“Alien zombie invasion?” said Max, straight-faced.
Stefan nodded solemnly, his eyes alight with mystery and terror.
Max guffawed and slapped his knee. “Holy shit, that’s a good one. Damn, Piper, you really outdid yourself this time.” Max dialed her number with one hand and pushed Stefan playfully with the other. He gave him a thumbs-up. “Great fake blood, by the way.”
“Sheriff…”
The call went to voicemail. “Hey, this is Piper Maelstrom, I can come to the phone right now, but I don’t feel like it. Leave a message if you’ve got something worth saying.”
“Hey Pipes, you can pick up now. The jig is up.”
“Sheriff,” said Stefan, grabbing his arm.
Max shrugged him off and said into the phone, “How in the hell did you get the whole town in on it? I must say, you are the absolute champion of pranks. This blows away the fake kidnapping of your gramma last Christmas. Or the time that I fake-drowned and you had to identify my body at the morgue.”
“Sheriff!”
Max covered the phone. “What?”
Stefan pointed behind them.
Max turned in his seat and looked out the back window, annoyed. Behind them, a group of at least fifty “zombies” were running toward them.
“Jesus, how many people did she hire?” he said with a chuckle.
“Dude, this is fucking REAL!” Stefan bellowed. The deputy slapped the locks on his door before reaching across to lock Max’s.
All the while, Max laughed boisterously. He laughed when the zombies climbed up on the hood, stomping and slamming the metal. He even laughed when they broke off the antenna and tore off the windshield wipers. But he stopped laughing when they began mindlessly smashing their heads against the windshield.
A crack spiderwebbed across the glass, and Max looked curiously to Stefan.
“It’s real, dude. I told you it’s REAL!” said Stefan.
One of the zombies, a young man wearing skinny jeans and a waffle toque, pressed his head through the growing hole in the glass and snarled at them both. Stefan pressed the barrel of the shotgun against the zombie’s head and pulled the trigger, bathing Max and the inside of the Bronco with gore.
“Drive!” Stefan screamed as he traded the shotgun for his sidearm and began shooting zombies off the hood.
Max was jolted into action by Stefan’s terror and the sound of ear-shattering gunfire in the cabin. He put it into reverse and peeled out backward, sending screaming zombies careening to the pavement. They tumbled like lifeless dolls before springing to their feet and turning milky-white eyes on Max once again. He put the truck in drive and swerved between them, though more than one of them leapt at the hood and fell beneath, only to be run over.
As Max flew down the street for home, he finally noticed what he hadn’t before. Almost half of all the windows in the buildings along Main Street were broken. There was blood all over the sidewalk farther up town. It looked like bodies had fallen out of the higher stories of the local hotels and splatted on the ground, but they had been moved.
Or had they gotten up themselves?
“Stefan, what the hell is going on?”
The deputy stared at the road ahead with wide, haunted eyes. He turned to Max and shrugged. “I’m afraid it might be the end of the world, boss.”
Chapter 3
Honey, I’m Home
“This can’t be happening.” Max steered around a group of zombies who were running down the hill leading into town. “Zombies aren’t real!”
“They look pretty real to me,” said Stefan. He laughed then, glancing at Max with a guilty grin. “I bet you didn’t think you’d outlive most of the people on Earth, did you?”
“You think it’s the whole world?”
Stefan shrugged. “Alan Jones seems to think so.” He turned on the radio and tuned it to an AM station. Alan, a local nutjob conspiracy theorist, started coming in through the static.
“…the goddamned Russians, or aliens bent on world domination. I don’t know yet, but we were lied to. The government knew full well what was coming, and they didn’t say anything. This is just like 9/11. The pigs will probably find a way to make money off this too…”
“Turn it off, I don’t want to listen to his dumb ass right now.”
“Hold on,” said Stefan, turning it up.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think that our own government did this to us. Maybe it’s a culling, maybe it really is the end. All I know is that I, Alan Jones, will not go down without a fight. If anyone is listening, you are the resistance! Come to the station. I’ve been preparing for a day like today, unlike most of you sheep, and I’ve got enough food and fresh water to last a lifetime. Strength in numbers, my misguided sheep. Strength in numbers! The spirit of 1776 lives!”
Max turned off the radio as he pulled into his driveway. He stopped the truck, let it idle, and sat staring at the empty windows.
“You need me to come in with you?” said Stefan.
“No. You keep a lookout. If Piper gets to me, and, you know, turns me into a zombie, you know what to do.”
Stefan nodded, sliding over to the driver’s seat when Max got out. “I’ll make it quick, boss. Bullet to the head.”
Max looked again to the window, and he thought he saw the curtains move inside. A chill ran up his spine. “What you think the odds are that she survived…like we did?”
The deputy shrugged, looking anxious.
“Can you at least humor me?” said Max.
Stefan didn’t answer at first. He was staring at the house with that faraway look. “I’m sure she’s just baking cookies or something.”
Max let out a sigh and grabbed the shotgun from Stefan. His boots crunched loudly on the snow as he walked up to the front porch of the A-frame log cabin. He peered in through the window. From here he could see right across the house to the large bay windows and the fireplace between them. No fire was burning in the hearth, and no Piper was to be seen in the living room. He grabbed the door handle, found it unlocked, and carefully opened the door.
He stuck his head inside and called out, “Honey, I’m home!”
Nothing.
Max stood halfway through the threshold, listening to the silence. Something creaked upstairs. Was it Piper?
“Piper? You home?”
Max waited a few seconds before calling Piper’s number. But the call wasn’t going through. He checked the bars on his phone—no service.
“Fuck!” Max hissed, stuffing the phone in his pocket and creeping into the house.
He closed the door behind him and slowly walked through the mudroom and into the open. To his right, the kitchen was tucked in the corner with a half wall separating it from the rest of the house. He checked the other side of the island and, finding nothing, continued into the living room. There was no sign of Piper, no sign of a struggle, and no sign of a zombie transition, though he had no idea what that might look like.
Max checked the downstairs bathroom, expecting a zombie to lunge at him from behind the shower curtain. He slid it back with the barrel of his gun.
Nothing.
Max turned his attention to the stairs leading up to the loft and bedroom beyond. A slow creak was coming from upstairs; either that, or Max was hearing things. It sounded like the rocking chair slowly swaying back and forth in the baby’s bedroom—the one that was never used. They had built the cabin after hearing the news. Piper spent weeks getting it ready, but then she had lost the baby, and the door to that room had remained closed for nearly two years now. Max climbed the stairs, the hairs on his neck standing at attention and a shiver playing down his spine. The creak, creak, creak of the rocking chair issued so faintly that Max could hardly hear it over his ragged breathing.
He reached the top of the stairs and stopped, trying to listen to the silence over the ringing in his ears. The soft groaning of the rocking chair had stopped, and now only the wind blowing against the house and the creaking of t
he eaves found his ears. His heart thumped in his chest, harder than he would have liked. Max had been in dire situations overseas, but there was something about seeking out your possibly infected zombie wife in your own house that gave him a bad case of the creeps.
“Piper? You up here?”
Max debated between checking the bedroom door to the left and the baby’s room to the right. He gravitated to the baby’s room, not knowing why. Something itched at the back of his mind, and he half expected to open the door to see zombie-Piper nursing a baby that had never been born, its eyes like its mother’s, glazed over and white.
He reached for the knob, but then pulled his hand back. “Come on, Max, get your shit together.” He grabbed the knob and turned hard, pushing the door in. In the corner, the rocking chair moved back and forth, seemingly on its own accord.
“Piper?”
A scream tore through the silence behind him and he turned, bringing the shotgun with him as Piper charged out of the bedroom and barreled into him. Upon seeing her, he had had the presence of mind not to shoot. But he had seen her eyes, and he cried out as they went down, he trying to fend off her advances with the gun held across his chest with both hands, and she with gnashing jaws and white eyes, trying to tear his throat out.
“Piper! It’s me!”
She wasn’t home, and whatever had taken over her mind wanted him for dinner.
Max got a boot between himself and his zombie wife and kicked out as hard as he could, sending her 120-pound frame sailing back through the doorway. He scrambled to his feet when he saw her land on all fours like a cat. She charged again, and Max grabbed the door and slammed it in her face when she reached the threshold. He heard her hit the floor with a thud and whipped the door open, jumping on her back as she rolled over to get up.
“Sorry, babe, but you’re under arrest.” He slapped a handcuff on her right wrist and cranked it tight before grabbing her left wrist and putting a knee in her back. For her weight, she was alarmingly strong, and Max had all he could do to subdue her long enough to get the other cuff on. Piper thrashed and howled, growled and bucked, but Max held firm, holding her by the cuff chain and shoulder and pulling her to her feet. When Piper’s feet hit the floor, she took off like a crackhead, slammed into the wall, and went tumbling down the stairs. Max ran to the stairs and rushed after her as she tumbled end over end and hit the bottom with a thud. He fell on her as gently as possible, getting a better hold of her this time.
“Sorry, babe, that was my bad.”
She answered with a mewling grumble that was all phlegm and blood, snapping her jaws at him. He started her toward the door, but she kept trying to twist around to bite him.
“This biting thing’s an issue isn’t it?” he said, dragging her instead to the garage door off the mudroom. He found what he was looking for hanging on the wall above his workbench—the goalie mask he used to wear during his ice hockey days. He grabbed the mask and carefully strapped it on his wife’s face before securing it with duct tape.
Panting, he turned his wife around to look at his handiwork. She looked like Jason Voorhees’s demented little sister with her milky white eyes peering through the eyeholes and the shock of red hair tangled in the duct tape, but at least she couldn’t bite anyone now. Her pink cotton nightgown and bunny slippers topped off the surreal look, and Max had to suppress a chuckle at the absurdity of it all.
“What a fucking day, huh?”
She growled at him and slammed her face into his, crunching his nose and making him see stars. Max fought to get behind her again, and through teary vision he led her out the door to the waiting Bronco.
Stefan sat in the driver’s seat, looking dumbstruck.
Max brought Piper around to the back and, as gently as possible, put her in the back seat. A metal divider separated her from the front seat, and the deputy turned to stare at her.
“You didn’t kill her?”
Max slammed the door closed and came around to the driver’s side as Stefan slid over.
“Why the hell would I kill her?” he said, getting in and closing the door.
Piper banged her head on the cage and proceeded to go berserk.
“Because she’s a fucking zombie,” said Stefan.
“Yeah, well, I’m not killing her. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, find a vaccine, and turn her back to normal.”
“A vaccine?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Max, we’re not scientists.”
“So? Scientists are scientists. We’ll just have to find one.”
“She’s going to kill herself thrashing around like that.”
“Nah, she’ll get bored with that thrashing around.” Max put the Bronco in gear and pulled out of his driveway.
“Where we going?” said Stefan.
“The radio station. Anyone who heard Alan Jones is going to be headed there. We’ll make that our base camp and figure this shit out.”
“Good idea, but first you gotta stop at my place.”
“For what? You live alone.”
“My LARP gear.”
Chapter 4
Stefan of the Woodland Realm
“LARP gear?” said Max. “Are you talking about that plastic shit you wear in the woods with the other dorks?”
“It’s not plastic, and we’re not dorks.”
“Yeah, no, we’re not going to your house for fake armor.”
“Dude, it’s real armor. I spent two weeks at a workshop last year forging it with my bare hands.”
“Is that what you did during your vacation last year?”
“Yeah, dude, I showed you the pictures.”
“What do you want with medieval armor anyway?”
“Duh,” said Stefan. “We’re fighting zombies, zombies who like to bite. I’ve seen enough zombie movies to know that you got to protect your neck. Well, they won’t get through my chain mail.”
“Jesus Christ, fine!” Max turned off his road and headed toward Stefan’s apartment.
As they drove across town west toward Saranac Lake, they came across a group of pajama-wearing zombies shuffling through the streets, searching for fresh meat.
“Looks like whatever happened to them happened while they were sleeping,” said Max, blowing by the raging group of slumber party zombies and turning left onto Stefan’s road.
“It was the meteor shower. Didn’t you see that sparkly stuff falling last night?” Stefan asked.
“I saw something. I mean, I thought it was the liquor, to tell you the truth. I got pretty shit-faced last night. Felt like going on a bender after I found out I had terminal cancer.”
“I was drunk too,” said Stefan. He looked at Max with large, speculative eyes. “You think that’s why we’re still ourselves?”
“What, because we were drunk? That’s ridiculous.”
Stefan laughed, a quick burst at first, but then it dragged out into a long, maniacal chuckle. “We’re in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. Shit got real ridiculous, real fast, boss.”
Max had to agree with that.
“Alright, so say that the meteor shower unleashed some sparkly dust that turned everyone into a zombie, but not the people who were drunk. Why?”
“Why?”
“Yeah, why! What the hell’s going on here?” said Max, glancing back at Piper as she continued to bang her head against the cage.
“I don’t know, man. I’m just going with the evidence,” said Stefan.
“This can’t just be an accident,” said Max. “A meteor shower doesn’t just release sparkle dust that turns people into zombies. It’s got to be biological.”
“Like an alien attack?”
Max scowled at him. “You’ve been listening to too much Alan Jones.”
“Dude, you’re the one who turned me on to his program.”
“That was in 2011, when he was making sense.”
“Yeah, well this is his territory. He’ll have a theory or two.”
“Yeah, n
o shit he will.”
They pulled into Stefan’s driveway, and Max put the truck in park. He killed the engine, surveying the surrounding woods. Stefan rented a loft, one of three that were situated above three more apartments that sat overlooking the town. Currently, no one was about, neither human nor zombie.
“You staying with the Bronco?” said Stefan, checking the chamber of his sidearm.
“No, I’m going with you. Piper’ll be fine in here, right babe?” He glanced back, and the Piper-zombie hissed at him.
“She always gets cranky during road trips. Maybe she’ll decide to take a nap while we’re gone.”
Max and Stefan slipped out of the Bronco, and Max locked it up. He carried the shotgun, and Stefan led the way with his sidearm thrust forward. They hurried through the snow toward the last flight of stairs to the right and climbed them swiftly. Stefan stopped at the door, and Max pushed it open. The deputy went first, crouching down as Max swung the gun into the room above him.
“Clear,” said Max, and Stefan rushed through the kitchen and crouched beside the fridge, aiming his weapon into the living room.
Max rushed by him, moving toward the opposite wall, and crouched by the oven, aiming past the living room and dividing his attention between the bedroom and bathroom doors. Stefan hurried into the bathroom, clearing it, and Max moved to the bedroom.
When the apartment had been cleared, Stefan hurried to the chest at the foot of his bed and popped it open to reveal a plethora of medieval armor. Max watched the door as his deputy suited up, moving to the window and pushing the curtain aside to peer at the Bronco out in the driveway. It looked like Piper had chilled out for the time being.
Max turned to regard his deputy as he strode out of the room looking like a Knight of the Round Table. He wore a coat of mail armor beneath a thin breastplate. A horned helm adorned his head, sitting over a hood of mail. Thick pauldrons hung on his shoulders, and the getup even boasted thigh, shin, arm, and forearm guards, along with heavy boots. Stefan had strapped his sidearm to the right side of the belt, and on the left hung a short sword, along with a two-foot-long mace with a balled end.
The Doomsday Sheriff: The Novella Collection (Includes Books 1 - 3) Page 2
