Free Undead by John Russo Page B

child’s bedroom. The bedsheets were rumpled and stained with blood, as if they had been clawed loose by someone struggling to hang on while he (or she) was being dragged from the bed. But there was no body in the room. Anxiously, afraid of what he might find, Ben searched around the bed and under it—and in the closet, which contained the clothing of a boy perhaps eleven or twelve years old. There were a couple of baseball bats, and an old skinned up baseball with the cover half off, lying on the floor of the closet.
    Ben guessed that the boy was dead. Probably he had been dragged out of the house by some of those things that now stood watching and waiting outside. Probably the dead lady in the hall had been the boy’s grandmother.
    The thought of it renewed in Ben the terror of what was happening, which he had been able to suppress while his mind was occupied with working hard and taking defensive measures and concentrating on his own survival.
    He thought of his own children—two boys, one nine and one thirteen. He did not have a wife any longer; she was dead; she had died several years ago and left him to raise the children alone. It was not easy. He loved the boys, but his job took him out of town often and much of the time he had to leave them in the care of their grandmother while he traveled and tried to earn enough money to support them all. He had been on his way home to them, but in the breakdown of communications during the present emergency his train had not arrived and he had started to hitchhike, desperate to get home. Nobody would pick him up and, walking at the outskirts of the town he had been in, he began encountering signs of destruction and murder. It puzzled him at first. He became scared. Then, in a restaurant he heard a newscast and he knew he had to get back to his family right away. He could not get a bus or cab. He even tried renting a car or just paying someone to take him where he wanted to go. Finally, hitchhiking again, a farmer picked him up and drove him a long way, but dropped him off out on the country, in the middle of nowhere it seemed. Ben got the truck on the front lawn from a dead man—a man who had been dragged from it and killed at the edge of a dirt road. He had continued listening to broadcasts on the truck radio, and he knew as much about what was happening as anyone else—which was very little. But he knew he wanted to survive and get back to his boys and their grandmother—although his reason told him that they were probably much better off in this emergency than he was himself. At least they were in a town, with other people and police protection and food and medical care if they required it. And their grandmother was a capable person. The boys would probably be all right. Ben tried to convince himself of that, but it was not easy, while he was confronted with the bloodstained sheets and mattress of the young boy who had probably been killed not so very long ago. And the old farmhouse was more a prison than it was a refuge for him and Barbara—although he did not even know her name and he could not help her, it seemed, and she was unwilling or unable to help herself.
    Ben retreated from the child’s room and tried the other closed door. The old lady’s bedroom. He did not turn the light on at first. His eyes fell on the edge of the bed, with its white sheets, and he could see well enough to know that there were several large pieces of furniture in there. He flicked a switch, and the lights revealed nothing out of the ordinary—a bed and a couple of dressers. A quilt was folded and lying on top of the sheets, but the bed had not been slept in. Probably the old lady had gotten the boy to sleep and was preparing for bed herself when they were both attacked.
    Ben entered the room and began to drag furniture out into the hallway. His plan was to get all the things of any possible use out of the boy’s room and the old lady’s room, and then board up the doors.
    He did not