Books of the Dead | Book 9 | Dead of Winter

by Spears, R. J.

  Dead of Winter

  Books of the Dead 9

  R.J. Spears

  Radioactive Studio

  Copyright © [2021] by [R.J. Spears]

  All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1. The Winter of My Discontent

  2. The Phone Conference

  3. What She Has Become

  4. Divine Inspiration

  5. Internal Strife

  6. Reconnaissance

  7. First Encounter

  8. The Nest

  9. The Waiting Game

  10. Out of the Cage

  11. Door Number One or Door Number Two?

  12. My Little Surprise

  13. Delay of Game

  14. Intruder Alert

  15. Ghost Story

  16. I Am Afraid of Ghosts

  17. Temptation Too Much To Bear

  18. New Kids on the Block

  19. Standing at the Abyss

  20. Never Give Up

  21. Different Sides

  22. A Hint of an Idea

  23. On the Way to a Rescue

  24. Rescue Mission

  25. Radical Change of Plans

  26. A Desperate Run For It

  27. Aftermath

  28. Lost in the Dark

  29. A View from Above

  30. Making the Call

  31. Deal Breaker

  32. Breaking Through the Inertia

  33. Giving Up the Ghost

  34. Sacrifice

  35. Finding the Strength to Go On

  36. Into the Tunnels

  37. Passing the Nest

  38. FUBAR

  39. Dozer or Bust

  40. Wagon Ho

  41. Take Me To the River

  42. Wake Up Call

  43. To the Boats!

  44. Boats Away!

  45. One Final Look Back

  46. A Note from the Author

  Chapter 1

  The Winter of My Discontent

  I hold these truths to be self-evident. She’s out there. I know she is, but she’s lost and I’m the only one that can save her.

  Okay, pay attention. I’m only going to go over this once. There’s a lot of details here, and some of them are very important. Like life and death important.

  By ‘out there,’ I’m talking about the area around the Ohio State University Medical complex on the south end of the sprawling university campus. Specifically, at that very moment, I was on the roof of a medical research building with the chilled winter wind whipping around me, chapping my cheeks, and freezing my ass off. But I was a sentinel on the watch, looking for her.

  The ‘her’ I’m referring to is Kara. She’s the woman I love and when I say she’s lost, what I mean is that she’s half-dead. That’s sort of complicated to explain, but the world has been swarmed by the undead. Kara got bitten by one of those zombies, and, as was the natural process of being bitten, she became infected and died. But she didn’t really die all the way.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. You see, Kara, Naveen, Brother Ed, Jason, and me ended up at the hospital as a part of a holy mission pressed upon us by God.

  Yeah, I said God. For some reason, not too soon after the world went down the drain when the zombies took over, God had decided to start sending me visions. Yes, real visions. Some of them were cryptic. Some were frightening. Some saved our asses.

  At first, I thought I was losing my mind, but when those visions began becoming true, I had to accept the unacceptable. It was beyond insane that God had picked me, but as I’ve said all too often, it is what it is.

  These visions put us on a holy quest to find a vaccine to prevent the zombie virus from turning people. That quest (given to us by the Big Guy upstairs) brought us to a team of people at the hospital seeking to create that very vaccine. We had the secret ingredient, which just happened to be in our friend Jason’s blood. You see, he was immune to the zombie virus.

  Unfortunately, as I’ve learned in this universe, with each action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. (I think there’s some scientific law that states that. I’m not a scientist, but I saw one on TV. Well, when there were TVs.)

  While we were on a holy mission, the forces of evil were doing everything they could to stop us. By forces of evil, I’m not talking about a bunch of bad guys with guns or even zombies. I’m talking about arch evil, as in the devil or some other dark, nefarious force.

  Those forces caught up to us and killed Jason. The only upside was that Doctor M (I’ll tell you about him later) was able to use Jason’s blood to create a vaccine. That vaccine’s claim to fame was that it protected people from turning into a zombie if they got bitten. Let’s just say that was a big win, but in Kara’s case, it was just a half-step.

  Please take note; the vaccine did work. In the chaos of a final battle, Naveen got bitten, but she had been given the vaccine prior to that. So, she did not turn. Hooray! But the vaccine was intended to be a preventative measure, not a cure.

  Doctor M emphatically told me that over and over again after Kara got bitten, but what could I do? I had to do something or else she was going to die.

  Sadly, we discovered that what the vaccine did after you were bitten was bring you back from the dead, but not all the way. That’s what happened to Kara. She came back half-human and half-zombie.

  Not being able to deal with this new half-dead existence, she fled from the research building and roamed among the dead. In our encounters with her, it was easy to see that this transformation had not only changed her physically but also emotionally and spiritually. It was as if a dark force had entered her.

  Somehow, she now commanded the zombies around our area and she brought them on a direct attack on us. With her zombie horde behind her, I saw such hatred in her dead gray eyes when she stared at me. She wanted to let all of her zombie army loose on us. To make us pay for what had been done to her. Really, she wanted to make me pay. The rest of the people with me would just be collateral damage.

  It was only when I told her that what she was doing she would kill Naveen and everyone inside that she backed down.

  That’s when I knew the real Kara was still inside there. That meant I could reach her. I just had to get my hands on a cure and then get past a few thousand or so zombies to get it to her.

  Oh yeah, my other obstacle was that a cure hadn’t been invented yet. That and the only medical research team working on it was a hundred miles away with a whole shit ton of zombies standing in my way. That was just another pesky little detail I had to deal with.

  So, that’s what I was doing perched on the roof of the medical research building, freezing my nutsack off. Trying to devise some new plan to make it happen. That’s what I was, the man with a plan, but I was all out of plans at that time. So, I waited for inspiration, divine or otherwise.

  On the ground seven stories below me, a hundred or more zombies ambled along in the courtyard between our building and the one next door. With winter fully upon us, the zombies wore a coating of snow and ice, bleaching out their appearance, making them seem like ghosts. Ghosts who wanted to eat us.

  A voice shouted behind me, “Hey, Nanook of the north, you waiting for the cold to freeze the last brain cell out of your skull?”

  When I turned around, I saw Alex standing with the door to the roof halfway open, shivering against the cold. She was short and stocky with her muscular figure hidden by her parka. She wore a knit cap that covered her buzz cut.
(How she found a way to keep her hair cut like that, I do not know and I do not ask. Some of life's questions are like that.)

  Alex had been a cop at the university before zombies took over the world. She was now my chief ally when it came to killing zombies. She was as tough as nails, but she had a soft spot for me.

  No, it’s not like that. We don’t play on the same team, as some would say. But we had both lost someone we loved, and it bound us together.

  “I like the view,” I said as I waved my arm to encompass the wide courtyard below.

  A few zombies shambled across the concrete, moving a little slower than normal. It was our theory that cold slowed them down. At least, it was my theory.

  “Did you see her?” Alex asked.

  It took me a moment to answer. “No. No sign of her.”

  “It’s been two weeks,” she said. It was her turn to pause. “Maybe she’s moved on?”

  “I have to think she’s out there,” I said. “I can’t give up on her. Not yet.”

  The expression on Alex’s face seemed to say all hope is lost. Don’t hold on, it will only draw out the pain.

  To her credit, she didn’t say any of those things. Instead, she said, “Doctor M is on a call with Doctor Richter down in Cincy. You want to be in on that? Sounds like he’s made some progress.”

  Of course, I did. Maybe that tight-ass Richter finally had some good news.

  Chapter 2

  The Phone Conference

  “Now, you’re interested in my vaccine,” Doctor M said, puffing his chest out in indignation. “It’s certainly about time.” We called him Doctor M because his last name was a total mouthful. That name was Methasashamasakeran. See what I mean? Now you know why we called him Doctor M.

  He stood at the end of a table in one of the building’s research laboratories. It was the place he had developed the vaccine that protected Naveen, but doomed Kara. Well, half-doomed her because I knew there had to be a way to bring her back from the precipice. There just had to be.

  To call Doctor M pompous was an understatement. When it came to this research science shit, he was genuinely brilliant. Like Naveen, his family had come from India, and also like Naveen, he had a light brown complexion. His face was overly round, and it didn’t help that he had a bad Clark Gable mustache. It made him look a little devious.

  Seated around the table with Doctor M was Lori, his chief research assistant, Richard, a nurse who had taken refuge in the hospital, and Alex. Naveen sat in the corner, watching the adults. Brother Ed was conspicuously absent, but that had become his default position as of late.

  You see, after our climactic battle with Colonel Kilgore, he revealed that he was supposed to die so that we could live. (Or at least that’s what he said he saw in a vision.) But Richard had miraculously resuscitated him. Anyone else would have been grateful, but Brother Ed was bitterly resentful about remaining in the land of the living.

  He had always been our resident sour puss, but he had taken it to a new level. You have to hand it to a guy like him, though. There are few people who are sad to have survived when others hadn’t, but that was Brother Ed. Dour to the end.

  “Well, Doctor Methasashamasakeran,” Doctor Richter said from the other end of the line, but Doctor M cut him off.

  “Please, I am well aware that my name is impossibly long. You can call me Doctor M.”

  “Well, okay,” Richter said, “let me continue. You see, we have had a couple of breakthroughs down here.”

  Doctor M leaned slightly closer to the satellite phone sitting on the table, his eyebrows raised.

  “We’re not one hundred percent there, but we are getting closer,” Richter said.

  Now, I was leaning closer to the sat-phone, too. Maybe this was my opportunity to do something for Kara. Of course, there was the tiny little detail of all those zombies between me and Doctor Richter’s research lab down in Cincinnati.

  “How so?” Doctor M asked, his voice displaying guarded skepticism.

  “As we spoke about a few weeks ago, one of my researchers, Doctor Jenkins, who had been working on treatments for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. That’s mad cow disease for the others with you not familiar with it. This disease has some very eerie similarities to the zombie virus. Anyway, Doctor Jenkins is quite brilliant, and in examining the zombie virus and seeing that there is a connection with the prions. His specialty is PrP receptors and…”

  And that’s where I got lost. I understood words like brain and disease, but when they went up the academic and scientific ladder, all I could do was stand there with my mouth hanging open. It was like I was a kindergartner in a room of PhDs. Which is basically what I was. Had there been a dunce cap sitting around, I would have eagerly placed it on my head and stuck my thumb in my mouth.

  Lori, who was Doctor M’s chief research assistant, joined in, and after a few more minutes, I felt like my head was swimming. At points, Doctor M would get a little overheated, but Lori was able to calm him down. Despite being a total science nerd, she had a comforting manner and wasn’t hard on the eyes.

  Richard sat next to me, and I leaned over and asked in a whisper, “You understand any of this shit.”

  “Very little,” he whispered back. “What I do understand is that Doctor Richter is now very interested in Doctor M’s vaccine, where he had basically shit-canned it before.”

  Richard was a stocky guy with slightly bulging eyes and was missing most of his hair. From what I had learned about him, he had worked his way out of poverty to become an EMT and then a nurse. He had come on at the hospital’s ER three years before, and while he wasn’t really all that book smart, he seemed to have a decent amount of innate intelligence.

  The doctors continued to banter back and forth, completely ignoring us or really anything else in the world. A pterodactyl could have flown by the window on fire, and I doubt if Doctor M would have noticed.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Hell if I know,” Richards said. “I’m guessing that Richter finally realized he could learn something from Doctor M’s vaccine.”

  “Like maybe he’s made a breakthrough?”

  “Who knows?”

  I leaned forward in my chair and said, “Excuse me.”

  At first, it was as if I weren’t even in the room as they went on with their conversation.

  I raised my hand to be polite, but that got ignored, too.

  “Hey, you academic assholes, I have a question,” I nearly shouted.

  It was as if I had farted at a wedding. Doctor M and Lori looked in my direction with contorted expressions that seemed to question my very existence.

  “What?” Doctor M spat out.

  “Aren’t we back to square one?” I asked.

  Doctor Richter said, “No, no. With what Doctor Jenkins has discovered on our end and what Doctor Meth-- Doctor M has made, I think we might have something to advance our efforts forward.”

  “But we have no way to get it to you,” I said.

  Alex put her elbows on the table and said, “Yeah, in case you hadn’t noticed, FedEx is out of business, like forever.”

  On the other end of the line, Richter cleared his throat, then said, “I am well aware of that. But the fate of humanity is on the line here. Risks must be taken.”

  “I’m sure you’re fine with that, as long as we take the risk,” Alex replied.

  “Well, from what your doctor has said, your facilities have been compromised,” Richter said. “It might be better if you did leave.”

  “My ass,” Alex said. “You guys are just scared shitless.”

  Richter took in a long breath, “I’m not sure this conversation is taking a constructive path.”

  I saw my moment. “What if we could get you our vaccine? Do you really think you could do something with it?”

  “What are you saying, Joel?” Alex said, whipping her attention toward me. “There’s no way anyone makes it out of here and then into their city.”

  “There’s got to be s
ome way,” I said.

  Alex slapped her hand down onto the table, causing everyone to jump. “There is no way. You can’t save her. You need to get that through your fucking head. This crazy-ass talk needs to end, and it needs to end now before someone does something that gets them killed.”

  She shot out of her chair and shoved away from the table, knocking her chair over. She whirled around and stalked out of the room.

  Richter took a moment to respond but said, “Perhaps we should table this discussion for now.”

  “Yes,” Doctor M said, “You are probably right.” He reached down and pressed the off button on the satellite phone.

  Alex may have been done with the discussion, and she may have been right about someone getting bad ideas because that person was me. And yes, it might just get me killed.

  Now I just had to come up with an idea, bad or good.

  Chapter 3

  What She Has Become

  She felt revulsion for what she was doing, but knew she couldn’t help herself. She knew she had to eat, but chomping down on newly dead flesh and muscle filled her with a deep sense of self-loathing.

  Blood dripped off her chin and fell onto her already badly soiled clothing. Her teeth tore away a piece of muscle, and it was a chore to chew it, but she got it done, swallowing the hunk of flesh. It went down her throat, wet and still a little bit warm.

  She had found the scrawny cat in the building she had holed up in and then trapped it in a storage room. Killing it was a challenge as she remembered her childhood cat, Mr. Whiskers. She made it quick and painless, twisting its head completely around with one rending turn.

  Over the past few months, she had been reduced to eating rodents, a few cats, and even a couple of dogs. Her only consolation was that she had still not killed and eaten a human. The urge was undeniable and almost impossible to resist. She had kept the desire at bay, but she felt her resolve slipping away each day.