“Dead body behind us,” she reminded him.

“Fine!”

Ken whipped open the door. The alley came into view. Ken’s small Volkswagen convertible was parked just across from the back door under a carport. Between the door and the Volkswagen were five zombies greedily ripping apart some poor person and stuffing bits of flesh and gore into their mouths.

“Shut the door,” Lenore ordered.

Ken stared in horror. “I think they’re eating the mailman.”

Lenore reached out and slammed the door shut just as the zombies realized there were fresh humans standing nearby. Sliding the heavy bolts into place and twirling the deadbolts until they locked, Lenore felt her stomach heaving. Beside her, Ken sobbed softly. Something hit the door on the other side and faintly they could hear the dead thing growling.

Overcome, Lenore stumbled to a nearby sink they used for cleaning up the brushes and bowls and threw up. Tears stung her eyes as her stomach kept emptying and her body was wracked with tremors. Ken’s hands delicately pulled her hair back and he stood next to her until she finished. She rinsed her mouth out with water as Ken rubbed her back and whispered that it would be okay.

Slowly straightening, she tried not to let him see she was crying. “Mr. Cloy is in danger. We were supposed to pick him up. They’re trying to get into his store.”

Behind them, the banging on the back door continued.

“We can’t go out through the alley. Can we go out the front? Maybe whack the little demon kid?”

“The other ones are right next door. If we go out and they rush us...” Lenore shook her head. “We’re kinda stuck.”

Ken suddenly looked excited. “The gun! The gun! The Sheriff has a gun!”

Together they raced over to the man’s body and knelt beside it. They both reached for the holster at the same time only to realize it was empty.

“What the hell?” Ken looked around the store.

“I got a bad feeling,” Lenore said, heaving herself to her feet. She moved over to the window and cracked the curtain just a little.

The little bastard was still pounding on the door, but didn’t notice her. In the street more of the dead things wandered around. They were fairly messed up and it was hard to tell if they were townspeople or not, though a few looked slightly familiar. She scanned the street and sighed.

“Gun is out in the street. He must have had it in his hand.”

She let the curtain fall into place.

The phone began to ring again. Ken snatched it up. “Hello? Mr. Cloy? Yes. We were going to get you but there are more zombies in the alley. Um. Um. You don’t have an office in the back you can lock yourself in? Well, true. You’d be trapped with no exit. Uh.”

Lenore grabbed the phone from Ken. “Go up to your storage room and lock yourself in. At least you got a window up there. Yeah, I know it has bars. But you’re in a hardware store. Grab something-”

Even in the beauty shop they heard the glass shatter next door. It was a frightful sound and Lenore heard Mr. Cloy gasp in terror.

“Run to the storage room upstairs!”

The phone on the other end hit the floor and she heard footsteps rushing away from it as the moans and screeches of the dead grew louder.

She banged the phone down.

Through the thick brick walls, they heard the cries of the dead.

“I want to go upstairs,” Ken said finally.

Lenore jumped at the sound of someone thumping their fists against the beauty shop window started. “Yeah. I think you’re right. They’re all stirred up now.”

Together they hurried to the door to the stairwell that led to the second floor. Ken quickly unlocked it and they both stepped inside. Ken twirled the deadbolts into place.

They rushed up the long wooden staircase to the floor above.

“I hate today,” Ken said.

“I’m there with you,” Lenore agreed.

Unlocking the door to his apartment, Ken said, “We need to get a plan together. Stat.”

Lenore stopped on the step below him and took a deep breath. “Right now, I just wanna sit down for a minute and not think about it.”

Ken nodded and opened the door to his apartment.

Next door, they could hear Mr. Cloy screaming their names.

7.

The Fate of Mr. Cloy

The morning sun poured through the high windows of Ken’s apartment, filling the stylishly-decorated space with glorious light that illuminated the leather furniture and the art nouveau paintings that hung in antique frames on the walls. It was a perfect setting, except for Mr. Cloy’s voice screaming their names next door.

Ken drew in a few deep breaths and prayed to God it would be over soon. How long would it take for the zombies to kill Mr. Cloy? He felt tears sliding down his cheeks as the screaming continued. Next to him, Lenore sank down into a chair and put her face in her hands.

Together, they waited for the feeding frenzy to be over and prayed for Mr. Cloy’s screams to end.

Shaking, Ken sat down on the sofa and began to rearrange the fresh flowers in the china bowl on the coffee table. He couldn’t think of anything else to do and he just couldn’t sit still.

The screaming didn’t stop.

“Why won’t it end?” Lenore finally said.

Ken blinked, then whispered, “Oh, shit.” He realized Mr. Cloy wasn’t screaming because he was being eaten. He was screaming to get their attention.

Jumping to his feet, Ken indicated for Lenore to follow him to the room next to the front door. It was a room that he had yet to renovate. The roof had leaked and the wood was rotted and the walls moldy. The estimate on how much it would cost to renovate had been out of his price range so he had shut the door and pretended the room didn’t exist.

“The foundation settled a few years ago after a bad series of storms and the wall in here pulled away from the main part of the building. This section was an add- on.” Ken explained as he unlocked the door and shoved it open. “It used to be an open porch. Mr. Cloy’s building was built after this one and was built right up against it. A tornado during that big storm tore the second floor off of Mr. Cloy’s building except for the old storage room. They never rebuilt the second floor. They just fixed up what they could. I think I know what he’s doing.”

“Thanks for the history lesson, but show me what the hell is going on,” Lenore snapped.

Ken pointed to a corner that was flush to Mr. Cloy’s building. There was yellowed caulk bubbling out of the crevice. “There is a crack in the wall that goes through to the storage room. My bastard ex put caulk here as a temporary fix.” The crack was almost two inches wide.

Mr. Cloy was still screaming their names.

“I think I gotcha,” Lenore said.

Together, they began to pull at the hard and dirty caulk with their fingers, then resorted to chipping it out with knives Ken retrieved from the kitchen. It took some hard work, but they finally got a section cleared out.

Pressing firmly against the wall, Ken could peer through the crack to the other side. Mr. Cloy’s eye was staring right back at him.

“Took you long enough,” Mr. Cloy’s lips said under his big bushy black mustache.

“We thought you were getting eaten,” Ken explained.

“They’re in the store, but I got two doors between them and me right now,” Mr. Cloy answered.

Lenore shoved Ken out of the way and said, “You got stuff to make this wider?”

“I don’t keep anything up here. You got something on your side?”

Lenore snorted. “Ken’s idea of tools is a knife for a screwdriver and a heel of his boots for a hammer.”

“Hey,” Ken protested, though it was true.

“It would take forever anyway. Got at least two feet of quarry rock and mortar between us. I’m gonna try and pry the bars off the window. The tornado did a lot of damage and they’re kinda loose already. If I can get onto the roof of the storage room, maybe you guys can haul me up onto the roof of your building. There ain’t no windows facing my way on your second floor.”

“Okay, let us know when you’re ready. That sounds like a decent enough plan. They ain’t in our building yet.” Lenore stepped away from the wall and gave Ken an annoyed look. “You do have rope, right?”

Ken hesitated then said meekly, “No. But we can tie sheets together.”

Lenore rolled her eyes and Ken ignored her to flatten himself against the wall to see Mr. Cloy one more time. “We’ll get you over here then make plans. We can do this!”

Mr. Cloy’s laughter was a welcome sound. “With you and Lenore on my side, I feel safe as a baby at his mama’s teat.”

“Ew,” Ken answered. “Baby slobber.”

This made Mr. Cloy laugh again as Ken saw him pull away from the crack to start work on the window. It sucked that they didn’t have a way to bash through the wall, but then again, if they made a hole in the wall and the dead guys got into the storage room...yep, it was better to haul him up onto the roof.

Ken left the room and found Lenore standing in his kitchen, calling her grandmother again. From the look on her face, he knew she had a busy signal again. It wasn’t uncommon for her grandmother to be on the phone chatting, but on a day like today, it was more than annoying.