a death trap. Mort didn't fancy dying in a concrete tunnel, the weightof the world pressing down upon him. The dead ones were bad enough in thedaylight, let alone in a pitch-black tunnel where there was no escape.
To the right, a road led through a residential area. Joansaid the road wound through some neighborhoods and up over the hill into thesuburbs of the West Hills. There would be plenty of houses to hole up in shouldthey need to. Who knew? Maybe there were other survivors as well. Of course,how friendly those survivors were was anybody's guess.
Mort coughed and spat a wad of phlegm on the ground.Behind him, he could hear the scrape of shoes on pavement. A white hand slappedhim on the shoulder. Mort turned to Blake who held his notepad in his hand. Helooked down at the notepad and read the single word there,"Thoughts?" Mort found it odd that sometimes Blake preferred to writehis thoughts down on a notepad. It's not like he couldn't speak.
Mort looked straight at Blake while he talked. Blake wasbecoming better at reading lips, but he needed to see you from straight on tobe able to puzzle out
