by Mark Tufo
She nodded, and Gem smiled at me.
“So when I’m happy, mommy and Jesse are happy? So if I’m happy all the time, so will they be?”
“I’m pretty sure it works just like that. I know we’ll miss them, but I do have some picture albums here that we can look at when you want. And remember the video, too. Do you think that would make you sad, or do you think that would make you happy?”
Trina smiled. “I’d be happy to see them on a video.”
Charlie said, “I tell you what, Trina. We’re going to have a ceremony this morning where we get to say good bye to your mommy and sister. We’re all going to take something that means a lot to us, put it in a hole in the ground, and we say a prayer over it, then cover it up. And then we say a prayer for your mommy and sister, too. And you can bring wildflowers.”
“Beaker means a lot to me. Can I bury him in the hole?”
We all looked at one another in shock.
“You knew he died?” Hemp asked.
“Yeah,” Trina said. “I found him yesterday. I figured it out.”
“He was sick, baby,” Charlie said. “He’s at peace now. Sure you can bring him. We’ll put him in a little box and you can decorate it if you like.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll decorate it first, then we can put him in. I think that’s better.”
Charlie laughed. “Yes. Makes much more sense. I’ll get you some markers and we’ll get the kitchen cleaned up while you prepare the box.”
The ceremony was short and sweet. We’d all been through enough. Last night, Hemp and Charlie had wrapped Jamie’s body tightly in stretch wrap that’s normally used for palletized goods, making the cocoon airtight. They then dug the hole, put her in the grave, and covered her with about two feet of dirt. Two more feet remained to be filled, so as far as Trina knew, this was just a symbolic hole.
I had a tee-shirt from a Billy Vera and the Beaters concert that Jamie had given me, and I put that in the grave. Gem had a tattered copy of Watership Down that she had left at my place before we split up, and was delighted to find it. She knew it was the perfect tribute to her Rabbit, so she kissed it and dropped it in as well.
Hemp had picked up some Earl Grey tea at the store, and threw two teabags in – one for Jesse and one for Jamie. His British contribution.
And following in my footsteps, Charlie tossed in her beloved AC/DC concert tee shirt.
And finally, in a gloriously decorated little cardboard box, Trina knelt down and dropped the box containing her lost pup Beaker into the hole.
We stood back in silence, and I closed my eyes.
“We honor the lives of Jamie and Jesse, the love they shared and the light they shined on this Earth. As we stand here missing them in our hearts and souls, we also turn our faces to the heavens and know they’re looking down upon us with love and hope for the future. God bless the two newest angels – our guardian angels – whose presence will give us comfort for the remainder of our lives.”
Tears streamed down the faces of each of us. We all came together, arms around one another, and when our group embrace met its natural conclusion, Hemp and I picked up the shovels and began filling in the hole.
When the earth was heaped over the grave, Trina took the handful of tiny wildflowers she’d found and put them in the center of the mound.
She was a brave, strong little girl, like her mommy and sister. My heart ached for the loss we shared.
Then we all began walking back to the house.
Gem and Charlie got there first, with Trina between them, swinging on their hands. Hemp and I brought up the rear, our guns over our shoulders.
The girls had entered the house already, but when Hemp and I were twenty feet from the door, we heard a sound from beyond the tree line.
A snapping, crackling sound, the sound of a tree branch rustling. Startled moans.
Then again. And again.
The moans were constant now.
I looked toward the forest, then back at Hemp, then checked my gun even as he checked his. We both had additional magazines on us.
“You and me,” I said. “Now.”
“You’ve got to warn them,” Hemp said.
He was right and I knew it. I ran to the door and stuck my head in. “Stay inside, get your weapons and wait for us.”
Gem looked at me, her face pale. “Flex, what is –”
“No time,” I interrupted. “Be ready, but stay inside.”
I rejoined Hemp and we jogged toward the forest.
As we ducked under the low-hanging branches, we scanned the line of traps. The four we could see had all snagged zombies. Three males and one female struggled against the snares, but to no avail. Hemp ran toward the first one and fired a shot into the thing’s brain and it fell still.
I didn’t like going in, but we’d committed. I ran to the second trap and as the woman-creature floundered there, snarling, snapping, and trying to scratch me with her remaining fingernails, I fired directly into her face, destroying it, and the brain behind it. That one also fell motionless.
And then we heard rustling all around us. I looked up to see twenty – no, at least thirty of them closing in.
We were surrounded.
Hemp ran to me, and we positioned ourselves back-to-back, our guns held up.
And we worked our way through magazine after magazine of ammo, knowing we would run out before they were all dead.
“The girls,” I said, turning my head toward Hemp.
“I know,” Hemp replied, in between shots.
“God help them,” I said. “Please, let there be a God to help them.”
I fired my weapon with intensity, exploding the heads of the zombies approaching me and Hemp from all sides, and I felt his back against me reverberating as he did the same.
My eyes glanced at the sky, and for just a brief moment, I prayed that the guardian angels that were once my Jesse and Jamie – the ones we promised Trina were there – really existed, that they were really looking down on us, and that they were truly guarding us.
All of us.
* * *
A new chapter of our war with the walking dead had begun.
* * *
The End
About the Author
Author & Narrator Notes
* * *
Dear Reader and/or Listener:
* * *
You may not be aware of this, but if you’re listening to the audio version, this is a re-recording of this book, performed by me, the author. I had previously hired John Perry, who did a wonderful job on the first five books.
But I was never really happy with the fact that the narrator changed midstream. So, I decided it was time for me to redo the first several books.
As of this time, it’s July of 2017. I will be recording The Gem Cardoza Chronicle, which is the second book in the series, next. If you enjoyed this recording, you may wish to check to see who the narrator is on book #2 before you purchase it.
If it’s John Perry, you may just have a listen to the sample before you purchase – if it’s narrated by ME, then you know it will be consistent with this first book. Since I take over narration with book #6, you can rest assured that if you get that far, it will be all me.
Look – it’s not that I’m “better” than John – it’s that I know my characters, and I know how they sounded in my head when I wrote the series.
That’s all.
I hope you enjoy it. And if you’ve read the series before, and you just thought you’d revisit it now that I’ve re-done these first five books, awesome!
Please do me a favor, too.
REVIEW THIS BOOK ON AUDIBLE. When I replaced it, I had to delete all 100+ reviews that were there. I gotta start all over.
From zero.
Hey, thanks again, everyone.
* * *
Me.
* * *
OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR ERIC A. SHELMAN
* * *
Dead Hunger II: The Gem Cardo
za Chronicle
Dead Hunger III: The Chatsworth Chronicles
Dead Hunger IV: Evolution
Dead Hunger V: The Road to California
Dead Hunger VI: The Gathering Storm
Dead Hunger VI.5: The Shelburne Chronicles
Dead Hunger VII: The Reign of Isis
Dead Hunger VIII: Peace, Love & Zombies
Dead Hunger IX: The Cleansing
* * *
TRILOGY
* * *
Scabs: The Gemini Exception
Scabs II: The Quantum Connection
Scabs III: Humans, Gods & Monsters
* * *
STANDALONE BOOKS & NOVELS
* * *
A Reason To Kill
The Witches of Laguna Beach
The Camera: Bloodthirst
Out of the Darkness: The Story of Mary Ellen Wilson
Case #1: The Mary Ellen Wilson Files
* * *
NEW SERIES (2017)
* * *
Emma’s Rose: The Cave (book #1)
* * *
Find Eric A. Shelman on Facebook!
He’s “AuthorShelman” on Twitter
Twisted Fans of Eric A. Shelman on Facebook, too!
Don’t forget Goodreads! He’s there, too
Return Of The Phoenix By Heath Stallcup
Mankind has always suspected that he wasn’t alone at the top of the food chain. Since time immemorial, he has had an innate fear of the dark, a fear of the unfamiliar, a fear that something evil lurked just outside his field of vision. Whether he lived in a cave, a mud brick house, or a Tudor mansion, man has been afraid of that noise in the darkness that signified that he was not alone, that something might be waiting to attack him or his family. Grown men could tromp into the woods and play hunter by day, but once the sun set and the moon lit the sky, the unfamiliar snap of a twig or rustling of a bush could make the deadliest of hunter’s blood run cold. Something was out there. He didn’t know what it was, but the hair on the back of his neck stood on end for a reason. Man’s sixth sense that warned of an unseen danger was alive and well and screaming at him; his fight or flight instinct was kicked into high gear.
If that same man experienced nothing, he would of course nervously laugh it off as simply ‘nerves’ or too much coffee. Perhaps it was just an overactive imagination playing tricks with him. But sometimes things would occur that simply could not be explained by the ordinary. Sometimes people would get hurt or attacked by things that defied rational explanation. Sometimes people would simply disappear…never to return again.
Those who did survive, if they dared speak of the horrors they experienced, were often ridiculed by others. Some were institutionalized. Some— the truly unfortunate ones—enter into a special level of Hell reserved for survivors of attacks that can only exist in dime store novellas or bad science fiction movies and horror comics. These poor souls were left to deal with their consequences on their own, all the while asking, ‘why couldn’t somebody do something about the monsters that were out there?’ Why can’t somebody do something to protect the innocent? Why can’t somebody do something to stop the things that go bump in the night?
* * *
Somebody has.
* * *
This is their story.
Chapter 235
“OPCOM, this is Team Leader. We are approaching now. One click to target,” the disembodied voice whispered across the overhead speakers. “Zero tangos.”
Colonel Matt Mitchell was bent over the operations console observing an overhead view of the heat signatures of his assault team as they approached an abandoned farmhouse outside of Brownsville, Texas. The command center had switched to red light and all non-essential personnel had vacated the center. Communications techs, logistics personnel, weapons and tactics specialists and OPCOM’s lone civilian government representative, Laura Youngblood, sat anxiously near their respective stations waiting for the fecal matter to hit the atmospheric oscillator. “Keep your head about you, chief,” he answered back. “Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they can’t see you.”
“Copy that,” came the whispered reply.
“Be safe out there Phoenix,” Mitchell whispered to himself, a creepy feeling crawling up his back and settling in the base of his neck.
Mitchell turned to peer at a countdown clock over the shoulder of one of his communications techs. The mission team had only been “feet down” in Texas for forty-three minutes, but it felt like this mission was already taking too long. The heat in this piss-ant border town was so intense during the day that it played hell with their satellite infra-red observation. Reading heat signatures in this type of heat, you actually watched for cold spots for your men. The colonel had practically begged for a bird with microwave visual capability, hoping that he could at least borrow one that had true-eye visibility, but none of the alphabet soup groups would loan him one regardless of the risk involved. He was stuck with the only bird he had, and tracking body heat was all he could do.
Mitchell cursed again as his men faded in and out of view. “Those asshats promised me everything I needed to make this unit work, and I have to send my men into the meat grinder with antiquated equipment.” Mitchell glanced up at Youngblood. “Any chance those assholes you used to work with would return your calls?”
“Colonel, I tried to call in every marker I had,” Laura replied, her eyes not leaving her monitor.
“What did those limp-wristed spooks say?”
Laura sighed and finally made eye contact with him. “They laughed at me, sir.”
Although Laura was still technically a civilian and didn’t have to refer to Colonel Mitchell as ‘sir’, she did so out of respect. Mitchell was a tough SOB, but he treated her as one of the guys rather than a know-nothing civie, and after all the grief she met climbing her way through the ranks at the CIA, she knew the caliber of man he was simply in the way he treated his people and the way he treated her. When she was assigned to him, he didn’t piss and moan about her being a woman or her being weak, he simply reviewed her file, accepted the accolades of her superiors and her mental, physical, and shooting scores for what they were and assessed her as he would any other member of his team. He placed her based on her merits. And she was now his second-in-command. Nobody ordered him to do it, nobody suggested he do it. Nobody pulled any strings and nobody coerced him because of who her family was. Hell, nobody knew who her family was, she had seen to that. And over the years, Mitchell had become much like a father figure for her. A brother in arms, but one she could go to if she felt she needed to air a personal problem that she didn’t feel comfortable sharing with anyone else.
“I all but begged them, sir. I tried to express the importance of this particular mission without going in to details, of course, but it was like butting heads with a brick wall.” Half-Irish and half-Native American, Laura Youngblood stood a solid 5’ 11’’ with long mahogany hair. She looked to have a permanent tan, and her dark eyes gleamed with intelligent mischief. She was her father’s only daughter, the youngest of six kids. With five older brothers, she knew how to roughhouse with the best of them. She could definitely give as good as she could take.
“Bastards. Let them hope they never need us to come clean up a mess for them or they’ll wish they had played a helluva lot nicer with us,” Mitchell swore out loud. “And yes, lieutenant, you can record that comment into the hard copy. Maybe when the powers-that-be sees that we aren’t getting the support we were promised, maybe…just maybe…somebody’s head will roll over this!”
The communications officer cut a shit-eating grin at the colonel and simply uttered a “Yes, sir.”
“Approaching the outer perimeter,” the disembodied voice whispered again.
Mitchell returned to his post. Laura couldn’t help but notice that every time he assumed his duties in the command center, his stature seemed to grow. A Green Beret, Mitchell was an Army Special Forces soldier and a large man by nature. He kep
t himself in shape despite his age, but when his troops were ‘in-the-muck’ as Mitchell would say, he seemed to grow larger. Almost as a defensive move, like a mother hen fluffing her feathers to appear larger to a predator when her chicks are threatened.
“Go easy, Phoenix. It’s daylight, so it should be like shooting fish in a barrel. But we know they’ll be somewhere deep and shadowed, and hopefully asleep. If they wake, cornered rats tend to bite.”
“Copy that, OPCOM. Slow and easy until bingo,” the speakers responded.
“Colonel, they still have four hours until dusk. No discernible weather noted. Blackhawk dispatched to LZ for pickup,” the logistics officer stated.
“Noted and marked,” Mitchell responded. “Team Leader, you are T-minus four hours until bug-out.”
“No problem, skipper. We should be mopped up long before that. We’re almost to the farmhouse. We’ll soon be going radio sile—” static hissed across the secured channel and was amplified through the command center.
Mitchell stood instantly. “Sitrep! Now!”
The command center was suddenly abuzz with activity. Techs were adjusting the contrast on their screens trying to discern their operators from the heat of the day. Unfortunately, it was nearly impossible in the scorching Texas sun. Communications techs were trying every frequency, adjusting their equipment, going for every band available for any kind of signal. Suddenly one of them cried out, “I have them!”
“Big screen!” Mitchell barked and the operator switched his monitor to the overhead screen so that all could observe the team’s heat signatures in the dry Texas scabland. But rather than seeing the seven special operators, they saw dozens of higher heat signatures running rampant at high speed, three and four attacking individual heat sources at a time, literally tearing it to shreds, then moving to assist another group that was tearing up another target.
