The Good, The Bad, And The Undead : A zombie Apocalypse (The Wild Wild Midwest Book 1)

by Gill, Bonnie

  "Let's go," Vinny calls to him.

  "Let Star know I was here." Joey starts the engine, and I swear the windows in my mobile home rattle. He installed an aftermarket exhaust on the beast.

  I wave and walk around to the ladder. I start climbing, and out of the corner of my eye, I catch some movement. Policeman zombie. He's walking toward me with a bit of brown fur sticking out of his mouth. He must have caught the squirrel.

  I grab my large wrench next to the stairs to my door. "Hey," I call out.

  Policeman gabbie's milky eyes are fixed on me. He raises his arms like Frankenstein and heads right for me.

  I lift my elbows and spread my feet in the batter's position. "Come on gabbie. I've got a nice surprise for you."

  He lunges at me.

  "Batter, batter, swing!" I strike with my wrench. Crunch. Direct contact with his temple. I carry through for maximum impact.

  The undead police officer goes down. His legs and arms twitch as if he's having a seizure. I smash the wrench into his head again to make sure he's dead. I pull away, and the tool makes a squishing noise upon leaving his skull. The tea in my stomach sloshes around for a moment. I think I’m going to blow. Then I do something incredibly stupid and look at my wrench. Dark brown goo and gray matter is stuck to it. A piece of spongy zombie brain falls to the ground. My gut clenches, and I dry heave several times. Thank goodness I haven't eaten much in the past few hours because it would've come up. It reminds me of the time when Star and I drank too much wine. The next morning it felt like someone stuck a dirty sock in my mouth. The acid burned my stomach for days.

  "Are you okay?" Daria asks from the doorway.

  I nod my head because I'm afraid if I speak, I'll keep gagging.

  "Do you need help getting rid of that?" She points to the gabbie lying next to me.

  "Yes," I squeak out.

  She walks toward me carrying a bottle of water. "Here," she says, shoving it into my hand.

  I unscrew the top and take a good, long drink. The cold water helps the spasms in my throat. "Thanks."

  "No problem." She gives me a wink. She's holding up quite well, considering everything that has happened. My sister and Daria can act pretty flighty, but mostly it's just an act. Those two have hearts of warriors and a knack for adapting.

  We walk a few yards over and pick up the tarp.

  "Is Star awake yet?" I ask.

  "No, not yet. I took a power nap while she was caring for that lady. She's beat."

  We lay the tarp next to the cop. "Let's search him," I say.

  She gives me a questioning look.

  "He may have something we can use. We need to collect whatever we can." I really don’t want to search the dead cop's pants. He has bloodstains on his arm, and the fabric is torn. That must be where he had been bitten. But why didn't he go home? Did he turn quicker than the others?

  She shrugs as if it doesn't make a difference to her. "Go ahead. Here are some gloves."

  Of course, she’ll make me dig through the cop's pockets. I put on the rubber gloves and pull the pistol out of its holster. I check, and find it's out of ammo. I pat down his pockets and reach inside. His body is cold. Then I remember he's been dead for some time.

  Inside his left pocket is a picture of himself, a woman, and a small girl. I didn't kill him, a gabbie did. In his other pocket, I find some pepper spray and a key ring. The ring holds a car key, another key, and a small key that probably goes to the handcuffs hanging from his belt. I hand them to Daria and grab the handcuffs.

  "Do you plan to get lucky?" Daria raises her eyebrow and laughs.

  "No. They may come in handy in the future though." I toss them to her.

  "I can use them." She twirls them around on her finger.

  We roll him over on his stomach and search his back pocket. Only his wallet is left in his pants. Strangely, he didn’t carry the picture in his wallet. I flip him back over and see he's wearing a radio and earpiece. I pull them off of him.

  "Don't tell me you're going to put that into your ear. Yuck. It's got zombie cooties on it." She sticks out her tongue and squints her eyes as if she just ate a lemon.

  "Don't be silly. I'm going to douse it with alcohol first. What if there's still living police out there?" I'm not actually sure I want to contact them. What if they arrest me for killing the gabbies?

  7

  "What's the grossest thing you've ever done?" Daria asks while we unfold the tarp.

  I think about it. I've done some pretty gross things, one of which was cleaning a mangled rat from a belt tensioner. The belt cut the rat in half when it wound around it’s body. Then as the belt chewed up the body, it flung bits and pieces of dead rat through the pulleys. The summer heat sped up the stench. Yeah, that was pretty disgusting. I decide to go with another.

  "A car came in with a cat cooked onto the catalytic converter. I don't know how it got itself wedged up in there, but..."

  She interrupts me and waves her arms in front of her face. "No. I don't want to hear about it. Forget it. I thought Star had some doozies working at the hospital, but you are just yuck."

  "You asked." I shrug. “Okay by me. I don’t want to relive how I had to pull the whole exhaust system, and the smell was disgusting.”

  We cover the policeman's body with the tarp, roll him over, and voila! We don't have to touch him or any icky parts of his body again. Some of his brains spill out of the bundle, so we use a shovel and scoop them up. It's amazing how quickly you become desensitized to body parts during the zombie apocalypse.

  Daria brushes her hands against each other. "I swear, no matter how much I bathe, I'll never feel clean again."

  "Maybe because you keep handling disgusting gabbies." I pull off my gloves and toss them into a trash can not far from the zombie pile. The stench is horrid. We'll have to move them or burn them soon.

  "I wonder how long it'll take for them to decompose?" Daria takes out some antibacterial hand sanitizer and dumps a large dollop into her hands. She hands me the bottle.

  "You know you should probably save this stuff for when we don't have running water." I go ahead and squirt some onto my hands.

  "The water's going to dry up?" she asks.

  "No. Not dry up. But we'll lose power soon. Without power, the pumps won't be able to refill the water towers. The water is gravity fed into our pipes from the towers. We have some time yet. I figure within a couple of weeks the power will go out. We'll need to bug out when it does. Maybe go up north into Wisconsin. I've been thinking about this a lot. I have a feeling once we lose power, humanity will go too. Mass panic will break out, and people's morals will be a thing of the past." Oops, maybe I just said too much.

  "You're kidding, right? People will go all mass hysteria? Cray Cray?" Daria twirls her finger by her head.

  "It won't take much. I bet a lot of people have gone over the edge already." I don't want her to think we are in the clear. She needs to take precautions and be careful. We all do.

  We step into my home. Mrs. Garcia is asleep on the couch.

  I wash my hands in the kitchen sink with lots of antibacterial soap and water.

  Daria sits at the table. "We're going to need some supplies."

  "No. For now, what we don't have, we can find when we raid our neighbors' houses." There’s no telling how many gabbies or hostiles are out roaming, or whatever it is they do, around the town.

  "I'm starting to go stir crazy." She looks down at her fingernails.

  "It hasn't been twenty-four hours." I dry my hands on paper towels. I have at least thirty rolls of the stuff stored.

  "It's just, I want to see if anyone else has survived." She lowers her head.

  "Joey and Vinny stopped by," I say.

  "What?" Star says from the hallway. She bolts into the kitchen.

  "Joey and his cousin came by while you were sleeping. They wanted to check on you." I look at Star, waiting for her to blow up, but she doesn't.

  She sits next to Daria. "I'm assum
ing they're okay. What did he say?"

  I lick my lips. For some stupid reason, they're dry and cracked. It's like all the water has been sucked out of my body. I fill a glass with water and take a drink. "He wanted to know if you're alright. They invited us to their "brick" house. I said we're staying here for now. Oh, and yeah, they're waiting for their mothers to come up from Arkansas. Can you believe they didn't go down to get them? They said they're probably having the time of their lives. True story." I sucked in a breath and took another drink.

  "I'm glad you didn't agree to go over there. I don't think I could take his attention twenty-four-seven. Supposedly, their moms are retired mob hitwomen." Star rolls her eyes.

  "The mob? Didn't they all quit and go into health insurance?" I ask.

  Star shrugs. "I figure if Joey's lying, I don't want to be with him. If he's telling the truth? Who wants a mother-in-law who was a mob hitwoman? I decided to get out of the relationship." She scraped her nail along the table.

  "So, you really liked him?" This changes a lot of things.

  "Yeah, I did." Her bottom lip quivers.

  "I gave him one of our handheld radios."

  "Why did you do that?" Star stands so abruptly the chair falls over behind her.

  Mrs. Garcia walks in. "What's going on?"

  "Raven gave Star's ex-boyfriend a radio to keep in touch, and Star isn't happy about it." Daria turns to me. "Is this Vinny cute?"

  Of course, Daria would want to know. These two are like teenagers when it comes to guys. "I guess so." Like we don't have more important stuff going on around here.

  "Did he say anything about what it's like out there?" Mrs. Garcia asks.

  "He said it was pretty bad, and the National Guard cleaned out Summer Hill Estates for refugees. We don't want to go there." I stand and look around. "Where's Dean?"

  "I imagine he's still sleeping at his house," replies Mrs. Garcia.

  "I'm going to check on him." I leave my trailer and grab my pipe wrench that I had left sitting outside. The mobile home park is eerily quiet for this time of day. Usually, the neighborhood is filled with the sounds of kids running down the road screaming, car noise from the street, and planes flying overhead. I knock on his door. "Rise and shine sleeping beauty," I call out.

  Dean opens the door and rubs his eyes. He’s holding a cup of coffee. "What's going on?"

  "I killed a gabbie cop, and I think some people turn into zombies faster than others."

  He takes a long drink of coffee. "Come on in." He steps to the side and opens the door wider.

  I walk in. Dean's home is almost the same as mine, except it has dark brown carpet instead of tan. "The cop gabbie was in uniform. He was bitten on the arm. If he was sick, why didn't he go home? Maybe he turned faster than expected."

  "Maybe. Or maybe he did go home and turned before he left his house. Edith turned. I had to put her down. I also took care of Dorothy." Dean has true sorrow behind his eyes.

  "I'm so sorry you had to do that. You should've asked me to help you." My throat tightens. He shouldn't have had to do that alone.

  "I didn't want to wake you."

  "We can bury Edith and Dorothy with Betty." This weekend just keeps getting better and better.

  "I was planning to check on Jerry and the lady down the street. Do you want to come?" He sits down and pulls on his boots.

  "Of course."

  Dean grabs his pistol, and we set off.

  We open Jerry's door and walk into his home. Star and Daria must have tidied up his living room. Everything looks like it’s back in place and the room smells like lemon disinfectant. We stop outside his bedroom door.

  "What's the plan?" Dean asks.

  "If he's a gabbie, we kill him." I don't feel like smashing in another neighbor's head. My arms are starting to ache from all the bashing, and my soul feels like it’s being sucked from my heart every time I kill one.

  "How about you open the door, and I'll shoot him if he's a gabbie?" Dean must see something in my face.

  "Sounds good. Ready?" I grasp the door handle.

  "Yep."

  "Go." I twist the knob, push open the door, and take a huge step back.

  Jerry is standing not three feet from us. His skin is the same grayish color all our neighbors had after they turned. His foggy, bloodshot eyes focus on me like I’m his next meal.

  Dean takes a step forward and fires his weapon. The round burrows straight into Jerry's forehead. His eyes cross upward as if he's looking for whatever hit him in the head right before he does a Nestea plunge onto the floor.

  We move closer and look down at him.

  There's a small geyser of Boston baked bean colored sludge bubbling out from his bullet hole.

  "Well, that's disgusting," I say.

  "He's a juicy one. I guess the fresher they are, the more moist they are," Dean says.

  I cringe. Moist is one of those words that gives me the willies. Along with wart and nub. Just thinking of the words has heebie-jeebies crawling all over my skin. "Let's just close the door, and mark this a do-not-enter house." I honestly can’t deal with another dead body. Oh, and now, we still have to check on the lady with the bite on her wrist at the end of the street. Zombie infestation—a fun-filled weekend.

  "Okay." Dean turns the lock on the inside handle, marks a big X on the door, and we set off to the next house.

  We climb the stairs to the woman's home when we hear a psst noise. I look at Dean. "What?" I ask.

  "I didn't say anything." He gives me a look like I'm losing my gumballs. Dean's hearing isn't the greatest. In fact, I often tease him that for Christmas I'm going to buy him a hearing aid. He listens to the television and radio at full blast. The neighborhood knows the moment when he gets home and settles in for the evening. I blame it on the constant noise of power tools and engines from the shop. It also could be from the time he served overseas.

  Psst. The noise happens again.

  I scan the bushes and notice a pair of scuffed brown boots sticking out from underneath.

  Psst.

  I raise my pipe wrench.

  Dean aims his weapon where I'm looking. I don’t think he has any clue as to what I'm hearing.

  "Come out with your hands where we can see them," I say.

  The evergreen bushes shake as if a bear is hiding inside of them.

  We wait.

  Psst.

  Obviously, this person is a whacko. "I'm not going into the bush. You need to come out, or we'll shoot. Come on, we don't have all day."

  Dean gives me a look like, What else do we have to do?

  The bushes rustle, and a face peers through the evergreen. The face belongs to a woman, and she's coated in mud. She steps out, and her handkerchief skirt and old jacket are covered in dirt. She wears a cloth pouch around her neck with a chicken foot sticking out of it. Homeless Helga.

  "Don’t go in there. She's one of those things. A monster," the woman says, her voice crackly. She scratches her stomach and then her neck. She probably has fleas. I feel bad because this woman has been on the street for a few years now. Star told me the local urban legend about her. Some time ago, she was accused of casting spells on men who cheated on their wives. When one man ended up in a severe car accident, everything came out to the public. He just happened to be the town’s beloved mayor, and the townspeople wanted someone to blame. The widow came clean and said she knew of her husband's cheating ways. She’d hired Helga but didn't think she was for real. The widow had approached Helga to make herself feel better. Upon inspection of the crashed car, it was discovered that the brake lines had been cut. I personally think it was related to his suspicious political deals, or his wife hired a hit person. Maybe it was Joey's mom? No one was charged. Anyway, someone ended up burning Helga's house down. The poor woman wanders the streets now.

  "We had a feeling. That's why we brought weapons." I lift my pipe wrench to show her.

  "She's a demon now. You must destroy her. You must destroy all of them. A
nd the rats." She points a gnarly finger at me.

  "The rats?" I hate rats and don’t recall our area having an infestation. I look around the neighborhood but don't see any little, furry bug-eyed rodents. In Chicago, we had rats the size of cats. A shiver races down my spine.

  "Helga, right?" Dean asks.

  The woman snaps her attention to him as if she just realizes he’s standing there. "Yes."

  "How about you come with us? You can use our shower and get cleaned up. We'll cook you a nice meal." Dean is using his placating voice. It's the one he uses when a customer is about to go ballistic, which happens quite often, even though it's not usually our fault. You'd be surprised how emotional people get when something malfunctions on their car.

  "She should shower in a vacant home," I speak out of the corner of my mouth in a hushed tone. Lord knows what will wash off that woman. She smells almost as bad as the gabbies.

  She gives me the stink eye.

  We don't know this woman, and I don't want to leave her outside this house while we're inside with the zombie. If she has some kind of a weapon, she could come up behind us and whack us.

  Dean gives me a look like he's thinking the same thing. "We can take you to Betty's house to clean up. You can use some of her clothes."

  We open Betty's door, and her rose perfume scent hits me. The pit in my stomach feels like it has ball bearings bouncing around inside of it. Her home looks the same as it always does. The little crocheted doilies sit on the end tables, a knitted blanket is perched on the back of her couch, and knick-knacks cover every horizontal surface. The little people statues with big sorrowful eyes are staring at me while I walk Helga to the bathroom.

  I pull the shower curtain back. "There’s shampoo, conditioner, and soap in here. You look like you’re about the same size as Betty. I'll get you some clean clothes, and we can wash these." I point at her skirt.

  She gives a nod and starts to undress.

  I grab clean towels and a washcloth and hand them to her before I shut the door.

  Dean startles me. "She's sort of strange. What do you think she meant about the rats?"