Books of the Dead | Book 9 | Dead of Winter

by Spears, R. J.

A handful of humans were just two blocks away in the medical research building. She could lead her moderate-sized horde there and be inside in no time. Together, they could easily break into the building and surge up the stairs to where Joel and his friends were. Then they would all dine on human flesh. Maybe that would stop that insatiable hunger inside her? Maybe?

  The only thing that kept her from acting was Naveen. The residual feelings she still held for Naveen acted like a barrier, but those feelings were getting dimmer and dimmer with each passing day. There were times she could barely remember what Naveen looked like.

  Each day that passed, she felt herself slipping away from her past. Getting further from what she had been and further from her humanity.

  It didn’t help that dozens of zombies stood outside the door of the storage room she had locked herself in. They let out their tuneless and dissonant moans and sometimes even clawed at the door, wanting to get in to be with her. She didn’t understand why she attracted them and what compulsion drove them to collect around her.

  Their very presence seemed to twist her mind further and further away from sanity. It was as if she were spiraling down, falling past her half-dead state, getting closer and closer to be truly and fully dead. Like them.

  If she fell that far, she knew she would no longer be able to deny the burning hunger in her guts. She would forget even Naveen and act in a way that there was no coming back from. She would lose any connection to what made her human, and it was then she knew she would be utterly and completely lost.

  This thought filled her with a despair so intense, she felt as if she were already spiraled down and away from anything she had been.

  As if on cue, a deep smoky voice spoke inside her head.

  “Kara, look what you’ve been reduced to,” the voice spoke.

  She knew the voice all too well. It haunted her every day. It was the Night Visitor. And she knew what he wanted.

  “Leave me alone,” she growled out, scanning the darkness of the storage room. Her voice wasn’t anything like the one she had when she had been fully alive. When she went through the transformation from life to death and then back to this half-life, her voice had changed. It was now coarse and harsh, sounding almost like a robot gargling on glass.

  “Oh, why are you angry at me?” The Night Visitor asked in an almost playful tone. “It’s not my fault you were living like an animal, skulking around in the shadows.”

  “Shut up!” She screamed, tossing the half-eaten corpse of the dead cat into the corner of the room where it thumped against the wall.

  Her scream echoed in the room until it decayed away like the world outside.

  “You should listen to me,” the Night Visitor said. “I’m only telling you what you already know. Your Joel is to blame for you being like this. For being half-alive. And what he did had an effect on your unborn child.”

  Kara felt the heat of anger sweep away from her, like the tide rolling out to sea.

  “Please,” she said, and this time her voice was close to breaking from grief. “Leave me alone.”

  “You deserve so much better than this,” the Night Visitor said. “If Joel had only listened to you and let you stay south of the city like you wanted. Well, nothing would have happened to you. You’d be safe and sound, and so would your child. You know this.”

  “What do you want from me?” She said, her voice rising again, but still thick with pain.

  The Night Visitor gave the moment a pregnant pause, then said, “You know what I want. You have to stop him. Stop him and all of his friends.”

  “What can they do?” She asked. “They’re just a handful of people trapped in a building.”

  “I’ve read that a man with faith can move mountains,” the Night Visitor said. “While your Joel is still alive, he is a threat. To me. To you. If you can do this one little thing for me, I can restore you. I can save your unborn child.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said, but he heard either doubt or hope behind her voice.

  “I’m talking to you across time and space,” he said. “You have no idea what I can do.”

  “Then why don’t you do this yourself?”

  This time, he needed to pause. “Because child, there are rules.”

  He had already broken many of the rules. That was his way. He was the great deceiver. But because he had agreed to these rules thousands of years ago, his opponent was allowed to bend the rules, as well. This had gotten his last master minion killed. Colonel Kilgore had completed a part of his mission and killed Jason Carter, but not before those damned scientists had created their vaccine.

  When he considered these threats, this vaccine was the biggest threat to his plan for domination. When the undead had risen, he had seen his opportunity and seized it. It was HIS time. His time to take what was rightfully his. He was the ruler of earth and air. Certainly, he could rule it all.

  Now, though, he sensed another threat. One bigger than a vaccine. His ability to see precisely what they were up to was obscured, and he guessed that his opponent was veiling the people in the medical research building. That alone tipped his hand that what they were doing was of great consequence.

  Yes, the likelihood of any of them being able to get out of that building alive was next to nothing, but he knew if they were all dead, there’d be no chance of that at all.

  “I don’t need to explain myself to you,” he said, and she sensed a seething anger in his voice.

  “Then you must not be as powerful as you say you are,” she said.

  “WATCH your tone with me!” He shouted so loudly in her mind that she fell to her knees and her hands went to the sides of her head to hold the pain inside.

  “I will leave you now. Leave you to consider your choices,” he said. “You can decide whether you want to continue this pitiful existence. If you would just do what I ask, then I promise you that I can make your life better.”

  She didn’t say anything. Despite the pain in her head and the tortured thoughts roiling in her mind, she still knew what he was and what the cost could be to serve him. But she also knew that she hated what she was and didn’t know how much longer she could stand to be this way.

  It was truly the devil’s choice she was going to have to make.

  Chapter 4

  Divine Inspiration

  No matter how I wracked my mind, I could not come up with a plan. Every idea ended one of two ways - with me getting eaten or all of us getting killed. Neither of those were appealing, but even if there was a one out of a million chance that I could get that vaccine to Doctor Richter, then I had to try it. And if that led to a one in a trillion chance I could bring Kara back, then I was going for it. I had to try it.

  I stood in the doorway of the room I had shared with Kara. It had been an administrative office that we had made homey by moving in a hospital bed and an industrial end table. It was about as charming as a crypt.

  I didn’t stay there anymore. The memories were too painful. My new room was down the hall around the corner. Just far enough away, but never truly far enough. Not when I could just walk in and rip my heart out.

  Even looking in was like sticking a dagger in my chest. It’s not that we had shared great memories there, but we had been together. Not like now.

  “Aren’t you always the masochist?” Alex’s voice came from behind me.

  She caught me. I didn’t want people to know I revisited this room. I wanted it to be my secret, but in a place and a group this small, there was no hiding.

  “Did you do something to hang on to Rebecca?” I asked.

  Alex had been in love with a woman named Rebecca before the world fell. Rebecca had gotten bitten by one of the undead, and that was it.

  I knew I was on dangerous ground and half expected a punch in the neck or something. Alex could be a touchy one.

  “Before she died,” Alex said, “I spent the last few hours while she was still in her right mind in the ER. It was a fucking nightmare. People were moa
ning and crying out in pain. Even more were dying. By then, the doctors were on to what happened when someone was bitten. They died, and reanimation was next. They had...methods of taking care of it. I didn’t want anyone to do that to my Rebecca. I took her out of the ER and to an abandoned office space here at the hospital. Hell, no one was coming into work with all the shit going down. Anyway, it’s where I took care of her. You know what I mean.”

  “Yes,” I said, and I did. When Kara died, I had my gun ready to take her out. Ready and waiting, aimed at her head. Her eyes closed, and I heard her breathing slow, then stop. I waited, afraid to do what I knew I had to do. Only a few minutes later, her eyes popped open, but they were no longer blue. Instead, they were gray and lifeless. I closed my eyes, knowing that she had turned. No one came back and lived or anything close to living. I felt the tension of the trigger under my finger, and although I knew it would break me, I was ready to ease Kara out of the world.

  That’s when she talked.

  Zombies don’t talk. Since she spoke and zombies don’t, she wasn’t a zombie. Yes, that’s elementary deduction, but when she spoke, my heart soared. There was something not quite right, but I was delirious that she hadn’t been turned.

  I left to get Doctor M and Richard, knowing Kara may need medical attention. When I returned to the room, she was gone. At that point, I didn’t realize the extent of what was wrong with her. That she had come only halfway back.

  Alex continued her recollection. “I used to go back to that office because it was the last place I had seen her alive. It was just a stupid fucking office. With chairs and desks and filing cabinets. Where people had done their mundane and shitty jobs, but I went there every few days because...because…”

  “It was a shrine,” I said. “Like this room is a shrine for me. A place I can remember.”

  We shared a heavy silence for a few seconds, then she said, “It’s really fucked up. And we are sad little people, aren’t we?”

  “That we are,” I said and started to turn back to her when it hit. Like so many times before, I went weak in the knees, and my vision dimmed with the inevitable darkness ready to wash in. There was no fighting it, so I just went with it.

  God was sending me another vision. Oh boy, I couldn’t wait.

  Now, you might think getting a vision from God was a good thing. With God on your side, who could stand against you?

  If only it were that simple. Sometimes these visions were as cryptic as a riddle. Other times, they provided some hopeful clues or imagery. And at other times they were just plain scary as shit.

  This vision was somewhere between all those options, caught in the middle between cryptic and scary as shit.

  When I came out of it, I discovered I was on my back with Alex’s face hovering above me, only partially in focus. Her lips were moving, but the noise coming from them sounded far off and indistinct.

  For her, it must have been disturbing, but for me, it was just standard operating procedure. Sometimes my visions were gentle. Those usually came on me in my sleep, much like dreams. When they came on me while I was awake, they dropped me, leaving me senseless and weak. At least I had never pissed my pants.

  The worst time was when a vision hit me while I was riding a bike. Oh yeah, and there were zombies heading for me as I laid on the side of a road, as helpless as a baby. Fortunately, Brother Ed saved my ass that time.

  It took almost a minute for me to make it back to full consciousness, but I could tell that Alex was about to slap me. People did that in movies to bring others out of stupors. To me, it never made sense.

  Alex had her hand pulled back, ready to put it in motion when I flailed up a hand to block her. She aborted the move.

  “What the hell was that?” She asked.

  “Oh, that’s right,” I said, my voice hoarse and shaky. “You’ve never seen me have one of those.”“One of those, whats?” She asked.

  “That was me having a vision,” I said.

  “It looked more like you had a seizure,” she replied.

  “Yeah, I could see that,” I said. “But I assure you I had a vision.”

  “You know, I’m not sure I’m on board with all these visions from God voodoo.”

  “Richard said he saw us coming before we got to the hospital,” I said.

  By us, I meant Kara, Brother Ed, Naveen, and me.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said, waving a dismissive hand in my direction.

  “Richard said he had dreams of us coming for months. I had visions of the hospital. Then we showed up. I’d like to think that is proof enough.”

  “Whatever,” she said, and I could tell she didn’t like accepting this truth. “So, what did you see, vision boy?”

  “Oh, yeah, about that,” I said. “No one is going to like what it told me.”

  Chapter 5

  Internal Strife

  “Oh, you are damn right. I don’t like this at all,” Richard said, slapping his hand onto the table.

  “My vision says we can do this,” I said. “That bulldozer will get me to the river.”

  “But it doesn’t get us past all those zombies to get to the damned bulldozer,” Richard said.

  I had convened our little team in a conference room down from Doctor M’s lab. Doctor M didn’t want any part of our little meeting, so he was tasked with ‘baby sitting’ Naveen. Of course, that was a double-edged sword. On one edge, Naveen had someone watching over her, but on the other edge, it meant that he could continue drawing as much blood as he could from her for his endless experiments. So, this meeting had to be fast, or else he’d drain her faster than a vampire.

  In attendance were Alex, Richard, Brother Ed, Lori, and me. Lori looked really nervous. She had never been on an “away team” mission, but with Kara gone, we might need another person. Only if it was necessary, though.

  Beside Lori sat Brother Ed. He continued with his sullen countenance, which wasn’t anything new. The only thing different was that he seemed more elbows and knees than in the past. His mood seemed to have diminished his appetite. Only coaxing from Naveen could get him to eat.

  “But that bulldozer is my ride,” I said. “At least, that’s what my vision told me.”

  The bulldozer was the one I had seen time and time again as I stood up on the roof of our building looking for Kara. I just never put it together that we could use it to get to the river.

  “That’s not what bothers me,” Alex said. “We don’t have any safe way to get to that bulldozer.” She got up from the expansive conference room table and walked over to the window. “If you hadn’t noticed, there’s a whole shitload of zombies standing between us and that bulldozer. So, your vision may have told you that it was your ride, but did it tell you how to get to it?”

  “Hmmmm, well, no,” I said, not meeting Alex’s gaze.

  “There you have it,” she said as she spread her arms out from her side, her palms held upwards.

  I stuck my index finger in the air and said, “But I have a plan.”

  “That does not sound good,” Richard said.

  “It almost never is,” Brother Ed said.

  “Listen, folks, no matter what, we need to find a way around this complex,” I said. “We’re going to run out of food at some point. We need to be able to scavenge what we can and I think the tunnels are the best way to do it.”

  “And they just happen to be the safest way to the bulldozer you want to ride out of here,” Richard said, glowering at me.

  “Well, there is that,” I said, “but I won’t put anyone at risk.”

  “Is that what you told Kara?” Brother Ed asked.

  I felt an unexpected surge of heat race through my body, and I wanted to go across the table after Brother Ed. Back at the Manor, he had never been on my side, but he seemed to have resigned his fate to me. This attack came out of nowhere, and it felt like a slap in the face.

  Alex must have seen something in my expression because she stood up and pushed both of her arms out,
one in my direction and one toward Brother Ed.

  “Calm down, boys,” she said, giving each of us her best cop stare down.

  I’ll be damned, but it worked as I felt the anger inside me diminish.

  “Joel is right,” Alex said. “While we were able to get the supplies at the back dock up here, they aren’t going to last forever. I’m guessing we have sixty days’ worth of stuff. Maybe eighty or ninety if we stretch it, but we will have to do something sooner or later.”

  Richard pointed at me and said, “I’m guessing for him, it’s sooner.”

  “About that,” I said, “in my experience with the deaders, they tend to move slower in the cold. Another thing we noticed in the past is that when there is no ready source of food around for them, they do this thing. It’s sort of like hibernation. We haven’t seen many people around this area for quite a while, so I’m guessing there is a good chance some of them might be hibernating.”

  “You guess?” Richard said, raising an eyebrow.

  My best response was a shrug. Did I tell you that I never made the debate team in high school?

  “I haven’t been in those tunnels in months,” Richard said. “When I was down there, they were filled with zombies.”

  “But there are a lot less zombies in the area after that huge monster horde swept through,” I pointed out.

  About two months ago, we saw a massive throng of zombies shamble through the area. Their mass looked like it covered a mile or two as it came through the city headed east. The herd was so big that it took them a couple of hours to pass by us.

  We breathed a massive sigh of relief when they just kept on going and were glad that they didn’t come to stay. In an added benefit, many of the zombies in the area joined with the horde and shuffled off to Buffalo, as they say.

  You certainly didn’t see me complaining.

  “There’s still more than enough to chow down on our asses,” Richard said.

  “Enough!” Alex said. “We need to do this. We might as well do it now, rather than when we’re out of food and desperate.”