DEAD Snapshot Box Set, Vol. 1 [#1-#4]

by Brown, TW

  The entire event took less than a minute, but when it was over, the carnage was indescribable. Bodies had been pulverized along with the machines their riders had arrived on. Both vans were smoldering hulks with an assortment of fluids draining underneath them in large dark puddles.

  “Okay, folks,” Joel called out as he returned to the Humvee, “let’s get this show back on the road.”

  “That was easy enough,” he said as he strapped himself back into place and Debra stomped the gas sending them lurching forward. “You got a problem?” He turned to face the woman in the driver’s seat.

  “I want to ride in the nest next time,” the woman grumbled. “I’ll be damned if I’ll let that punk kid have all the fun.”

  “You know I can hear you, right?” Malik’s voice called down.

  “I want everybody to keep their eyes peeled for any activity,” Joel said into his headset, ignoring the barbs between Debra and Malik. “If that was the extent of their little gang, then I’m surprised they managed to last this long.”

  He had barely finished speaking when plumes appeared in the distance on either side of them. He had just spotted them when Will’s voice broke in. “You mean like what we have coming from our three and nine o’clock positions?”

  Joel scanned the area. Just ahead was a four-way intersection with what looked to be the remains of what had probably been an exclusive community.

  “Turn left.” Joel pointed at the intersection and Debra jerked the wheel around hard.

  “How about a warning next time?” Malik shouted.

  The deuce-and-a-half followed, a plume of gray-blue smoke coming off the tires as it slowed dramatically to take the turn.

  “This isn’t a freakin’ sports car,” Will bellowed in the radio. “Maybe try to keep the speed down in the corners. If we get separated, I will be lost. I’m from Colorado. I never even visited Vegas before all this zombie shit popped up.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Debra quipped. “Hot shot like you never been to Vegas?”

  “I saw no need to throw my money away. I’d rather spend it fixing up my Harley and taking road trips during my leave times.”

  “As interesting as this all might be,” Joel interrupted, “can we keep our minds on the fact that we have what might be the rest of a biker gang chasing us?”

  “I have a visual on approximately twenty individuals,” Malik chimed in.

  “Next intersection, break left, Will,” Joel ordered. “Have your passengers set up ambush positions and give them the word to open fire at will.”

  Debra reached the next intersection and turned right without being told. She continued to rise in value in Joel’s opinion with every passing minute. She knew exactly what he had in mind and eased between what had probably been some soccer mom’s minivan and a two-seater sports car with the driver and passenger still strapped into their seats. As the vehicles passed by Joel’s window, he saw yet another stereotype. The man was perhaps in his late fifties, thick dark hair with gray streaks down each side. If not for the paleness of his undead flesh, he imagined the man once sported quite a tan. His skin had the appearance of elephant skin with its leathery quality. The woman, and that was stretching the definition, barely looked twenty. And it was unlikely that she was his daughter considering her attire which would make a stripper blush.

  The woman had suffered the worst by the looks of things. Her throat had been ripped out, and she was missing her right arm at the shoulder. The man had been bitten on the face and lost his nose, most of his lower lip, and left cheek.

  The Humvee came to a stop after turning around to allow Malik the full view of anybody approaching in their wake. Both Joel and Debra exited the vehicle with Debra running in a crouch to take up a position on the ground wedged up against the minivan. Her rifle was snug against her shoulder and two spare magazines were on the ground beside her.

  Joel scanned the area and spotted a rock fence that ran between a pair of houses. That position would make him useless in the opening minutes of the firefight to come, but it would also allow him to slip behind the enemy and flank them.

  The rumble of the approaching motorcycles began to echo off the vacant houses and fill the abandoned neighborhood with a deep thundering noise that brought out the undead. Joel felt rather than heard the creature come around the corner of the house he was beside.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he saw it stop and regard him. This child was perhaps eight years old. Her hair was cut short and one colorful ribbon still clung to the matted mess. Her mouth had a dark stain of very old dried blood and her teeth looked almost as gray as her skin when she opened her mouth to let loose a soft moan. She was wearing a pair of faded jeans and what remained of a powder blue blouse. He glanced down and saw that all the fingers on her left hand had been chewed off in a rather grisly manner. Splinters of bone and tattered flesh almost gave the hand the appearance of being tipped with claws. Her right forearm had a chunk missing, and if he were to guess, he imagined the little girl had tried to fend off her attacker. The size of the bite on her forearm was small, which led Joel to believe that her attacker had been a child as well.

  He didn’t have to wait long for what he took as confirmation. A little boy of perhaps five came around the corner of the house in his sister’s wake and stopped just behind and to one side of her. Their similarity, despite the distortion of their features due their facial muscles growing slack in death, was uncanny and left little doubt that they were siblings.

  “Go on,” Joel whispered. “Nothing to see here.”

  The children regarded him, and something about their lack of simply attacking him outright caused him to pause. He had no issue with killing a zombie. If need be, he wouldn’t hesitate to drop one no matter the age or gender, but these two weren’t acting like the zombies he’d seen or encountered thus far. They were acting like…children.

  “This is a bad place to hang out,” Joel whispered.

  The pair continued to simply stare at him with their filmed-over eyes shot with the black tracers. When they did move, it seemed confined to the head which would twitch and jerk in small fits like a toy trying to start but not quite managing it.

  “You need to be away from here,” Joel hissed through clenched teeth.

  He could hear the bikers approaching and guessed that they were just now coming up the main entry to this development which, as Joel got a closer look, wasn’t as devastated as he’d initially thought. Still the kids remained put. He used the barrel of his gun and jabbed at the air making a shooing noise as he did so. In that moment, the pair almost appeared to transform before his eyes. Both lurched forward, mouths open and hands reaching for him just like any zombie he’d seen in person, on television, or at the movies.

  It was no problem to allow the rifle to drop as he pulled a knife from his belt. By the time the zombie children reached him, he’d made it to his knees. He grabbed the closer of the two, which turned out to be the girl, and plunged his blade into her temple. Pushing her aside as he withdrew the knife, he caught the boy by one arm and yanked him in, driving the point of the dripping blade into his open and staring eye socket. Just that quick, it was over. At no time had he felt like he’d been even in the slightest bit of danger.

  Kicking the corpses away with one foot, Joel took his place again and sighted in on the intersection as the first motorcycle prowled into view. One of the snipers from Will’s group fired the first shot and the rider toppled to the side, dumping the big hog in the process. That was the signal to everybody else, and a barrage of high-velocity lead flew as the rest of the bikers rolled into view.

  In seconds, the scene was almost a comedy from Joel’s perspective as the bikes collided with one another as some of the riders made the choice to attempt to flee. It didn’t matter once Malik opened fire. The group was cut down without any of them so much as getting off a shot.

  When the cacophony of weapons ended their deathly symphony, a silence fell on the scene that last
ed just a few heartbeats before moans of the dying were met by the groans of the undead. Joel got up and walked into the street, shoving an elderly woman wearing way too much makeup and jewelry aside as he returned to the Humvee.

  “Mount up and let’s roll!” Joel called.

  As they exited the once upscale housing community, Joel glanced back. The zombies were falling on the bodies scattered about the intersection. Even in the Humvee with his headset on, he could hear the screams begin.

  They continued on towards what had once been the city of Las Vegas. Despite being several miles out, there was a noticeable and very visible smudge in the sky. The number of fires that had burned out of control were beyond counting. Being in the desert there was an added feature that only helped the destruction: the wind.

  The steady breeze that blew now was sending the scattered plumes of smoke southeast towards Joel and his team. The closer they got, the thicker the smoke became until Joel finally called for a halt.

  “Let’s take Interstate 215 and head west. Maybe we can skirt around the worst of the smoke,” Joel announced in his headset. “I don’t know how much worse it gets, but if we keep driving into it, I think we put ourselves in a bad situation.”

  “Yeah, it would suck to survive the zombie apocalypse this far and then die from smoke inhalation,” Malik snorted.

  While it was a little clearer, the smoke in the air was still omnipresent and irritating. Before long, even Debra was coughing and complaining about her throat.

  Eventually, they found themselves hooking around and coming to the junction of Interstate 15. They headed north directly into the heart of what remained of the Las Vegas Strip. Several of the iconic hotels had numerous plumes of smoke billowing from too many windows to even guess.

  “There are too many.” Will’s voice was the first to break the silence.

  Joel once again ordered them to come to a halt. He climbed out of the Humvee and then onto the hood. Using his binoculars, he scanned the landscape. It was almost impossible to believe what he was seeing.

  “Why are they still here?” Debra asked, finally exiting the vehicle as well.

  “I am going to guess the ready food source,” Joel replied pensively.

  As he scanned a few of the massive hotels, he saw pockets of activity. From what he could gather, small groups of survivors were attempting to hold up in one of the many resort hotels that lined the strip. He also saw signs that things were not going well for the living. Just as what existed outside of the city proper, it was clear that certain elements were taking full advantage of the situation to the utmost.

  As they passed a golf course and the airport on the right, a new theme was appearing. Just ahead was an overpass with at least a hundred bodies hanging from it. None of them twitched or squirmed indicating to Joel that these people had been among the living and executed. Each had a placard around his or her neck with a Roman numeral between one and ten. All of them had I, IV, and X on their cards. There was a smattering of other numbers with the most prevalent being VII.

  “What the hell?” Debra breathed.

  Joel glanced over to discover that she’d brought her own field glasses up and was taking in the same scene that he was looking at. He was just as confused.

  “Some sort of code?” Malik called down from the machine gun turret.

  “I don’t know,” Joel admitted, but something tugged at his mind and he believed the answer was very likely something simple and probably obvious.

  “Whatever this is, I’d rather we not hang around too long,” Will spoke up, his voice sounding a bit distant in Joel’s headset, almost as if he were not actually speaking directly into his mic, but instead from a few feet away.

  A whistling sound snapped Joel’s attention away from the scene ahead. On instinct, he yelled for everybody to get down as he dove for cover under an abandoned taxi that still had its undead driver behind the wheel. He hit the ground harder than intended, but still had the presence of mind to roll and then scramble on his belly for cover just as an explosion shook the ground several yards away.

  “Find out where that is coming from!” Joel snapped as he jumped to his feet.

  In seconds, they were moving again. Despite not liking the idea of driving into a city that was visibly infested with the walking dead, they were left with very little choice as a wall of fire erupted and spanned the interstate behind them about two hundred yards back. While he did not doubt their vehicles’ abilities to simply drive through something like a wall of fire, he wanted to at least give the impression to whomever was behind this attack that they were in the driver’s seat.

  Admittedly, they might have the slightest upper hand at the moment in that they obviously knew his location and he had no clue about theirs; that was a minor advantage as he saw it. By giving them a false sense of control and power, he felt things were even if not perhaps tilted in his favor somewhat.

  Keeping their speed down to a crawl, they continued forward until they actually passed under the overpass with all the hanging bodies. That also allowed Joel to confirm that each of those individuals had been a living person when they’d been hung. None of them were zombies, and he confirmed that by making certain that none of them had been shot in the head. Nope, these were simply corpses of the “normal” variety. That thought almost made Joel chuckle.

  As they crept past the Mandalay Bay complex and approached another overpass. They could see more figures hanging from it. As they passed the towering golden-faced building they were able to see that the front of it had been defaced. However, it was clear that this bit of vandalism was not only very intentional, but also required no small amount of planning. Windows had been busted out from about the tenth floor almost to the top as well as a good distance across just past the midway mark to form a massive cross.

  “The Ten Commandments,” Malik whispered.

  “What?” Joel said absently as he stared out his window at the strangely unsettling display.

  “Those numbers on the cards around those people’s necks,” Malik answered, his voice uncharacteristically barely above a whisper. “I don’t have them memorized or anything, much less know the order they supposedly come in other than the first one being something about not having any God other than Me, the Lord your God.”

  “Great,” Debra snarled. “Bikers ain’t enough. We get to deal with religious nuts.”

  “I think those may be far more dangerous,” Joel muttered.

  Just because he was not a fan of gambling did not mean he didn’t pop into town on occasion. Without fail, it seemed he could not walk a block down the strip without some group of religious zealots accosting him and others in the street with proclamations of how they were destined for hell. Maybe they were even right, but all it took was a single glance into these people’s eyes to see the truth of their frenzied devotion.

  Truth be told, Joel had no trouble with religion. His problem existed in the people and the actions they perpetrated in the name of it. For too many, it was an excuse to harass and even assault others simply because they held on to a different belief.

  Towards the last few days when he and Wanda had watched everything unfold, he’d seen some of the scarier sorts of zealot types crawling out from under their rock. Many were making the ever-popular claim of this being the “Last Days” prophesied in the Book of Revelations. Others simply called it God’s judgement against man.

  “Shoot anything that moves,” Joel announced.

  He knew better than to think any sort of encounter with the perpetrators of those hangings could end in anything short of bloodshed. The old ways were gone. There were no such things as “due process” or “innocent until proven guilty” as far as he was concerned.

  The first chatter of machine gun fire came from the left and Joel called it out to Malik who swung the .50 cal around and started pumping rounds into the face of what appeared to be a simple two-story parking structure. Another explosion sounded, this one to the left, sending a gout of co
ncrete, smoke, and flames ten or twenty feet into the air. The heat was enough that Joel could feel it even inside the relatively safe confines of the Humvee.

  “Religious nuts with military hardware?” Will shouted in the headset as the metallic plinks and pings of bullets hitting the deuce-and-a-half tried to drown him out.

  “Break right at the next exit,” Joel barked, ignoring the comment. “Then turn right onto Tropicana. We are headed for the MGM Towers.”

  The Humvee rocketed forward as Debra decided that creeping along was making them far too easy of a target. They rolled up the off-ramp and reached the corner well ahead of Will and the truck. She cranked the wheel around to make the right turn and stomped on the brakes.

  “This is a bust, Joel,” Debra said between gritted teeth as she slammed the Humvee into reverse.

  “There has to be a way,” Joel said, but it was more to himself as he craned his neck to see the wall of undead that clogged the street.

  “Nope,” Debra snorted as she turned as tight a one-eighty as the Humvee was capable. “Anybody in those buildings are on their own. They are trapped in there until either the zombies get in, they hang up, or they run out of food. Personally, my money is on the second option.”

  “Military vehicle fleeing the area, this is Pastor Billy Dean Smoltz. We have over one hundred souls, good and pure, currently isolated on top of the entrance to the large white castle just ahead of you. Due to the entrance being breached, the people were forced to retreat to the concrete awning above the main entrance. The heat is taking a terrible toll, and it will only be a matter of hours before people begin to perish. I beg you to resist the urge to flee. If you are truly members of this nation’s armed forces, then you are driven by a sense of honor and duty that I hope you still possess. Please, many of those trapped are children.”