The Dead Collection Box Set #2: Jack Zombie Books 5-8

by Flint Maxwell

  More and more are coming and dropping to their knees. It doesn’t take long before they have the headless corpse flipped over on its back, and they’re digging into the man’s stomach. Hands of exposed bone pull out organs, massive pink things that are slimy, close to bursting. There’s one zombie with a burnt head that reminds me of Freddy Krueger; he’s missing most of his arms. That doesn’t stop him, though. He plunges into the gore with his stubs, and sloshes the mess around, then his face follows. When he pulls back up, his burned skin glistens with blood.

  I have to turn away. I can’t look any longer.

  An intermittent burst of gunshots sound off over the heads of the zombies that couldn’t enjoy the District guard buffet.

  Abby and Lilly.

  My blood freezes as I spot them, just see them over the misshapen and ruined heads of the undead. I have to get to them. I can’t lose anyone else.

  The gun in my hand, I’m ready to plunge through the gate, back into the chaos, knowing there’s no way I’ll make it, no way I’ll survive. I’ll miss the Overlord, too. I know that.

  I part the gate slightly, about to slide through. Dead hands and fingers, dripping with the guard’s life force, reach out for me.

  I hear rolling thunder. Then the dark streets are alive with a lightning storm. Then I hear a high-pitched scream.

  Not of pain. Not of fear. But of victory. Nacho, Mandy, and Roland have come back for us.

  Thirty-Nine

  “Yeah!” I shout, thrusting my fist into the air.

  Roland looks over to me, smiles, and raises his hand back in a beautiful sign of victory.

  The tight circle of zombies that was closing in around Lilly and Abby disappears. The undead fall like dominoes, one after the other.

  “Yeah! Yeah!” I continue shouting. “Wooooh!”

  But there are so many zombies. They’re like trees in a forest. Blades of grass on a lawn.

  Abby looks at me. Her jacket shines with blood—not her blood. “Go!” she yells. “Get the son of a bitch!”

  Shit, I think. She’s right. I raise my hand up high above my head again. Abby raises her stump.

  Then, over the sounds of the rip-roaring gunfire, I hear something else, something I don’t want to hear, something that makes my stomach drop below my knees: the sound of a helicopter starting up, the unmistakable whirring of blades.

  The Overlord is getting away.

  Up the rest of the ramp I go, moving even faster than I did when I fled the old building. I come out on an upper level that looks down at the field. One of the goalposts is gone, and the paint in the grass that once held the team’s name is almost completely faded; all I can make out is an ‘S’ and an ‘A’. The shadows of the nuclear weapons obscure anything else.

  They are much bigger this close. It fills me with fear, seeing those agents of destruction and chaos. Unlike everything else in this messed up world, they shine as if someone has polished them every day, has taken good care of them since the apocalypse started.

  The fact that weapons are more important than people says a lot about the bit of the human race that has survived this plague.

  Beyond the warheads is the helicopter pad where the helicopter sits. That same light on the tail blinks on and off. A brighter spotlight comes on near the nose, brightening the dimly lit stadium. There are two figures in the cockpit, pilots. Their hands are raised above them, flipping switches, pressing buttons.

  A third figure is climbing aboard, a man. He wears a dark coat with the collar turned up. He has no hair, his head is shaved clean.

  It’s the Overlord. It has to be.

  I aim down the iron sights on my rifle. It’s a far shot, but I think I have it.

  I squeeze the trigger. The gun barks, barely audible over the roar of the helicopter’s engine, and sprays its rounds.

  It’s time to die, you son of a bitch.

  Forty

  The cockpit’s side window bursts in a spray of glass and crimson.

  Direct hit. I sank your battleship.

  The two figures in front slump forward. Dead. The third figure spins toward me. The blades of the helicopter create a shadow that obscures his features, but not enough for me not to see him dip his right hand down and pull a pistol free. He squeezes off three rounds.

  I drop behind a guard railing separating the walkway from the lower level seats. The metal sparks as the bullets hit home. I roll left.

  Fuck, that could’ve been my face.

  More shots toward my way. I keep rolling until I find shelter behind a shuttered vendor’s stand, probably an ice cream place or something. I can’t tell for sure, because the signs on the side of the building are beyond faded.

  On the other side, I lean out, see the figure is gone. That’s okay. I rip off a stream of shots at the helicopter. The bullets hit the body of the bird, sending a spray of sparks every which way. With a low whine, the blades are finally slowing down, but I have to get there before the one-eyed fucker makes an escape. I doubt he knows how to properly fly a helicopter, but when it’s life or death, I know the things people can find themselves capable of.

  A minute passes. Two minutes. I watch the helicopter and the field around it for any sign of movement. There’s nothing.

  Oh no, where did that piece of shit go?

  Part of my mind is telling me that he’s supernatural. The dark magician, or whatever he is, just snapped his fingers, and—poof!—he’s gone. I shake my head, and with it, the thought.

  Outside of the stadium, the gunfire continues. I hear the shattering of broken glass, and war cries, the low groans of zombies. It’s Armageddon Part II out there, and I’m praying to whatever gods are listening that my friends are okay. But I can’t worry about them right now, as hard as it is not to. I have to focus on the matter at hand.

  Where did the one-eyed man go?

  Another minute passes. I stand up in a crouch, and keep my weapon low. I don’t know how many rounds I have left, but it can’t be that many. Maybe I shouldn’t have wasted the ammo on shooting at the helicopter. My intentions were to scare the bastard out of hiding, but I should’ve known he’s not one to scare easily.

  I hop the fence and go down the row of concrete steps in the lower bowl of the stadium. I keep my head low, my eyes sharp. I see nothing. No movement. My heart pounds so hard against my ribcage that it almost sounds like the crushing, clashing helmets and shoulder pads of a football game.

  The phantom noises fill my head.

  At the end of the row, I hop the barrier and land on the field. The spongy grass cushions my landing. It doesn’t hurt my ankle as bad as concrete would, but the impact still brings a flaring of pain.

  The warheads are lined up near the thirty-yard line. I’m just beyond the goalpost opposite the helicopter, the blades of which are still winding down. The bombs are right in front of me. Above and past the warheads and the helicopter is the broken screen of a Jumbotron. There’s a lightning bolt crack right down the middle of it, and a spiderweb of smaller cracks in the upper right corner. The nose of the missiles point straight toward it, ready to fly at the push of a button.

  As I get closer to them, I think I can feel the radioactivity within, the immense power, but I know that’s just my mind filling in the blanks. My overactive imagination.

  Still crouched, my goal is to make it to the helicopter. I will strip the pilots of any weapons and ammunition that they have, then I’ll search the main section for whatever else I can find. I’m sure there is something. What I don’t think I’ll find is the one-eyed man.

  The idea that he might’ve magicked himself far away from here is creeping into my consciousness again. It’s becoming more and more plausible, because the feeling that I’m alone is very prominent.

  I am alone in here while my friends, what’s left of my family, fight out there.

  “What am I doing?” I say aloud to myself. “He’s gone.”

  I lower the rifle, and prepare to run back toward the exit. There will
be another chance to kill the one-eyed man. I’ll make sure of it.

  Back between the warheads I go, my pace fast, my ankle only slightly bothering me. It’s that great old constant of my life: Adrenaline. Without it—

  A sound overhead. I stop and wheel my weapon toward the top of the missile closest to me.

  It’s the one-eyed man. He didn’t vanish, you idiot, Jack! I’m thinking, as the figure reveals himself.

  There is no fear. Only confidence. I know it ends here, it ends right now.

  My finger finds the trigger, but—

  It’s not the one-eyed man, not the Overlord.

  No. No. No.

  It’s my older brother. It’s Norm.

  Forty-One

  I am a deer in the headlights as a semi-truck comes barreling down on top of me. Tons of steel coming to crush me into oblivion, and I can’t even move a muscle. Can’t even scream.

  Norm tackles me. I’m knocked backward, land on my ass with bone-jolting force. The rifle wasn’t strapped around my shoulder, so it’s gone, somewhere behind me, near the twenty-yard line.

  I roll a couple of times and spring up in a fighting stance.

  The first thing I notice is how different he looks. He has no hair, which isn’t a far cry from what the top of his head usually looked like, him being a fan of military buzz cuts. Now, though, there’s no hair whatsoever. He’s squeaky-clean bald. One of his eyebrows is gone, too. The other, the right, has about five vertical lines shaved into it. His skin is old and cracked with wrinkles. His eyes are haunted, even more so than before.

  But through this mask my older brother wears, I still see that he’s my older brother, my Norm Jupiter. It’s the way he grimaces, the way his upper lip comes up to show me those pearly whites. It’s the perpetual smile at the corner of his mouth, always threatening to burst into a shit-eating grin. It’s the finger he had cut off in Eden by the psychopaths Spike and Butch Hazard. It’s the way his shoulders are straight—never slumped—in his own fighting stance.

  “Norm, it’s Jack!” I say. “It’s me, Norm!”

  “I don’t answer to that name anymore,” he says. “My name is the Judge.” He reaches behind him, pulls out a gleaming chrome pistol.

  “It’s me, Norm. It’s your little brother.”

  My hands are up, but not in an ‘I surrender’ type of way. I’m pleading for him to remember me.

  Dying is the furthest thing from my mind.

  “All of my family is dead,” he says. His voice has changed, too. It’s a few octaves lower, gruffer, pained…but beneath it, like beneath his mask, I hear his real voice.

  “No,” I say. “No. I’m still alive. Abby’s still alive. Don’t you remember Abby? Remember how she’d hit you whenever you said something stupid? Don’t you remember, Norm?”

  “For your crimes against the District, I sentence you to die, friend.” He ignores everything I’ve said. Aims right at my head.

  I show no fear because there is no fear inside of me. There is only acceptance.

  If this is the way I die, by fratricide, so be it.

  Norm pulls the trigger.

  Forty-Two

  I don’t close my eyes. I stare my older brother right in the face.

  The gun clicks.

  I’m thinking of fate. If this is not fate, then I don’t know what is.

  Norm moves the slide back. Reaches into one of the pockets of his cargo pants, which are stained with mud. He pulls out a fresh clip, never taking his gaze from me.

  “Fearless, huh?” he says.

  “Norm,” I say. “You’re brainwashed. You have to remember. Think. Think.”

  Then an idea pops into my head. A face.

  “Tim!” I say. “Don’t you remember Tim?”

  His mask wavers. One eye flashes with remembrances, the other remains dead, devoid of all emotion.

  “What about Darlene and Carmen. Herb! What about your nephew? My son? What about Haven? We helped build that place together, you and me, Norm!”

  He chuckles. It’s a humorless sound, like the snapping of dead tree branches. “Haven,” he says. “I remember that place.”

  Hope freezes my lungs, and I can’t breathe. He remembers.

  “I remember it just fine,” he says. “I remember that the Overlord destroyed it, set the place on fire to send a message. I remember he saved me from that nightmare. And then he put the place and all its shitty people out of their fucking misery.” A smirk stretches across his face, one I don’t recognize, and my false hope is snatched away, replaced by a fiery anger I’ve not felt in a long time.

  I can’t control myself any longer. My body tenses, and then the next thing I know, I’m launching forward, going for my older brother’s throat.

  He is caught off guard, but only for a moment. I manage to throw my shoulder into him, knock him off balance.

  He is older than me, past middle-aged, but he is still as solid as a rock. Seconds after we collide, he’s regained his balance and is coming my way. His gun isn’t loaded, so he holds it by the barrel and swings it like a hammer.

  I dodge the blow. Barely.

  Now I take a swing. All the force I have left goes behind this punch. I feel a rib snap beneath the force of my fist, and he cries out, but he doesn’t crumble, which was my intention.

  His face goes as red as blood, and the emotionless look in his eyes changes to that of a psychopath in the throes of a killing spree. He swings back, and I’m not quick enough to dodge it. A fist as hard as steel catches me in the side of the jaw. Teeth are knocked loose. The coppery taste of blood floods my mouth.

  I stumble backward, seeing a duplicate of Norm.

  “You piece of shit,” he barks.

  Then he’s running, and I don’t know where to go, because there’s two of them coming at me. As they get closer, they merge into one, but I’m too late in moving.

  He slams me up against the warhead. My head knocks against the metal casing, thrums, and my brain rattles. Warm liquid gushes down my upper lip and frames my mouth. More blood.

  “Fight back! Fight back!” he demands as he hits me with a fury of blows, each one more bone-crushing than the last.

  I spit blood out of the side of my mouth.

  My brother looks down. My eyes somehow manage to follow his, and I see he’s looking at the knife I have strapped to my calf, the one I pulled from the guard in the watchtower.

  He snatches it from its holster and brings it up to my face. “It’s done” he says. “You won’t fight back, so it’s done.”

  I can’t fight back even if I want to.

  “Norm,” I plead. “Don’t do this. Just think. You have to remember.”

  “Enough!”

  He flips the blade in his hand, catches it by the handle, and stabs down.

  “Norm!”

  I reach up and catch his wrist. His teeth bare as he struggles. Mine have bitten through my bottom lip.

  Sometimes, you have to accept failure. Failure is a part of life. Sometimes, you have to remember the ultimate goal.

  For me, my ultimate goal is to bring down the District, to make the Overlord pay for what he did. If I’m dead, I cannot achieve that goal.

  So I do what I have to do.

  I scream as I bring my knee up. The blow catches Norm in the same injured ribs I punched earlier, and he cries out in pain. His grip around the knife loosens, and I easily take it from him.

  In one smooth motion, I do the unthinkable.

  I stab my brother in the gut.

  The blade is easily six inches, and Norm’s flesh swallows the blade completely. Still, I press until my fingers are wet with his blood.

  He collapses to his knees with both hands wrapped around the knife. He tries to pull it free. Can’t. Now he’s holding his hands up in front of his face, hands that are bright red with his life force.

  I stare at him in utter horror. What have you done, what have you done? I ask myself over and over.

  But I know what I did. I did
what I had to do.

  Norm blinks heavily, like he’s sleepy or drugged. He smiles. It looks so wrong on his pain-twisted face. He opens his mouth to talk, but he can only cough. Flecks of blood hit the turf, stark red against the green.

  “Supposed to finish the job, maggot,” Norm says when the fit passes. “Leave no survivors.”

  “Norm?” I say. I drop to my knees, though I know the danger of this, I know he could be playing me for a fool, but I don’t think so.

  My gut tells me he’s back.

  “Jack,” he says. “It’s g-good to see you, man.” He can no longer hold himself up on his knees. He falls backward, moaning.

  Tears are rolling down my face. They’re warm, and I’m sweating, but I feel so cold right now. So cold.

  “Norm, I missed you,” I say through the tears.

  He shakes his head, but even this seems like a lot of work. “Don’t g-get all…all sentimental on m-me, man.”

  A laugh bursts forth from my mouth.

  Norm grins back.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say as I take his hand. He is cold, too.

  “Don’t b-be sorry. You d-did wha-what you had t-to do.” He puts his arms up. I hug him. He hugs me back, weakly.

  “He’s a b-b-bad man, J-J-Juh…” He can’t finish my name.

  God, it hurts.

  “I know. I’m gonna beat him. I’m going to kill him if it’s the last thing I do,” I say.

  Norm nods. His face has gone unbelievably pale. His shirt is soaked through with blood, the knife handle still sticking out of the wound.

  “That’s m-my little b-b-bro,” he says. He points to his jacket pocket. “In there.”

  I reach in and pull out what looks like a cheap smartphone. “What’s this?” I ask.

  He shakes his head, and shudders in pain. I cradle him closer, trying to avert my eyes from the knife, from the blood, but it’s hard.